Today’s Zippy looks to the future of Western civilization, and sees the triumph of popular culture:
Time to get together my Chiquita Banana syllabus, I guess.
Archive for March, 2011
The coming triumph of popular culture
March 17, 2011Swiss Army Gender
March 17, 2011Over on Facebook, Tané Tachyon has posted this engaging graphic for San Francisco Queer Contra Dance (here):
This is a Swiss Army knife with three sex/gender symbols added to the typical tools in such a knife: male/masculine (upper left), female/feminine (bottom), and a composite of the two (upper right).
Owsley Stanley
March 16, 2011Another remarkable obituary by Margalit Fox, in the NYT yesterday:
Owsley Stanley, Famed Artisan of Acid, Is Dead at 76
Owsley Stanley, the prodigiously gifted applied chemist to the stars, who made LSD in quantity for the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Ken Kesey and other avatars of the psychedelic ’60s, died on Sunday in a car accident in Australia.
There’s more, some of it as entertaining as “the prodigiously gifted applied chemist to the stars”.
(And though he released White Lightning, Monterey Purple, and Blue Cheer, he did not produce a product called Purple Haze.)
ruby/red slippers/pumps
March 16, 2011Over on ADS-L, Neil Crawford asked about “to wear the ruby slippers”, as here:
“Love is just a chemical reaction designed to encourage propagation of the species,” James [who is gay] declares […].
“Really?” Callie says. If it’s all about propagation of the species, then how do you explain homosexuality, honey-love? Those of you who wear the ruby slippers?” (Cody McFayden, Abandoned)
Clearly a reference to homosexuality, via the ruby slippers, red slippers, ruby red slippers, or ruby red pumps Dorothy wore in The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy and her slippers have become icons of homosexuality. In fact, the newsgroup soc.motss (members of the same sex), now in an incarnation as a Facebook group, ran a fund drive about twenty years ago on behalf of the Lambda Legal and Defense Fund, under the name RRP (for Ruby Red Pumps), and now the pumps serve as the Facebook icon for the group. Here’s a somewhat different version of the icon:
Sometimes you just have to be fabulous.
spunk
March 16, 2011The noun spunk came up on ADS-L recently, in two different senses: ‘spirit, mettle; courage, pluck’ (OED2, with citations from 1773 — Oliver Goldsmith — on) and the “coarse” sexual slang ‘seminal fluid’ (citations from c1890 — My Secret Life — on); the original senses were for various kinds of spark, from which the other two developed.
Underwear puns
March 16, 2011In the tradition of the Valentine’s Day package play from Undergear, now a line of Greek underwear: Greek brief(s), jock(strap), trunk(s), and boxer brief(s) (in red, yellow, turquoise, white, and purple), all on sale at the moment for $5.
Musical f-bombs
March 15, 2011Jon Pareles on the music beat for the NYT (on-line today, presumably in print tomorrow): “On the Pop Charts, Singing the Unspeakable”:
It’s some kind of milestone: Three of the Top 10 hits on last week’s pop music chart have choruses that can’t be played uncensored on the radio and won’t have their original lyrics quoted in this family newspaper. All three use variations on a familiar, emphatic, percussive four-letter word.
Yeah, yeah, y’know, like fuck:
(“Poster Making” (2007) by Royal Art Lodge, from McSweeney’s 27)
Sundance stories
March 15, 2011On my X blog, three pieces of Sundance fiction:
from before South America: “Tumbling”
in South America: “Sundance stays in to hunt” [man-man sex alert]
in California: “The interview”
These added to the California story “Vergissmeinnicht”.
SemFest log
March 14, 2011While I’m working on expanding this year’s Stanford SemFest handout a bit and putting it on my website, here’s a little history of my experience with this event:
Days
March 14, 2011Today is Pi Day (3.14, in some date notations). Think radially!
And tomorrow, March 15, is my household’s traditional spring Evacuation Day — the day on which, for many years, Jacques and I moved East from Palo Alto to Columbus (having done the reverse move starting on December 15), after a week of mailing boxes of books back, packing up, arranging for someone to live in the house while we were gone, and so on.
Much as I like Flagstaff and Albuquerque, I’m glad not to be going on the 2,650-mile trek twice a year.
Meanwhile, it’s really spring here: the Victorian box (intensely scented like orange blossoms) is blooming, birdsong awakens me in the morning, and so on.