Halloween playfulness, using the Daily Jocks ad for today:
(#1)
Mark is all a-quiver
Over the sale — the
Troy quadruplets can be
Booked at half price; Mark
Wants Tom Troy so bad he
Lives in Tom’s
Signature hot
Pink superfaggy
Team8 Trunks.
The Troy boys: left to right, Ted, Tom, Todd, Tim:
(#2)
I hear that they’re offering a further volume discount.
Mark is so much into the quads that he’s been developing his. See the legs in #1.
A Roz Chast cartoon in the November 2nd New Yorker:
You could always go into farming — with a moral stance, of course. Those fruits amd veggies are better with a Master’s degree behind them.
First, I note a snowclonelet composite not discussed earlier on this blog: X snob, involving a specialized use of the noun snob. Then I summarize some ADS-L discussion of possible extensions of the snowclonelet, where it was suggested that the snowclonelet might in some cases be losing its pejorative tone.
I woke to the sound of the famous theme from Schubert’s incidental music for the play Rosamunde, a tune to which a friend had been taught a rhyme in grade school that was supposed to help kids fix the theme and its creator in their minds:
Franz Peter Schubert,
Kind and gentle spirit,
Wrote with his quill pen
Melodies like these.
A performance (rather slow for my taste) by the Neue Orchestra under Christoph Spering:
This little melody will take us far afield, eventually to the “Beer Barrel Polka” and the brewpubs of San Francisco.
National [ick] Candy Corn Day yesterday, and now Halloween is upon us. Linus awaits the Great Pumpkin:
(#1)
That would be today, October 30, the opening act for Halloween. Celebrating a seasonal candy that some love, but many detest. One kernel:
(#1)
And part of an extended rant, “Candy Corn is Garbage”, from 10/31/14 by Albert Burneko on Foodspin:
What in the damn hell is wrong with the rest of the human race, that a market for these deodorant-flavored earwax nuggets persists into the 21st century? Why purchase these wee little warhead-shaped misery pellets? Why consume them? Why give them to children?
I’m with him.
Today’s wry Zippy, with not much linguistic content (but it amused me):
A job. With a truck. French laundry? Hostess products? Or Zippy’s home brand of incoherent ramblings (which are often not as incoherent as you might think)?
Now about the French laundry…
In a posting three days ago on matters having to do with a Pop-Tart commercial on tv, I reported that at first I heard the peanut in peanut butter as penis. Now a Facebook poster adds his own experience, which had to do with the Cracker Jack slogan (for many years), “Candy coated popcorn, peanuts and a prize”, which as a kid he heard as hawking “penis and a prize”; he took that as an early indicator that he was gay. And now I discover that there’s a rich vein of joking (much of it sophomoric) exploiting the phonetic similarity of peanuts and penis (penis brittle and, yes, penis butter), plus considerable anxiety over the word peanuts from speakers of languages that disfavor consonant clusters (like /ts/).
Two topics here: the phonetic similarity of peanut(s) and penis; and some reflections on Cracker Jack, both the snack and its name.
From the Washington Post on the 27th, the story “Lindsey Graham pours beers, contemplates marrying Carly Fiorina’ by David Weigel, beginning:
Boulder, Colo. — Low poll numbers almost kept him out of Wednesday’s “undercard” CNBC debate, but Sen. Lindsey O. Graham’s presidential campaign made it to Colorado — and took him into territory where few campaigns would tread. Graham (R-S.C.) was the inaugural guest at CNN’s “Politics on Tap” happy hour, its first celebrity bartender and its first participant in a twist on a somewhat salacious name game usually reserved for slumber parties.
The game has a variety of names — kill, fuck, marry; fuck, marry, kill; fuck, marry, dump; marry, fuck, kill — but all have fuck in them, and most have kill as well.
Yesterday’s offering from Daily Jocks (with a caption; notes to follow):
(#1)
At first it was spectral, ghostly,
Visible only in blue light, at an
Acute angle, scarcely a real
Body part.Gus stroked it into
Life, gave it color, fun color, took it
From infracorporeal to
Ultracorporeal, crackling with
Energy at all frequencies.Power in a pouch.