A busy two days, with an avalanche of fresh things to post about, but all of it overshadowed by the hot news that I have found a place to live in. For complex reasons, it’s not technically an assisted living facility, but an independent living facility (think: retirement community); and for even more complex reasons, it’s a 2-bedroom (and 2-bath) unit for the same price as a 1-bedroom (so that fitting the crucial books I need into the place is now trivially easy, and I can also swing the finances, which would have been daunting). And it’s in a neighborhood just south of Stanford (and the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, where all my doctors are), one I’m familiar with. Gigantic piles of financial and business transactions for my daughter Elizabeth to negotiate now. But I’m all a-quiver.
Hot news
June 12, 2026Stunned by signage
June 9, 2026The 6/1 Zippy strip celebrates a vibrant life on the side of the road, in drive-in joints offering comfort food and in flashy highway motels, in the lost days of mid-20th-century America (think HoJo’s clam strips):
(#1) Stunned by signage: an octogenarian’s bulletin from the golden days; the cartoonist Bill Griffith was born in 1944, I was born in 1940, so this was the time of our youth
Remembrance of lost time: L-Ken’s Drive-In Restaurant in Colonie NY (a northern suburb of Albany, the state capital) was demolished on 4/20/17; the Tucson Inn, in Arizona’s second city, was demolished in April 2025. Both were famed for their neon signs (cartooned above).
I’m a big gooner
June 8, 2026(plenty of raunchy sex talk, not for kids or the sexually modest)
(#1) That’s gooner ‘someone who masturbates a lot, enthusiastically’ — one of a family of senses for this noun — and it’s a fair cop (on the song, see the footnote at the end of this posting)
But that’s not how I got wrapped up in goonerology (and what Mickey Dolenz sang in 1966 — back in pre-gooner days — was, of course, I’m a believer). That I blame on the Peachy Kings 30%-off Memorial Day sale on (100% polyester) mesh football jerseys with sexual or sexualized identity labels on them, among them:
(#2) At $40 a pop; the labels include GOOD BOY [Boy for Daddy], EVIL GAY, TRASH [‘slut’], STUD, HO HO HO [with ho(e) ‘slut’ (etymologically ‘whore’)], PORN STAR, DEMON TWINK, WOOF, SIR — and, as above, GOONER
Now, it turns out that a sexual verb goon, agent noun gooner, and activity noun gooning are all, according to Merriam-Webster online, recently coined (with goon‘s first known uses from about 2005). As is common with recent coinages, especially of markedly slangy or taboo nature, these items are highly variable in their reference (people play with them), taking in a range of uses — in this case, at least 5 distinguishable uses, all having to do, in some way or another, with masturbation. The result is that I have no idea of what a guy would intend to convey by wearing the shirt in #2. (I am a gooner-3 and gooner-4, definitely not a gooner-1 or gooner-5, and will disavow gooner-2.)
Probal Dasgupta
June 7, 2026I begin the story in medias res, with a May 27th Facebook comment by Probal Dasgupta on a posting of mine:
— PB > AZ: Speaking of the way one pronounces the acronym “AZ”, I’ve been puzzled by the fact that some function words that end in orthographic s in English (as, is, has) use a /z/ while others (us, this) use an /s/. I’ve failed to find a specialist who is generous with their time to tell me the diachronic sequence that led to this … My puzzlement originated in the fact that a friend of mine, in her Indian English, says “us” with a final /z/, definitely not in keeping with what most speakers of Indian English do.
With the help of Elizabeth Closs Traugott — nether of us experts in the phonological history of English or the development of spelling conventions, neither of us able to find an authoritative text or an actual living expert, but both willing to take a shot at some possibly useful speculation — I gave PB some tentative responses. And then came the news from his family that he had died, suddenly and unexpectedly, during the night of June 1st, at the age of 72.
His query to me was characteristic — intellectually curious and open, thoughtful and specific — and showed that he continued to follow my work closely, which is how we came to be (geographically distant) friends: when I was in an unhappy moment of doubt about the value of my research and writing, he sent me a bracing message of appreciation, with specific details, so that I came to think, jokingly, that at least I had a guy in Kolkata.
From this story, you will see his striking humanity, but nothing in that story predicts his passionate political engagement or his steady competence at academic administration.
to collab
June 4, 2026(high sexual content, not for kids or the sexually modest)
Lexicographic notes from Young America, heard on Facebook reels from bros in their 20s discussing sexual matters in a mostly bantering way: the verb to collab. Collected this morning (6/4), one bro to another:
When I collabed with Pepe, I was doing something I’d never done before … we were tossing each other’s salad
(to toss someone’s salad ‘to rim someone’ — verb rim-2: [with object] vulgar slang lick or suck the anus of (someone) as a means of sexual stimulation (NOAD) — seems to be a recent slang idiom: in Urban Dictionary in this century, but not my other sources)
The seeds of rye bread lie deep in 19th-century England
June 2, 2026(not the cartoonist’s fault, but my discussion veers occasionally onto fellatio, in vulgar street language, and that’s out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest)
The Pearls Before Swine strip of 5/31, Stephan Pastis’s farewell to the month of May, devoted to one of his outrageously complex jokes (it’s so off-the-wall intricate that Rat, one of his characters, takes to protesting against it):
Three contributions: (1) the joke genre (the setup / payoff formula pun); (2) the English verb succeed, homophonous with suck seed; and (3) the familiar proverb, popularized by William Edward Hickson in 19th-century England: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again — all the while skirting (4) the sexual collocation suck seed (with seed ‘semen, cum’), a variant of suck cum
On to the four contributions.
Four difficult childhoods
June 1, 2026… all fictional, unimaginably different, each one moving in its own way; welcome to the queen of the months, here in the northern hemisphere, where, on this celebratory day, the rabbits — 🐇 🐇 🐇 — come to play
Ir starts with a burlesque of the nursery rhyme “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” in yesterday’s posting “The server’s absurd attentions”, which led Benita Bendon Campbell to Kipling’s heartbreaking short story with that title. That led me to Saki’s black-comic short story “Sredni Vashtar”. And that to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s novel of healing and the overcoming of adversity, The Secret Garden. Finally, Bergman’s long masterpiece movie, Fanny and Alexander, which pretty much has everything, including some early luminous scenes of family joy, then wrenching scenes of abuse, and finally horrific dream death made real, freeing the children. (There are two versions, a shorter one made for tv, then the full, epically long, theatrical release. Watching the long version is like packing up your mind and moving to another — fabulous but perilous — country for some undetermined number of years; it took me several days to recover my bearings. The only thing I can compare it to is reading García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.)