Through various people on Facebook, reports on the presidential candidacy of Vermin Supreme.
(#1)
From Wikipedia:
Archive for 2015
On the campaign trail with Vermin Supreme
November 25, 2015motion-goal BE
November 23, 2015Overheard at lunch a few days ago:
(1) We’re going to Puerto Rico for the holidays; I’ve never been.
My first interpretation of the (elliptical) second clause was as
(2) I’ve never been to Puerto Rico.
with what I’ll call “motion-goal BE” in the pattern:
(3) HAVE been [PP to PLACE ]
where the lexical item BE is a motion verb, roughly glossable as ‘go’, so that (3) conveys ‘HAVE gone to PLACE’. Think of Charlene singing
(4) Ooh I’ve been to Georgia and California, and, anywhere I could run
… I’ve been to paradise, but I’ve never been to me
(I’ll get to Charlene in a while. Meanwhile, you can hear her singing “I’ve Never Been to Me” by going to this YouTube site. Note: opinions about this song are strongly polarized: many people think it’s one of the world’s worst songs, while others think it provides wonderful advice about attending to your feelings. Please: I am not soliciting opinions here.)
Or with past perfect rather than present perfect:
(5) I realized that I’d been to Georgia and not eaten a single peach.
There’s a lot to be said about motion-goal BE, beyond its having BE as a motion verb.
Nugenix
November 23, 2015A couple of weeks ago I posted about the product ExtenZe,
a herbal nutritional supplement claiming to promote “natural male enhancement”, a euphemism for penis enlargement. Additionally, television commercials and advertisements claim an “improved” or “arousing” sexual experience [longer, stronger, harder erections]. (from Wikipedia)
Now another product has come along and is advertising heavily on cable tv, especially at night. Unlike ExtenZe, which contains small anounts of virtually every substance believed (in some tradition or another) to be of some efficacy in enlarging the penis or improving sexual performance, Nugenix has a small ingredients list, which includes one herb, fenugreek seed, that is not in ExtenZe.
Using an ethnic slur
November 23, 2015Once again, the New York Times has tip-toed around a taboo word or (in this case) slur by paraphrasing a speaker, while signaling that the speaker used an item banned from the paper.
This time, it came in the story “Ben Carson Is Struggling to Grasp Foreign Policy, Advisers Say” by Trip Gabriel, which quotes Duane R. Clarridge, former CIA agent and adviser to Carson:
“Russian special forces are staying in the Titanic Hotel in Sulaymaniya,” the operative said, according to notes recorded by [Carson’s top adviser Armstrong] Williams. “They frequent an Irish pub in the hotel bar.”
“The jump from Erbil and Soviets [by which Clarridge must have meant Russians]” to the Chinese in Damascus “is a long leap,” Mr. Clarridge said, using an ethnic slur for the Chinese.
Two things here:
Penises, poppers, and piercings, oh my!
November 23, 2015Yes, a posting about men’s bodies and gay sex, but without pictures (those are on AZBlogX, in a posting entitled “The news for penises, Thanksgiving edition”). Still, not for the kiddies or the sexually modest.
Photo #2 on AZBlogX shows a guy with a huge hard-on, an industrial-strength metal cock ring, and some kind of penile piercing — improving the experience even more by inhaling poppers. Popper Man is a compendium of clichés of sex in the gay male world. (Cock rings, poppers, and piercings are of course not restricted to gay men, but they are especially prevalent in the gay world and are stereotypical there.)
Self-awareness
November 22, 2015Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
Another instance of the sort of meta-comic in which the characters are aware that they are, in fact, characters in a comic strip. Plus a (related) play on a convention of comic strips, — that the characters’ physical characteristics are just lines on the page.
Luis Valdez
November 22, 2015From a server at Reposado recently, a recommendation that I should look at the work of the Chicano writer Luis Valdez (whose name was unfamiliar to me); I recommended to him the work of the Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros (whose name was unfamiliar to him).
It turns out that I didn’t recognize Valdez’s name, but I certainly did know some of his work. From Wikipedia:
Luis Valdez (born June 26, 1940 [in Delano CA to migrant farm worker parents]) is an American playwright, actor, writer and film director [not to mention activist for Chicano causes]. Regarded as the father of Chicano theater in the United States, Valdez is best known for his play Zoot Suit, his movie La Bamba, and his creation of El Teatro Campesino. A pioneer in the Chicano Movement, Valdez broadened the scope of theatre and arts of the Chicano community.
Oh my, Zoot Suit and La Bamba!
big game
November 22, 2015Yesterday was the Big Game, between Stanford and Cal (the University of California at Berkeley), the Stanford Cardinal and the Cal Bears, in football:
(#1)
(Stanford over Cal 28-16, at Stanford Stadium; much celebration)
Linguistic point 1: the usage of the expression The Big Game.
Linguistic point 2: the expression big game used to refer to animals.
Bonus: the movie Big Game.
Kijé and Jimson
November 21, 2015Heard yesterday on WQXR (classical music in NYC), Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé Suite, always enjoyable and now sort of seasonal, because of its snowy fourth movement. And the suite reminded me of the wonderful Alec Guinness movie (he wrote the screenplay and starred in the film) The Horses’s Mouth, which used the Prokofiev suite as its soundtrack.
