As the run-up to the American holiday Memorial Day continues (only 9 days to picnic time), Pinterest has responded with a board of playful things you can do with hot dogs — sometimes moderating their potential as phallic symbols, sometimes accentuating it. Five examples follow.
Archive for May, 2017
Play with your hot dogs
May 19, 2017Housemates
May 19, 2017The occasion is the discovery of more photo albums from the past, in this case the relatively recent past. One had photos of two friends who shared the Columbus OH house with Jacques and me in the 1990s: Philip Miller (during a postdoc year in linguistics at Ohio State) and Kim Darnell (while she was finishing her PhD in linguistics at Ohio State). Then there’s our last housemate before Jacques and I moved entirely to Californa, our bookfriend Ann Burlingham, who was working in Columbus bookstores at the time.
After teaching in (mostly) Lille, Philip is now in Paris. After years teaching in Atlanta, Kim is now in Palo Alto. And Ann has been in Perry NY (south of Rochester), where she owns and runs Burlingham Books, for some time now.
Presentation and perception
May 18, 2017
Complementary ignorances
May 18, 2017Yesterday’s posting on Philip Larkin’s poem “This Be the Verse” elicited this redfaced comment from U.Mass. linguist Rajesh Bhatt:
I only knew this as an Anne Clark song until now!
To which I now reply, equally redfaced, that until Rajesh’s comment I didn’t know about the Anne Clark version, and was in fact only dimly aware of Anne Clark.
(Rajesh supplied a link to a YouTube video of a live performance, at the Berlin Metropol in 1992; you can listen to a studio recording here.)
Larkin and the Gray Lady, again
May 17, 2017I’ve been on break from remarking on some of the obsessions of the New York Times — its periodiphilia, its taboo avoidance, and so on — but I’m moved to return to the second of these topics because the Gray Lady has managed to reproduce, in deail, one of its previous encounters with taboo vocabulary, a tussle with poet Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse”.
Artichokes on the hoof
May 17, 2017Yesterday, coming back from the Ross Road YMCA (where I’d just been through my first Enhance Fitness class, an hour workout for seniors; note final cluster simplification in enhance for enchanced), Kim Darnell and I went past a house with, in its front yard, some remarkable tall green stems with huge green buds on top of them, looking like a child’s idea of a Martian plant, a pole with a vegetable on top. A photo from the net, not as perfect as the plants in south Palo Alto, but it’ll give you the idea:
(#1)
Some of you will recognize these as artichokes on the hoof, on a farm like those in Watsonville (in Santa Cruz County) or Castroville (in Monterey County) and surrounding areas of the Artichoke Empire. Others will, like Kim, will be startled to discover that this is how the artichokes we eat grow.
Red hots, getcher red hots here!
May 17, 2017Anticipating Memorial Day (May 29th this year), Pinterest has provided a big Hot Dog board. Memorial Day is a US holiday honoring Americans who died while serving in the armed forces, but it has also come to be the unofficial beginning of the summer vacation season and so the occasion for patriotic picnics (like the Fourth of July, but usually without fireworks or marching bands): hot dogs, hamburgers, mayonnaise salads (especially potato salad), watermelon, and so on.
Now, hot dogs are natural phallic symbols, more potent in a bun, and even more potent with the tip of the hot dog protruding from the bun, simulating a glans penis.
As a bonus, one Memorial Day picnic site suggests fruit skewers for the holiday — just the thing for Queer Memorial Day, with rainbow fruit in Pride Flag order and bright strawberry dickheads.
Write like the wind
May 16, 2017A few days ago on Facebook a friend despaired of ever getting his Master’s thesis written, and others chimed in with reassurances and encouragement. Somewhat bizarrely, I was reminded of something I wrote to the newsgroup soc.motss back in May 1996: a recollection of a radio dramatization of Ouida’s romantic adventure novel Under Two Flags (set in the Algerian desert), with a character who cries out at a crucial moment.:
My name is Cigarette, and I can ride like the wind!
And so she can. Meanwhile, I slightly revised the quotation, to:
My name is N, and I can write like the wind!
A mantra for the frustrated writer.
ice plants
May 16, 2017… that is, plants in the Aizoaceae, or ice plant, family. On the occason of recent visits to Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden, where there’s a spread of gorgeous Lampranthus spectabilis (syn. Mesembryanthemum spectabile), trailing ice plant:
(#1)
(photo by Kim Darnell)
Reading in the ’50s
May 15, 2017(Not much about language here.)
From Eleanor Houck on the 13th, a Mother’s Day posting from Reading Historic Neighborhoods on four places to take your Mother in downtown Reading PA in (roughly) the middle of the last century. Including a place I remember with particular affection, the Crystal Restaurant — which was more or less around the corner from my parents’ store: the Memo Shop, a little costume jewelry store a few doors north of Penn Ave. on 5th St.(while the Crystal was a half block east on Penn Ave. from 5th). Penn Square — 5th and Penn — being the very center of the city. The relevant map:
(#1)
One of the named features turns out to be key: the Wines & Spririts Stores are right where the Crystal used to be (from 1911 to 1981).