From Luc Vartan Baronian, this cover for an issue of the French comic book Les P’tits Diables, an issue about a little girl who loves to torture her brother, among other ways by kissing him. But how does that bring us to this?
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Luc: A little disturbing cause it’s aimed at children, but I can’t be the only one seeing things.
No, Luc, you’re not the only one.
Passed on by Kim Darnell, a BuzzFeed posting yesterday, “23 Adorable Penguin Products You Need In Your Life: Because when you love penguins, you REALLY love them” by Elaina Wahl. Two of the 23:
The small: measuring spoons from Etsy:
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The Love Song of J. Alfred Penguin:
I have measured out my life with penguin spoons
The large: a 5-foot stuffed penguin from Big Plush:
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Keep Calm and Get Stuffed (here)
This Pop-Tart commercial for their new Peanut Butter & Jelly line went past me this morning:
Well, I heard the peanut of peanut butter as penis, but that’s no surprise for someone of my inclinations. I noted it, to add to my file of mishearings, but decided not to post about it; I don’t post about each instance separately. But then along came the One Million Moms and their campaign to try to force Kellogg’s to withdraw the ad, or at least edit one line they found offensive because of its “foul language”. From their 10/15 posting, “Contact Kellogg’s Concerning ‘Jam It’ Ad”:
“No! Ah, Jam It!” The advertisement could have ended with “No!” but Kellogg’s chose to include a phrase that sounded just like a curse word.
It took me a while to see that they were talking about the blasphemous profanity Damn it! / Dammit!, which for me is the mildest sort of strong language. But they’re really serious Christians, who feel that children need protection from blasphemy, or allusions to blasphemy, in the media (in expressions with words like Christ, God, damn, and hell in them — OMG!).
Recently I’ve gotten two requests from acquaintances to remove a posting from this blog — one from a woman I’ll refer to as F, one from a man I’ll refer to as M. Both F and M are in long-standing relationships with a same-sex partner, people I’ll refer to as pF and pM, respectively. Both pF and pM have professional lives that are significantly associated with their homosexuality; they are “publicly gay”. F and M have notable professional lives, neither associated in any way with homosexuality, and both believe that their sexuality is a “private matter” and that their professional and personal lives should be entirely separate. I’ve posted about F and about M, in each case referring (in my posting) to their relationship with their partner, with the result that my postings identified F and M as gay. F and M objected to my making their sexuality public, and asked me to delete these postings from my blog.
The cases turn out to be significantly different, however, in ways that caused me to dismiss F’s request out of hand but to worry about whether I should take M’s request seriously.
Yesterday’s Zippy, with Fred & Wilma Formstone:
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Ah, the Baltimore connection. Well, Dingburg MD, the home of the Pinheads, is only 17 miles west of Baltimore.
The Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal from the 24th:
And no wonder: Baby Noam knows enough about Language to start a sustained argument that animals don’t have it, but not enough about the details of English to understand that the woman was asking what the conom (conventional onomatopoetic word — see discussion in the last section of my posting on Liam Walsh) is in English for the sound made by a chimp. (Note: there isn’t one, so far as I know). The facts of English usage in this domain are fairly complex, but little kids (other than Baby Noam, it seems) manage to cope very well with it.
I start with a Mark Stivers cartoon (from 11/16/14) that was reprinted (in b&w) in the November Funny Times:
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Reubenesque in the cartoon (referring to the Reuben sandwich, illustrated there), playing on Rubenesque (referring to the painter Peter Paul Rubens, known, among other things, for the plump — “full and rounded” in OED3 — female figures in his paintings), both pronounced /ˌrubɪnˈɛsk/. The Reuben sandwich in the cartoon is metaphorically Rubenesque: plump with its components, as it should be.
This play on words will take us in several directions; here are some preliminary comments, in no particular order.
While looking for something quite different, I discovered that if you google for something to do with penises, Google offers you a list of recent “news for penis” items. Today’s crop, with five items: a Jed York inflatable penis plummets from an upper deck at a S.F. 49ers game; a blogger fumes at still-empenissed Caitlin Jenner being named a “Woman of the Year”; a retired cop whips out his dick in the NYC subway and threatens a witness with a gun; a man with a metal wire inserted down his urethra to his bladder; and a man who claims to have the world’s largest penis endows his organ to a museum. Dicks seem to be endlessly fascinating.
A set of postings about penises, real and symbolic (with only a bit of linguistic stuff in there). To start with, a balletic moose-knuckle:
The photo came to me (under the heading “Morning stretches”) from Arne Adolfsen, who got it from Gabriel Martinez on the Male Ballet Dancers site on Facebook (where neither the dancer nor the photographer was identified). It’s remarkable in two ways: the extraordinary limberness of the dancer — I find the photo painful to look at — and the moose-knuckle he’s sporting, which moved me to re-title the photo “Morning stretches and morning wood”.
I was also moved to assemble a listing of postings (on this blog and AZBlogX) about, or just with, moose-knuckles: a Page “Phallicity: moose-knuckles” within the “Phallicity” Page, itself within the “Lists” Page on this blog.