A David Sipress cartoon in the July 20th New Yorker:
Looking at text in a mirror is one way to reverse the image. But so is looking at it from the back side of a glass window, as here. The bar’s customer is just going along with the reversal.
You do wonder about the pronunciation of the reversed text. (There are people who’ve gotten pretty good at “talking backwards” — reversing the acoustic signal. The linguist Yuen Ren Chao used to do this as a kind of parlor trick.)
(Mostly about gay porn and advertising for it, but there’s some language stuff in there.)
We’re into the latter part of the summer season, and there aren’t many occasions to celebrate in the US, now that Independence Day and gay pride days are past and Labor Day is about six weeks in the future. That presents a challenge for gay porn studios, who like to have holidays to hang sales on. Two of them — C1R (Channel 1 Releasing) and TitanMen — have taken the challenge, with rather different approaches.
C1R wasn’t inventive; they just declared a “summer splash sale” and offered up chunks of their inventory, plus a new flick, It All Cums Down to Cock (cramming cum, the down of go down on, and cock into a six-word title). The material in their ad, reproduced in an AZBlogX posting (note: visually and verbally X-rated), is undistinguished except for a steamy shot from the new flick (with slim twink Devin Dixon admiring hunk Jason Phoenix’s penis).
But TitanMen went for playful cleverness, with a “Christmas in July” ad campaign (details on AZBlogX).
At first glance this looks like word salad, and things aren’t helped much if I tell you that it’s a VP, that it’s attested, and that it wasn’t an inadvertent error. Context, we need context.
In today’s Dilbert, Alice complains about a sexual double standard on language use, with women held to a stricter standard than men:
Alice refers to, and rejects, two expectations of women: that they be supportive and cooperative (while men are expected to be competitive and challenging), and that they be the guardians of deceny (while men have licence to break the social rules of niceness). Both fair objections.
Of course, men with these expectations might be affronted and pained by women who flagrantly fail to respect them.
In an episode of CSI: NY, a very familiar face and voice appeared this morning, but I couldn’t place the actor. Information on the man in question gave me his name — David James Elliott — but that didn’t help. Wikipedia to the rescue:
David James Elliott (born September 21, 1960) is a Canadian American actor who was the star of the series JAG, playing lead character Harmon Rabb Jr. from 1995 to 2005.
Ah yes, the handsome, solid guy from JAG with the great smile.
This morning’s name was yellowjacket, a kind of wasp — relevant now that we’re in high summer, getting into yellowjacket season. That led me to the excellent technical term trophallaxis. Here’s the Western yellowjacket, Vespula pensylvanica, the scourge of picnics in this part of the world:
Recently on cable re-runs, a series of three CSI: NY episodes from 2010 (in season 7) with John Larroquette as police Chief Ted Carver: episode 7 (“Hide Sight” 11/5/10), episode 8 (“Scared Stiff” 11/12/10), and the moving episode 9 (“Justified” 11/19/10). From Wikipedia:
John Bernard Larroquette (born November 25, 1947) is an American actor. His roles include [the devious, womanizing] Dan Fielding on the 1984–1992 sitcom Night Court (winning a then-unprecedented four consecutive Emmy Awards for his role), Mike McBride in the Hallmark Channel series McBride, John Hemingway on The John Larroquette Show, Lionel Tribbey on The West Wing, and Carl Sack in Boston Legal.
A veteran and hard-working tv actor, especially on sitcoms, but also in some movies.
Today’s Zippy, which leads in several directions:
(#1)
Zippy at the Bluebonnet Diner in Northampton MA, trading warning signs at the counter with an icon representing a (generic) person.
Stuff here: the diner; broasted chicken; warning signs; icons (for a man, for a person); punchline.
