(Underwear models displaying their bodies, with allusions to various forms of intense man-on-man sex, so not to everyone’s taste)
A Daily Jocks sale ad in my email today (2/25):
[ad text:] Cellblock13 at Daily Jocks — buy 2 & save 30%
What sort of dramatic relationship from the world of the butch faggy — Red Guy and Blue Guy, resplendent in their gorgeous intense colors — is illustrated here? Tell us their story!
(Well, all about penises and what men think about their own and other guys’, so edgy for many people — but mostly clinical in content and tone, not at all raunchy)
Stephan Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine strip of 2/24, about what we might call little-dick grandiosity — the common belief that megalomania is (in general) a compensation for having a small penis:
There is in fact no evidence for this idea; and we might legitimately question whether there are any actual cases of little-dick grandiosity, as I put it so crudely above, at all
Reprinted on Facebook recently by Jeff Bowles, Charles Schulz’s Peanuts cartoon from 11/3/1988, in which Snoopy the writer upbraids an editor — someone I think of as the powerful but irrationally unappreciative son-of-a-bitch Ed — for failing to print his stories and make him rich and famous:
Me, I share with Snoopy a history — in my case, long past — of having my articles callously rejected by Ed. I did not seek riches, though I was happy to get some royalties from my writing; the currency of academia isn’t financial but reputational: having an audience for my ideas and my creative writing.
Yes, yes, I am bombarded with blizzard warnings, for the terrifying storm now bringing NYC and the surrounding areas to a standstill. But, bafflingly, though I am fully aware that the warnings are about a blizzard, I keep hearing them as announcing a lizard warning — as if I must now beware of a rain of cold-stunned iguanas falling from the trees or an advancing army of marauding Komodo dragons.
Sadly, since we are now in the zone of terrifying creatures, I have to tell you that Gojira / Godzilla is a reptilian (or dinosaurian) monster, or kaiju, not a squamate one (all lizards are reptiles, but not all reptiles are lizards). You should indeed be alarmed by the news that Godzilla is on the rampage in your neighborhood — that means it’s slated for utter devastation — but such a bulletin is not, technically, a lizard warning. It would be a grievous usage error to race through the streets screaming the lizards are coming! the lizards are coming!
I come to celebrate two television performances by Jesse Jackson (who died a few days ago) that have made my day: one that totally broke me up in laughter and one that made me weep with his regard for and buoying up of the least among us, little children.
The thumbnail history. As background about Jackson as a political force, from Wikipedia:
Jesse Louis Jackson (né Burns; 10/8/1941 to 2/17/2026) was an American civil rights activist, LGBTQ rights activist, politician, and ordained Baptist minister. A protégé of Martin Luther King Jr. and James Bevel during the civil rights movement, he became one of the most prominent civil rights leaders of the late 20th and early 21st centuries and an ardent and early supporter of LGBTQ rights. From 1991 to 1997, he served as a shadow delegate and shadow senator for the District of Columbia.
Now: Jackson reading Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” on Saturday Night Live in 1991 as a passionate and devout reading from the pulpit; and Jackson in a 1972 appearance on the children’s tv program Sesame Street, exhorting a gaggle of Rainbow Coalition kids in the liberatory chant “I am somebody”. Laugh with me, weep with me.
(Once more into man-on-man sex described in street language; kind of silly, and actually rather sweet, but way too raunchy for kids or the sexually modest)
In my e-mail this morning (2/22), a gay porn sale ad from ASGmax: for Almost Real (part 1), In the Name of Science, featuring Nico Coopa and Ryder Owens, from the studio Next Door Films, released on 2/14/26. The video tells the tale of a “synthetic intimate robot” — not an AI creation, but a character played by an actual porn performer, which somewhat takes the edge off the kinkiness of getting a blow job from a robot or the unpleasant prospect of getting fucked by one. (The only machines I want up my ass are anal probes and dildoes that are entirely under my control — nothing with any sort of mind of its own.), The whole ad, in all its details, but with the dicks fuzzed out for WordPress modesty (I will, however, describe them):
(This posting is all about man-on-man anal sex, with photos, in the plainest of street language (F-bombs will fall like snow), so it is utterly out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest; entertaining in its own grossly raunchy way, but spectacularly NSFW)
I’l ease into things, starting with some background about the noun catamite, taking off with NOAD‘s entry:
A note from my recent stay in Stanford Hospital: into the emergency room on Friday 1/30 in the afternoon, returning home late in the afternoon on Thursday 2/5. Not about the afflictions that brought me there, but about an odd experience during the long time waiting on a gurney in a very small room in the emergency department while tests were made and a hospital room sought. I had company all through the day: my daughter Elizabeth and grandchild Opal, who patiently enjoyed a card game together and played some interesting music softly for me.
Hallucination: the curtain. This tiny room had a curtain that could be drawn to make it private from the hallway outside: a pleasant beige color with somewhat glossy horizontal strips of a slightly darker tint.
But for me it was, startlingly, much more than that: what I saw inside those strips was the (unfortunately illegible) text of a substantial article that I was writing to post on this blog. I was entirely aware that this material was a hallucination, visible to me but not to Elizabeth or Opal, though I described it for them. Fascinating, in no way disturbing. But I was unable to dismiss or erase the text from my visual field — it persisted for more than an hour, with no way for me to un-see it. And then I was moved to a different room, with a different kind of curtain, so no more hallucination.
This sort of cognizant hallucination — my ad hoc label for hallucination (in this case, visual) with full awareness on the part of the experiencer — is, apparently, not unusual, though not much seems to be known about the triggers for it. They are common in the moments when people are dropping off to sleep and, especially, when they are wakening.
From Ben Yagoda on Facebook today (2/19):
[about] today’s Philadelphia Inquirer investigation of Philly Managing Director Adam “No Show Jones” Thiel, who was away from the office for nearly five months last year, including time in the military reserve and (presumably) running his consulting firm, from which he reported income of more than $300,000. (That’s in addition to his city salary of $316,000.)
… The Inquirer article … shows continued morphing of the verb don from meaning ‘put on’ (don we now our gay apparel) to meaning ‘wear’. The newspaper reports: “Ahead of a snowstorm in January 2024, Thiel stood with [Mayor] Parker during a news conference about preparations. He donned a suit while snowflakes fell, and he reassured the city that the administration was ready for the service disruptions that bad weather can bring”.
For those of us who still hew to the old meaning, that’s quite a visual image.
The Pearls Before Swine strip by Stephan Pastis, for 1/9/26:
A difference between British English and American English over constructions with the definite article (arthrous) or without it (anarthrous) — putting aside British Bob’s touching belief in the primacy of BrE over AmE
(There is a Page on this blog with links to postings on Language Log and this blog on arthrousness)
Now for some scholarly observations on BrE vs. AmE practices in arthrousness with various prepositional objects, among them hospital and university. Here I take you to Lynne Murphy’s blog “Separated by a Common Language: Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the US” — in her posting “(the) menopause, (the) flu, (the) hospital” from 4/17/2007:
