Yesterday’s Zippy takes us through 15 television series, of an extraordinary variety:
The strip ends with a cute POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau), Playboy After Dark + Dark Shadows.
Archive for September, 2015
TV series circuit party animals
September 2, 2015Flaunting it
September 2, 2015About the display of the male body, but also about gesture and facial expression.
Today, from the Daily Jocks people, an ad for products from the Pump! firm, specifically for a line of socks for working out, but with links to the company’s larger catalogue, which tends to feature underwear models “projecting steamy desirability” (as I put it in my Rafael Nadal posting) — in fact projecting a male-hustler persona while teasingly flaunting the pleasures of their bodies.
There’s shirt-lifting (focused on the abs), pants-lowering in the front (pointing towards the crotch), pants-lowering in the back (pointing towards the butt-crack), and armpit displays. The models stare intently into the viewers’ eyes, narrowing their own eyes (signalling arousal combined with dominance, rather than anger), and sometimes opening their lips slightly (another sign of arousal). They are scruffily hypermasculine, projecting not fitness and athleticism, but intense, even urgent, sexuality.
Scientists at play
September 2, 2015Passed on by Chris Waigl, a piece on the Washington Post‘s blog: “Scientists celebrate the world of animal genitalia with #junkoff” (by Rachel Feltman):
Scentists: They’re just like you! They have good days, they have bad days, they glue themselves to angry crocodiles, and they recognize how utterly ridiculous and funny animal genitalia can be.
#junkoff is the latest hashtag to take off in the scientific corners of Twitter, and it’s exactly what it sounds like.
Scientists who work with animals contribute their favorite images of penises and vaginas. Including the remarkable 4-headed penis of an echidna (aka spiny anteater, an egg-laying mammal).
Giving two hoots
September 1, 2015A follow-up to my “What a hoot!” posting, which was about a set of senses of hooter that turn out almost surely to be related. One of these is mammary hooters (as in the restaurant’s name), and there’s some question about its history (though it’s clear that it predates the restaurant); there are sources that attribute the item to Steve Martin on Saturday Night Live, but for reasons I’ll expand on here, I was very wary of the idea.
That’s the first hoot.
Then, as so often happens when I post about specific uses of particular lexical items, people wrote me about other uses, which are really beside the point of my posting, or about other items that are merely similar to the target item (usually phonologically). Now it can be entertaining to follow up such associations, but that’s at the risk of losing the point. Occasionally I’ve followed these associations, though I try to mark associative chaining off from the main line of the posting, as when I branched from a posting on Ficus plants to a collection of loosely fig-related other things: the fig leaf of modesty, Fig Newtons, figgy pudding, giving a fig for, the fig sign,
So: soon to loosely hoot-related things. That’s the second hoot.