Resting yesterday alongside 819 Ramona St. on an afternoon walk, my helper Isaac and I noted once again that the building started life as Palo Alto’s first Black church. Black meaning African American, one of a number of uses for the racioethnic designator BLACK. As it happens, Isaac, from Fiji, is a Polynesian black person, with BLACK used to refer to people from the Polynesian islands (Tonga, Fiji, Samoa, etc.) with dark skin, curly hair, and broad facial features. It then occurred to me to wonder if Isaac was misidentified as African American on the basis of his BLACK features, as I am misidentified as JEWISH on the basis of my prominent nose and my body language. So this morning I asked him.
Varieties of BLACK
May 1, 2026Mayday!
May 1, 2026🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate the month of May — Mayday celebrating labor, spring (new growth, rebirth, fertility), and romance, in a variety of ways (parades, dancing, maypoles, bonfires, public displays of affection)
From Hana Filip on Facebook this morning:
May 1: Workers’ Labo(u)r Day (international) and the day of (romantic) love celebration (a kind of Valentine Day on May 1 in the Czech Republic). Two seemingly incompatible ideas. Karel Čapek sees a connection between the two: “It is love that wreaked / inflicted on us life and all its travails … and so, dear friends, on Workers’ Labour Day we must talk about (romantic) love.” [AZ: Čapek coined robot ‘humanoid machine’ from Czech robota ‘forced labor’]
Bright Jeremiah, play for me
April 30, 2026🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate April (the rabbits rush in tomorrow, bearing muguets pour le premier mai), with my response to a posting on Facebook by John McIntyre yesterday
Hail! Bright Jeremiah, hail! fill ev’ry heart!
With love of thee and thy celestial art
— adapted from Nicholas Brady’s text for Henry Purcell’s “Hail! Bright Cecilia” (Z.328)
Notable Zwickys
April 29, 2026I had somehow missed this Wikipedia page until I stumbled on it this morning:
Zwicky is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
Let’s dance!
April 27, 2026Playing on my Apple Music when I woke this morning (4/27): the trio and chorus “They shall be as happy as they’re fair” from Act V of Henry Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, Z. 629, with its forward-driving syncopations accompanying the repeated “happy, happy”. A wild wedding song to start the day:
They shall be as happy, happy, as they’re fair,
Love shall fill all the places of care;
And ev’ry time the Sun shall display his rising light,
It shall be to them a new Wedding day,
And when he sets a new Nuptial night.
Every day a new festive wedding day, every night a new conjugal wedding night; let’s dance!
I was profoundly happy.
Mess, oops or yes
April 26, 2026(about sexual acts, especially between men, and also about excrement as an accompaniment to sexual acts, all described in vulgar street language, so this posting is massively unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest)
Two messy situations. Anal intercourse sometimes involves the mess of excrement — feces, inadverent (oops!) or intentional (yes!) — and American gay usage has supplied vocabulary for both situations (now extended to women, as well as men, as receptive partners in anal intercourse).
This is as far as I will go using distanced, technical language; from now on, I’ll use the current street language — heavy in F-bombs and S-bombs, among other things — of my sources. This isn’t just a stylistic decision; again and again, it turns out that the distanced language is imprecise and fuzzy, while the street language comes with specific and detailed reference — just as you would expect, because the distanced language is designed to avoid embarrassing reality, while the street language needs to be clear on details that affect how we conduct our everyday lives.
Stylish? Or in costume?
April 25, 2026(lots of discussion of men’s bodies in street language and similar references to sex between men, so not for kids or the sexually modest)
Stylish? Or in costume? There can be a fine line here, often crossed flagrantly — in my opinion, at any rate — in high-fashion shows. And then also in the far reaches of premium underwear for men, especially from the raunchily named Breedwell company — whose name includes the sexual verb breed ‘pedicate a man bareback (without a condom) to orgasm’.
(Translation in plain, but seriously vulgar, language: pedicate is a Latinate verb for engaging in insertive anal intercourse — fucking someone up the ass — and breed is the related slang achievement verb for bareback man-on-man sex — conveying that the fucker comes (shoots his load) in the other man’s ass.)]