From Janis Ian’s blog, passed on to me on Facebook by John Lawler on the 14th:
Taijitu meets Magen David, oh happy day.
Archive for December, 2012
Christmas dinner
December 16, 2012The gay underwear anthem
December 16, 2012[Mostly about queer sexiness and gay sex, but with comments on poetic form.]
Heard dimly across the room, a song with an insistent chorus that was apparently about bluesy underwear (or, just possibly, boozy underwear). On my iTunes, but it struck no chord of memory for me. I came closer, and it resolved itself into Pansy Division singing “Groovy Underwear” (originally on Deflowered, then in the collection The Essential Pansy Division). Ah, the gay underwear anthem, a theme song for my underwear postings.
Getting them to believe
December 15, 2012The Dilbert of 10/21/12, in which Dilbert spars with his boss:
Two rounds: over calling the Internet a cloud, and then explicitly over the gullibility of dumb people.
The meta-Zippy
December 15, 2012Today’s Zippy, which could easily give you a headache, and might upset your digestion as well:
This goes beyond Griffy and Zippy reflecting, in a comic strip, on their being comic strip characters, as they have in earlier strips. This time they’re reflecting on their being characters in meta-comics — reflecting on being characters who reflect on being characters in a comic strip. And so on, vertiginously.
Emoticons amok
December 15, 2012Today’s Zits, with Sarah confronting a profusion of emoticons from Jeremy:
Sometimes there seems to be no end of emoticons. (Most recent posting with emoticons in it here.)
Language play log
December 15, 2012Three items with language play in them that came by me recently, in the order of their appearance: (1) the Mental Floss list of their ten best-selling t-shirts; (2) an Ian Shoales piece rushing through “The Catchphrase History of the World”; and (3) some porn flick titles.
TMI
December 15, 2012Andy Rogers, in a Facebook comment today on “Commando no more“:
Waaaay too much information in the blog!
I have revised this posting to begin with the following warning:
[TMI Warning: The following posting contains information, opinion, or reflection that some readers might find uncomfortably or unwelcomely personal, private, or intimate in topic or content: too much information, as the saying goes. As a general observation, I’m willing to go almost anywhere in my postings, including some places that some readers don’t want to go.]
I will now go back and add this warning to other postings. I invite your suggestions, preferably by e-mail to zwicky@stanford.edu, as to which postings should be so labeled.
In the Usenet newsgroup soc.motss, I used to preface my racier postings with a warning that they treated sexual activity in plain language, so that some readers might want to avoid them. The tenor of blogs has changed enough in the 30 years that have gone past that I now rarely issue this sort of warning, but I wonder if I should return to some version of the practice. (I put “adult” visual content on AZBlogX some time ago, along with creative writing — poetry, fiction, fictionalized autobiography — with “adult” verbal content, but much verbal content remains on my regular blog, as does some “borderline” visual material.) I welcome opinions on the matter, as comments on this posting.
Tell us a story
December 14, 2012Among the collages I make up are some of a particularly simple sort (I’ve posted many many examples of more complicated ones, some XXX-rated, some on academic topics, on AZBlogX and this blog): a background image (usually from professional photographers or from advertisements), a caption lifted from some source (mostly the New Yorker; for other collages, I write the captions myself — I view caption writing as a creative act on its own), and a sticker or two from a collection of stickers I’ve amassed over the years. Occasionally, these three components fit together nicely, but I’m fond of assembling “puzzle pictures”, which can be treated like the images in the projective tests devised by clinical psychologists (the Thematic Apperception Test, for instance).
Lucy
December 13, 2012Two quick questions:
(1) What song was recorded by both Enrico Caruso and Elvis Presley?
(2) Why is question (1) especially relevant today?
Answers after the jump.
Stehpinkeln
December 13, 2012(Only a bit about language.)
[TMI Warning: The following posting contains information, opinion, or reflection that some readers might find uncomfortably or unwelcomely personal, private, or intimate in topic or content: too much information, as the saying goes. As a general observation, I’m willing to go almost anywhere in my postings, including some places that some readers don’t want to go.]
Despite the title, this posting is about the routinization of arrangements and activities, so that it becomes hard to imagine alternatives. Most of the household arrangements that got set up (rather hastily) when I came home from the hospital are like this. There were good reasons to do things in a certain way, but then my abilities changed, and maybe things could now be done differently — if only we thought about it.
The case at hand has to do with the 3-in-1 commode that came home with me from the hospital :
The three ways to use it are over the toilet, at the bedside, or as a shower seat. The point of the over-the-toilet use is to raise the effective height of the toilet; low chairs, including your typical (low) toilet seat, are bad news for my hip (were then and still are). After initial attempts to use the thing as a freestanding piece of medical furniture came to naught because my digestive system was not yet functioning normally, we turned to the raised-toilet use.
(Etymological digression from the Concise OED 11: commode is a euphemism, an 18th-century borrowing from French, literally ‘convenient, suitable’, used for “a piece of furniture containing a concealed chamber pot”, then in N.Amer. simply “a toilet”. It’s a convenience, yes, but in a very specific way.)
There followed a lot of trial and error (the commode was simply delivered to my hospital room at some point, without any information or instructions), the goal of which was to set things up so that I could manage all the toilet stuff by myself, without the aid of family and friends. The arrangement then had the commode over the toilet, and all the toilet action was in the sitting position (there turmed out to be good reason not to use the commode with its seat down for defecation (I’m sorry, but neither pooping not shitting really works for me here) and up for urination.
Ok, in this arrangement, peeing was certainly possible, though a bit cramped. Then at Gordon Biersch for lunch on Wednesday I used a urinal there, and wondered once again about those commode arrangements. And a crucial thing had changed.