Archive for February, 2016

A family thing

February 25, 2016

Today’s Daily Jocks ad (for Marcuse swimwear, showing a model in the very low-rise line of swim briefs Jagger, in the color Ivory), and another model in the same swim briefs, plus a caption:

(#1)

(#2)

Both in their Marcuse Jaggers in Ivory, the
Spare intellectual end of extreme low-rise
Swim briefs, Mick and his brother Keith would
Troll the surf together for cute boys to
Double-team while disputing political economy
With them – the Jaggeds bewitched the pups with the
Smell of their sweat, the feel of their tight
Muscular bodies, and the
Acuity of their reasoning.

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a katakana para

February 25, 2016

A piece of silliness for Thursday that will take us to many far-flung places and cultures and bring us into contact with a wide variety of people and food.

a katakana para:
maranatha! patapan patapan, mahna mahna

after a Panama caravan, Papa Salazar was away
at a Managua ramada with Capablanca aside a jacaranda;
at a Manama cabana gazing at Alana Blanchard atop a catamaran;
and clad in a black Hamas bandanna
from Gaza, at the Ramada in Pataskala;
mañana at a madrasa in Casablanca, Papa makes aloo
tamatar for Malanga and Zapata and Rafa Nadal, but today Papa
partakes of tapas, bananas, parathas, malangas, and
amaranth salad with his pata Chava Ayala —
and Bahama Mamas! and patatas bravas!

Fuckin’ A!

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The dog ate my book

February 24, 2016

Yesterday’s Mother Goose and Grimm:

The suggestion here is that just ingesting a thesaurus will move you to use fancy (near-) synonyms instead of ordinary words; most discussions of thesaur{i,u}sizing focus instead on motives for doing this, but here the idea seems to be that it just happens.

In this case, except for feline for cat, it’s not clear where Grimm’s wording came from.

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Annals of art and design: Vivian Hornick

February 24, 2016

From Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky a couple of days ago, this arresting image she found on tumblr (viewable here):

(#1)

This is Andrea Hornick’s  Madame Bonier de la Moson Luxuriates in the Protective Embodiment of Sun Bear; his Hibernation-Harnessed Fortitude Lends Her a Lack of Poise Needed to Play Diana the Huntress, 2014 (oil on linen, 20 x 17 inches), in an exhibition opening March 4th at Savery Gallery in Philadelphia. As with all of her work that I’ve now found, the title is something between a caption and a short story in itself.

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Annals of art and design: LC2 in Swiss concrete

February 24, 2016

Thanks to Google Alert, I got this Instagram photo of the LC2 (Le Corbusier #2) chair in concrete by Swiss designer Stefan Zwicky:

(#1)

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Who is Silvia?

February 23, 2016

The title of a posting from the 21st: “Who is Alice? What is she?”, the answer to the question turning out to be Alice Lee, sister of author Harper Lee. My title was a play on the first line of a song from Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlement of Verona, a play in which Silvia is a central character: “Who is Silvia? What is she”. (The two lines are closer than you might think at first, since in the song Silvia is clearly meant to be an initially accented disyllable, just like Alice.)

Of course, Shakespeare’s play doesn’t come with a tune for the song, so one must be devised (or borrowed from another source) for purposes of performance. A notable setting of the English lyrics is by none other than Franz Schubert.

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Morning names: the two Gracies

February 23, 2016

This is a tribute to the associative abilities of the human mind. When I woke this morning, my iTunes was playing what I recognized as comic songs by Gracie Fields, and what came into my mind was a bit of imagined comic dialogue:

(1) A to B: Say hello to the kids.  B: Hello to the kids.

in which there’s a quotational scope ambiguity, over how much of what A said is used and how much mentioned.

I quickly figured out the route from Gracie Fields songs to (1): from Gracie Fields to Gracie Allen (both comic actors with the first name Gracie) to this famous but (as it turns out) apocryphal exchange:

(2) Burns to Allen: Say good night, Gracie.  Allen: Good night, Gracie.

to (1) as a new variant of the joke in (2). But this path was beneath the level of my consciousness, producing an almost instantaneous short-circuiting from the music to (1).

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Batzarro

February 22, 2016

Stumbled upon this while looking for more examples of Bizarro cartoons with Batman in them:

That’s a thoroughly perverse counterpart of Batman, an anti-Batman, so to speak: a parallel to the character Bizarro, who’s the anti-Superman.

(Yes, Batzarro is a portmanteau of Batman and Bizarro. Just as Batzarro the character combines characteristics of Batman with the evil of Bizarro.)

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The pronoun strip

February 22, 2016

Today’s Calvin and Hobbes is a replay of a strip from 2/24/86:

I remember this strip (with its play on two senses of pro) with great fondness, and I was sure it had been posted (possibly by me) on Language Log or this blog, but an hour’s searching found nothing, so I’m posting it here.

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New Pages

February 22, 2016

Added on the 20th on this site: three Pages, two under “Comics lists” and one under “XBlog essays”.

Under “Comics lists”: Archie comics (Archie, Jughead, Betty, and Veronica) and Batman postings. The latter is about all things Batman, with links to postings about the many incarnations of the Dark Knight (not just the Batman of the DC comic books), to images of Batman, to parodies of Batman, and to incorporations of Batman (and Robin) into other comics and cartoons (Batman and/or Robin are recurrent figures in Bizarro cartoons, for example).

Under “XBlog essays”: b/t roles, with postings (mostly on AZBlogX) about the roles taken by characters in gay porn films, with the b man acting as subordinate to the t man, who runs the show. b and t are not the same thing as bottom and top in anal intercourse, though the two things are related in complex ways. The assignment of characters to the roles b and t is also a complex matter, being connected significantly to f/m gender roles in the straight world and to attributions of femininity and masculinity in both the straight and gay worlds: roughly, the more masculine character (on a number of dimensions) is likely to be assigned the t role, and then the b/t role assignment to characters will correlate with the likely course of their sexual interaction: who does what to who, in what order, etc. (These expectations are sometimes frustrated for dramatic effect, of course.)

I had considerable trouble assembling this Page. AZBlogX is a livejournal blog, and Google doesn’t track livejournal entries, so I couldn’t do a Google search; livejournal does have an internal search engine, Yandex, but it’s pretty much a worthless piece of crap (this might be connected to its being a Russian product), so I’ve had to resort to hand searches, and I’ve surely missed some postings that should be on the Page.

In any case, I’m now preparing an AZBlogX piece with some b/t analysis of (parts of) a gay porn flick I recently viewed. Stay tuned.