Archive for December, 2011

pornwear

December 25, 2011

In my many postings on (mostly men’s) underwear, there’s a theme about underwear that’s not really credible as functional underclothing; it’s for displaying the body and exciting the viewer, and you’d expect it to be worn with as few other, possibly distracting or concealing, garments as possible. I’ve come to talk about these items of apparel as pornwear. (The term has been used by others, but with reference to clothing that merely accentuates the sexy bits or comes with racy images or slogans. Pornwear, in my sense, has no real function beyond erotic display, as crudely as possible.)

The people at Titan Media have taken pornwear to new heights, to garments that you can’t imagine being worn under anything — while blatantly showing off cocks (or asses). This stuff goes beond totally revealing leather (though Titan specializes in that too). It’s pure pornwear. On my X blog today, a posting about a recent Titan flick that clothes most of its cast in pure pornwear, with links to three earlier postings in the same vein, plus an extra shot of pornstar Spencer Reed in a shiny black vinyl pornwear number.

Very much not for the kiddies.

Hair

December 25, 2011

A little story (adapted and paraphrased from reports from real life) about two children. The dramatis personae:

Child 1: a 7-year-old girl

Child 2: a slightly younger girl

Setting: the women’s locker room of an exercise center, where both children (with their mothers) had been swimming and had just showered; they were mostly naked.

The exchange begins: Child 2 admonishes Child 1, “This is the women’s locker room. Boys are not allowed.”

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Hippopotamuses and other Christmas wants

December 25, 2011

Following on my most recent Christmas music posting, focusing on the unusual (or actively silly), Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky reminded me about “All I Want for Christmas is a Hippopotamus” (a.k.a. “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas”), a magnificently silly holiday song.

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Sticking it to Saint Sebastian

December 25, 2011

A return to the Saint Sebastian theme, in a pincushion from the Ship of Fools site (last sampled in “Madonna of the Memories”):

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Jewish portmanteaus

December 25, 2011

Two Jewish portmanteaus (Jewmanteaus?) for the season.

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Data points: interpreting compounds 12/25/11

December 25, 2011

Yesterday morning on radio station KFJC, host Robert Emmett was talking about various early movies showing in the Bay Area and came to an actor he described as a silent cowboy. This wasn’t intended to be the Adj silent plus the head N cowboy (though it has the same accent pattern as this combination), but rather the N silent plus this head: cowboy (well, someone who plays a cowboy) in silents — that is, in silent movies.

So, first we have the nouning silent ‘silent film/movie’ (note specialization of the Adj silent ‘without sound’ to the movie context, and recall that before the advent of talkies, all movies were silent in this sense). Then, we get compounds in which the N silent serves as first element — like silent cowboy. Like so many compounds, this one takes some serious interpretive work.

 

The night before Christmas

December 24, 2011

Today’s Rhymes With Orange:

Not a creature was stirring,
Not even a mouse

And from later in the poem (by Clement Clarke Moore or Henry Livingston), with Undergear’s holiday greetings (in a flaming-red jockstrap):

Meanwhile, Flamingo Nativity: the holy parents and their flamingos await the appearance of the holy infant (photo from Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky):

Come Thou Fount

December 23, 2011

More about text and tune.

A little while ago, Kate Campbell’s recording of “Come thou fount of ev’ry blessing” (from the album Wandering Strange) went past on my iTunes, and I realized that though it had what I think of as the “standard” tune for this text, the tune wasn’t any of the ones in The Sacred Harp — though that book has four different settings of the words.

More mix-and-match association of text with tunes, in this case with tunes suitable to the 8,7 meter of the text.

One of the Sacred Harp settings is my grand-daughter’s favorite song in the book: Restoration (First) #312b, with its fierce tune paired with a chorus that Opal likes a lot:

I will rise and go to Jesus,
He’ll embrace me in his arms;
In the arms of my dear Savior,
O there are ten thousand charms.

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Their hearts were young and gay

December 22, 2011

(Not about language.)

Another item in my searches through the photographic records of Ann Daingerfield (Zwicky): this photo of her, young, gorgeous, and adventurous, about to sail off on RMS Mauretania in 1957 on her way to France for her junior year abroad.

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Dinosaur snowclone

December 22, 2011

Today’s Dinosaur Comics, in which Ryan North riffs on snowclones and Language Log (the all-caps speaker from above is God, or some equivalent authority, by the way):

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