Archive for July, 2016

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Not the prettiest stallion in the stable

July 3, 2016

(Not about language, but about holidays, advertising, and gay pornstars.)

In my e-mail for the Fourth of July weekend, porn studio Channel 1 Releasing’s patriotic ad (“Red White & Tattooed”) for this year:

Aside from the ridiculousness of the ad — something you expect in porn ads for holiday sales, and often a trigger for giggles — the model looks druggy and disheveled, and I’m put off by the pistol tattooed on his right hip. These things are a matter of taste; still, I judge this lad to be not the prettiest stallion in the stable.

Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Holidays | 3 Comments »

Instrumental music, mostly large-scale

July 3, 2016

… and not featuring the piano. The latest collection of CDs from Las Casas Zwicky, as I move through the classical music recordings. Still to come are two gigantic collections, of chamber music and music featuring the piano (yes, they overlap, annoyingly). Meanwhile, a tiny assortment of recordings with instruments other than the piano, and then a bunch of large-scale instrumental works, mostly symphonies. This is offer #19, Instrumental, in two boxes, which can be asked for separately or together.

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Hiphop phrenology

July 2, 2016

In going through CDs for recent offers — specifically, in the Quirky / Eccentric music category — I came across a hiphop album “Phrenology” by the group Roots. The cover art:

(#1)

This is a phrenological chart with a black man as model, with jokey or politically tinged drawings for the regions.

And the parental advisory reflects the lyrics of the songs, heavily laced with the full range of taboo vocabulary and slurs. The track “Pussy Galore” is particularly notable.

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Making plans

July 2, 2016

An old Calvin and Hobbes cartoon in my comics feed on the 30th:

It’s all about achieving goals (in this case, to get to the other side of the lake) and  making plans to achieve those goals, involving subsidiary goals (in this case, to drain the lake) and plans to achieve those subsidiary goals (in this case, by bailing out the lake with a bucket).

Human beings can be remarkably clever at devising auxiliary goals to reach larger ends, sometimes in several layers; Calvin’s problems are not in the planning facility, but in the utter futility of the auxiliary plan he’s devised.

Some other animals show some ingenuity in subsidiary planning, at least in certain contexts and for certain kinds of goals; great apes are known for their cleverness. But some animals in some situations are just not prepared to do auxiliary planning, as anyone who’s dealt with dogs, even very smart ones, can attest.

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Psychology | Leave a Comment »

Vocal music: two offers

July 2, 2016

Now attacking the classical music CDs, bit by bit. Two huge categories (piano music and chamber music), one large one (symphonies), and a smaller collection of vocal music, which I’ve divided into two collections of about 25 discs each, now on offer: #17, small-scale works (songs, lieder), and #18, larger-scale works (up to opera size).

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Rugrat regrets

July 2, 2016

The morning name from two days ago, a bit of language play, with the repeated pattern

r … gr … t  r … gr … t

apparently invented in my sleeping head rather than remembered from previous experience. The whole thing is a N + N compound, and as such, is capable of a range of interpretations — primarily in two broad classes: with an object interpretation of rugrats, ‘regrets about / over rugrats’, on various accounts; and with a subject interpretation of rugrats, ‘regrets of / by rugrats’, also on various accounts.

Then there’s the first element of the compound, itself a N + N compound, composed of rug + rat literally ‘rat located on, inhabiting a rug”, but with rat understood metaphorically (referring to small children as rat-like creatures) and rug understood metonymically (referring to household play surfaces more generally). The result is a colorful way of referring to toddlers, with the verminous connotations of rat apparently bleached out by playfulness.

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Posted in Compounds, Figurative language, Language play, Morning names, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »

CD surprise boxes

July 1, 2016

For several days, Kim Darnell and I have been laboring on the great bulk of my music CDs, from several locations in the two condos. Offers for relatively small focused collections went out earlier; now we are coping with three huge collections, labeled for internal purposes as Pop / Rock, Quirky / Eccentric, and Classical. Even this crude categorization was problematic and difficult to make (there’s a lot of fusion music, and performers cross from one genre to amother), and even more vexed was the possibility of pulling out smaller categories from these huge ones. In the end, we just gave up on the first two giant categories; Classical has been divided, but still needs further work, not to mention many hours of copying stuff to my iTunes.

In any case, I have 7 boxes of P/R stuff, 4 of Q/E, divided on (roughly) alphabetic grounds (so they’re sort of surprise packages), each box with 30-50 albums in it. We’re offering these separately, but you can ask for as many boxes as you want.

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On the surreal train

July 1, 2016

Following on my earlier posting on ceiling fans and, yes, the surrealism of René Magritte, today’s Zippy:

Every once in a while, the strip’s self-referentiality extends to recognition of its surrealist inclinations and the hostility this arouses in some people.

I’m enjoying the idea of Shrley Temple proposing to Marcel Duchamp.

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Big and cool and tangentially surreal

July 1, 2016

An ad that has been running in the NYT Magazine for several weeks:

  (#1)

Despite having a caption in French, the ad is clearly American: the adjectival idiom big-ass ‘really big’ in the company name Big Ass Solutions is distinctly American. As for the caption Ceci n’est pas un ventilateur ‘This is not a fan’, that’s an allusion to René Magritte’s The Betrayal of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe), which is at the very least “about” the image not being the thing depicted. This is not (just) a fan, this is not your father’s fan, this is a super-fan, big-ass and (in several senses) cool.

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