A Night in Tunisia 2

June 27, 2026

Briefly noted. From my posting yesterday (6/26) “Enjoy your night in Tunisia”, in response to Lise Menn, a comment about:

the music; I wanted to open up “A Night in Tunisia”, encourage people to discover the early [Dizzy] Gillespie-[Charlie] Parker collaborations, maybe to go on to discover that words got added to it [more than once, in fact] and it was eventually performed and recorded by almost every jazz or just jazzy vocalist(s) there is (Ella did it, Manhattan Transfer did it) and that most of that is in fact fabulous, genuinely a precious part of our cultural heritage

As it happens, this has been a dire day for my spirit, filled with such intense anxiety about the worth of my work that I was reduced to reading through old postings, looking for examples of things I wrote that might have been of value to at least a few of my readers. The triggers for this despair were multiple, but it turned out that sleep deprivation was high on the list; life is considerably better after three one-hour naps.

Then I went back to Ella Fitzgerald, a deep pleasure since I saw her perform live back in the 1960s.

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Enjoy your night in Tunisia

June 26, 2026

The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip of 6/26:


(#1) He’s a good man, who’ll give you hot licks on his saxophone while lavishing care on your car during your dinner; enjoy your night in Tunisia, light on the harissa (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

A complex joke pun on the name of the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker (Wikipedia entry here), in which the Charlie Brown character from the comic strip Peanuts is presented as a valet parker.

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Posted in Jokes, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Puns | 3 Comments »

Going down on Rosh Hashanah

June 26, 2026

(fellatial fun — and disrespectful of religion as well — so not for kids or the sexually modest)

Yesterday on the Facebook group soc-motss (for same-sex-inclined folk and their friends), Ellen Evans forwarded a 6/24 FB posting from Derekh Baruch Von Geiger on Facebook:


The ultimate source for this image is not identified; it could just be an invention, but it looks like a Christian church service borrowing from Jewish practices, in particular what’s customarily translated into English as the blowing of the shofar

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Posted in Jokes, Language and religion, Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, Metaphor, Puns, Taboo language and slurs | 3 Comments »

Jesus pyjamas, and a sweatshirt

June 24, 2026

From Toni Borowsky (in Australia) on Facebook on 6/24:

Jesus PYJAMAS!
Ffs I am seeing ads for Jesus pyjamas. 😳

(AuE / BrE spelling PYJAMAS, AmE PAJAMAS)

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Posted in Clothing, Language and religion, Music | 4 Comments »

Josef K. is summoned to appear

June 23, 2026

From Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky (my daughter) on  6/20, completely out of the blue:

Re: Assessment Thursday 10:30: The assessment visit is at the Avant [“a WellQuest Living Community”, offering independent living for seniors in Palo Alto]. All their departments meet you to make sure you’re a fit. I think it takes about an hour. Somebody will take you.

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Posted in Books, My life | 7 Comments »

Fathers Day, the survey

June 21, 2026

(about the holiday, and masculinity, and enough man-on-man sex to make this posting out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest)

First take: the long pan. From my 6/16/19 posting “On this day in 2019”:

(US) Fathers Day. For some of us, this is a day to remember our fathers with affection. I’m one of the lucky ones; I’ve written about mine several times, most extensively in my 1/30/11 posting “It Gets Better / Wonderful dad”.

It’s also an American commercial holiday that might better be labeled Masculinity Day, aimed at selling things stereotypically associated with high masculinity in either the upper middle class or the working class; elaboration on this point in my 6/10/18  posting “Gearing up for Fathers Day”. [AZ: I am largely alienated from American normative masculinity, have been as long as I can remember, so have gone my own way, on a path of homomasculinity, where both my sociocultural affiliations and my sexual desires take me off the broad highway and into the steamy jungle underbrush]

And then through its role as Masculinity Day and through complex associations involving gay men and fathers, Fathers Day is also a high holiday for gay porn, with at least three different themes: sex between father and son; Daddy-Boy relationships; and sex involving older men — called daddies — especially, very muscular ones. [AZ: of the three themes, only Daddy / Boy works for me, and that’s a recent discovery: in this world of sexual fantasy, despite my advanced age, I turn out to be, as we say there, a very good Boy; there is, apparently, always space for pleasant surprises]

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Posted in Events and occasions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language of sex, Masculinity, My life | Leave a Comment »

A faggot with a Tony

June 20, 2026

In the New Yorker‘s 6/15/26 issue, a “Talk of the Town” piece “The Boards: Like Willy Wonka” by Zach Helfand on the theatre director Michael Arden experiencing indoor skydiving at a facility in Queens (in preparation for his latest show, “The Lost Boys”, which includes actors in intricate flying sequences). Then:

In his acceptance speech for his first Tony, in 2023, Arden recounted being a bullied queer theatre kid in Texas, and then said, “All I can say is that now I’m a faggot with a Tony.” Post-flying, Arden said, “I was more nervous making that speech [than flying indoors]. That was terrifying.”

In Arden’s I’m a faggot with a Tony, I hear a mixture of urgent defiance and anxious fear that’s familiar terrain — I’m a pussy-boy in the American Academy —  that I passed through first as a child.

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Posted in Awards, Homosexuality, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Music, Theater | 2 Comments »

Two 6/22 cartoons

June 19, 2026

… from  the New Yorker issue of that day: a Liana Finck cartoon on the never-done work of women; and an Ellis Rosen cartoon featuring a fully-accredited monster.

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Posted in Allusion, Gender and sexuality, German, Language and the sexes, Latin, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Poetry | Leave a Comment »

“I am a male corn actor”

June 19, 2026

(a note on taboo avoidance and euphemism, but with enough explication of the raw reference of various expressions to make this posting unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

A poster wrote:

I am a male corn actor.

— adding that he had worked in adult entertainment before getting into corn. Just enough background information for me to exclude, oh so reluctantly, a wide range of colorful but unlikely understandings of corn, in favor of its just being an intentional replacement for porn to avoid filters on-line. So: a subtler and harder to detect variant of the well-established filter-avoidance pr0n ‘pornography, porn’: an intentional misspelling of porn (with the middle letters transposed, and the letter o replaced by numeral 0). (The thing is, pr0n stands out as odd, so clever filtering could fairly easily pick it out; the beauty of corn is its utter ordinariness.)

(Now, of course, being the person I am, I am seized with carnal, raunchy, grossly sexual readings of corn on the cob, corn chowder, Children of the Corn, cornucopia, corny jokes, cornflakes, cornfields, popcorn, Cornwall, corner store, cornrow, Jimmy Crack Corn, cornet, acorn, …)

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Posted in Euphemism, Gay porn, Language of sex, Taboo language and slurs | 4 Comments »

My ball, their flange

June 18, 2026

Just 3 days ago (6/15), it was the mantric pleasures of my ball: Key lime cheese ball, Key lime cheese ball, Key lime cheese ball. And then today (6/18), the Pinhead citizens of Dingburg have taken to chanting for their remarkable flange: galvanized steel socket flange, galvanized steel socket flange, galvanized steel socket flange.


Respect their flange! onomatomania, onomatomania, onomatomania!

Coming soon: the steel flange cheese ball, a triumph of textural contrast. Rivaling the US capital’s paint chip algae bloom  (Symphony In Blue And Green).

 

Posted in Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

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