In yesterday’s (3/27) Zippy strip, our Pinhead recognizes a dark service window in a generic roadside fast food place as an astronomical black hole:
(#1) Zippy between two worlds, ordering food in space
Two things: the service window; the black hole.
E-mail from Ellen Kaisse this morning, for the annals of mishearing:
— EK > AZ: I got all bent out of shape this morning when I thought I heard an ad for a prescription drug called Vivaldi. How dare they appropriate the name of a beloved Baroque composer? Further investigation revealed that it is called Lybalvi.
— AZ > EK: Lovely. With you, I am offended on Vivaldi’s behalf.
In my posting yesterday (3/26), “A fortuitous cold soup” Safeway’s house-brand tomato bisque combined with plenty of chopped clams (and some sriracha sauce for spiciness), served unheated (eventually, actually chilled): a (cold) clam-tomato bisque. With a bow to the movie The Wizard of Oz: tomatoes and spices and clams, oh my!
Which I will build up to by starting with bisques, and then running through
tomato juice, tomato soup, tomato bisque
clam juice, clam soup, clam bisque
and going on, at the urging of Tim Evanson on Facebook, to another meeting of clam with tomato, the commercial product Clamato, created as the basis for cocktails.
Doing a regular grocery order yesterday,* the Safeway page for their excellent house-brand tomato bisque happened to show, among other things I’d ordered previously, small cans of chopped clams (which I used to use for pasta with white clam sauce, when I still actually cooked), and it occurred to me that I could combine the soup and the clams, with some sriracha sauce added for a bit of heat, mix it up, heat it in the microwave, and get myself some nice tomato-clam soup. (I don’t cook, but I microwave up a treat.) [*If you kvetch about this example as a glaring dangling modifier, I will throw discourse-organizational stones at you, and try to educate you in the ways of non-default SPARs (subjectless predicational adjuncts requiring a referent for the subject — non-default when they don’t obey the Subject Rule, that is, when they don’t pick up this referent from the subject of the main clause; see the Page on this blog about my dangler postings here).]
I gave the spoon a lick to check the spiciness level. And found that it tasted wonderful, just as it was. It didn’t actually need heating. So I had it half of it for lunch, as a nice cold soup, and put the rest in the refrigerator, to produce a truly wonderful chilled soup for my lunch today. It might be nice with a bit of dill, maybe a dollop of sour cream, but I don’t have those in stock, so I was content with what I had.
And I got a nice, botanically oriented, walk around the block with Isaac, answered mail reconnecting with my old friend the philosopher Bill Lycan (see my 3/12 posting “The Vishnu of philosophy”), and then (for dinner) scored some bibimbap from a Korean restaurant, just because I was seized with a desire for it. An excellent day.
(well, yes, deeply about sex between men, considered analytically but described in the most direct street language, so entirely inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest)
Today’s topic combines the interests of my two previous postings
— on 3/24, “Luke Adams and the power bottoms of the pre-pandemic days”
— on 3/25, “The power of the normative gender binary”
and introduces as a side theme one of the overarching ideas of my work in both gender & sexuality studies and linguistics, that of pervasive variety / variability.
— as slogans: There are a great many homosexualities | There are a great many masculinities
Along the way, we’ll engage with four great bottoms from gay porn: Tannor Reed, Johnny Rapid, Kevin Wiles, and Trent Atkins.
From my 3/19/26 posting “Annals of derogation: homo”:
fairy-boy was the primary verbal abuse directed (inexplicably) at me in childhood, along with (equally inexplicable) accusations that I wanted to be a girl
The abuse was inexplicable to me when I was a kid, but though I was a canny child, there were ways of the world I did not yet appreciate, and among them was the power of the normative gender binary — whatever deviates from normative masculinity is necessarily feminine (and therefore unacceptable in a male person). Some material from this blog on the subject …
(about gay porn performers, their bodies, their presentations of themselves, and their role preferences in sex with other men, all discussed in street language — so, way too raunchy for kids or the sexually modest)
A TitanMen gay porn sale mailer from 3/23 features Luke Adams, the smiling, athletic gay porn performer and great power bottom of the time — he made porn from 2014-22 — just before the coronavirus raged (in 2020-23):
(#1) Jesse Jackman and Luke Adams (genitals fuzzed out for WordPress modesty) in Beef (originally released 1/11/18)
Two reports on abilities and disabilities in reading. One from my own experience in reading Finnish (a language I don’t speak, though I have a fair amount of linguist’s knowledge about the language, its structure, and its writing system). The other from our overlord Grabpussy’s approach to reading English (his native language, indeed the only language he can speak). I’ll suggest that the two of us are more alike in our abilities and disabilities than you might have thought.
Coming by me yesterday (3/23) on public radio, a feature on, as I heard it, the illegal trade in baby seals. (referring, apparently, to the seal hunt on Canada’s east coast, in which thousands of harp seal pups are clubbed to death for their fur) But the story was actually about baby eels (elvers). Mishearing strikes again.
Meanwhile, the actual story was alarming, but not as distressing as what I heard, since baby eels are astronomically less cute than baby seals.
(a posting that clearly will not to be to everyone’s taste)
From the Titan Men Store (an adjunct to the gay porn studio), among a huge variety of silicone sex toys currently on sale, this cute little item:
