Archive for December, 2017

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Sterek

December 26, 2017

(There will be implied or allusive steamy mansex, in addition to heavy man-on-man romance, affection, kissing, cuddling, and all that good stuff. A little bit of linguistics at the end. But perhaps not to everyone’s taste.)

Some Sterek slash art, involving the characters Stiles and Derek from the tv show Teen Wolf — introduced here in a posting on to kitchen-kiss and leading (in a posting to come) to more discussion of bromances, the bromance between the actors Dylan O’Brien (who plays Stiles) and Tyler Hoechlin (who plays Derek) being a case in point.


(#1) Sterek Pride

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Rainbow, Syntax, Taboo language and slurs | 4 Comments »

Xmas news for penguins

December 25, 2017

The Advent news flash for penguins — the fossil giant penguin Kumimanu biceae — and then today, a small Vera Bradley playful-penguin case (with pill dispenser) and a Munsingwear Penguin t-shirt (with flowered pocket), Christmas gifts to me (just one Playful Penguin Gray case from Vera Bradley products and just one item from a ton of stuff in the Munsingwear Penguin line).

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Posted in Holidays, My life, Penguins | 1 Comment »

Maggie Larson and New Yorker women

December 25, 2017

In my mail from Bonnie Bendon Campbell, a pointer to a Maggie Larson cartoon in the 12/4 New Yorker and to Michael Maslin’s Inkspill column about that issue:

(#1) From the 12/4/17 New Yorker, the first issue with more women artists than men

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

The power of the pen

December 25, 2017

Zippy continues his visit to North Carolina — yesterday Salisbury, today Charlotte — with Xmas pleasure and puzzlement about the antique technologies of pen and paper:

(#1)

The public art work is The Writer’s Desk (2005, by Larry Kirkland) at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Library:  a bronze quill pen in an inkwell at the top of a stack of books, surrounded by typewriter keys, pencils, and hand stamps.

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Phallicity, Signs and symbols, Technology | 1 Comment »

Easter Island holiday

December 25, 2017

Dan Piraro’s Xmas card today, from the vast emptiness of the southeastern Pacific:

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(This could also be seen as Christmas in Chile, since Easter Island belongs to Chile.)

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Posted in Art, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture | Leave a Comment »

Salisbury NC 60, 70 years ago

December 24, 2017

Today’s Zippy takes us to the middle South (the middle of North Carolina, in fact) and to the 1940s and 1950s:

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Griffy and Zippy are focused on the building and on the Cheerwine advertised on one side of it (the other side advertises the ubiquitous Coca Cola). Shmoo toys and Rinso detergent come into it, evoking the late 1940s and the early 1950s. Along the way, notes on names: Cheerwine, Rinso, Solium. And then a final note on the location of Salisbury NC.

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Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Names, Pop culture | 2 Comments »

Amazing Grace of the Rising Sun

December 23, 2017

On this blog on 11/17/15, “The House of the Writhing Pun”, I wrote about “The House of the Rising Sun”, with Wikipedia notes on the folk song and a link to The Animals’ 1964 recordng of it; and added this note about the meter of the text:

Common meter: four lines of iambs, alternating tetrameter and trimeter: 8.6.8.6. With the 2nd and 4th lines rhyming, An enormous number of texts — “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Amazing Grace”, for example — can be sung to this tune.

I hadn’t realized that one of these possibilities had been realized by serious musicians until this morning, when during hours of Christmas and Jesus music, public radio station KRCB in Santa Rosa CA broadcast a Blind Boys of Alabama recording of “Amazing Grace” (the text) sung to the tune of “The House of the Rising Sun”. Really quite moving. You can watch a live performance of it here.

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Posted in Death notices, Holidays, Music, Shirtlessness | 2 Comments »

they kitchen-kissed again

December 23, 2017

A Xmas data-gift from Larry Horn, from a novel (Sylvia Brownrigg, Pages for You (2001)) about an affair between an undergraduate and her universty TA. The two excerpts Larry sent are, in his words,

separated by various (recoverable) activities, but the reader is expected to remember what had gone on between the lovers on pp. 93-94 [They kissed in the lit kitchen] when she gets to pp. 99-100 [They kitchen-kissed again].

So, in the latter: the verb to kitchen-kiss, either a 2pbfV (a 2-part back-formed V) based on the (well-attested) synthetic compound kitchen-kissing ‘kissing in the kitchen’ or a verbing of the (also well-attested) N + N compound kitchen-kiss ‘a kiss in the kitchen’. It turns out that kitchen-kissing and kitchen kisses are a (sociocultural) thing, which has attracted websites, Pinterest boards showing the activity, and the like — so it’s no surprise that there’s a one-word (compound) verb referring to the activity.

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Posted in Back formation, Compounds, Gender and sexuality, Language of sex, Pragmatics, Semantics, Synthetic compounds, Verbing | Leave a Comment »

Another crop of homoXmas ads

December 22, 2017

(The title tells the story. There will be some plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

For this year: a Daily Jocks Xmas ad with a somewhat disheveled St. Nick in Santa cap and red mini-brief (available for $20 off the regular price!); and a TitanMen Xmas sale offering pornstar David Anthony (amiably smiling well-muscled big-dicked daddy-top) wearing absolutely nothing at all (so he’s #1 in an accompanying AZBlogX posting “More Xmas porn”).

From last year: the TitanMen sale, offering “12 Gage of Xmas”, 12 days of Joe Gage porn scenes (a ponderously phallic poster, so also in the AZBlogX posting, #2); and a Twitter Xmas card from Dallas Steele (@DallasSteeleXXX) and his boyfriend Taylor Bishop (@boySteele), doing the Daddy-Boy thing in scraps of red and green (and gold and white) and big smiles.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

Memory and the power of diner food

December 22, 2017

Yesterday’s Zippy (“The flying bucket on Sepulveda”) took us to Dinah’s Fried Chicken on Sepulveda Blvd. in LA. Today, Zippy continues the narrative with remembrances of diner foods past — rice pudding, creamed spinach, corned beef hash — and their ability to evoke specific moments from times gone by:

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The day when Zippy spilled ketchup on his styrofoam shoes at Dinah’s; the day when Dinah’s ran out of rice pudding and substituted creamed spinach; Marcel Marceau’s recollection of May 14th, 1894 in Fresno CA, a memory triggered by just a whiff of corned beef hash.

All of this is just absurd if you don’t know about Marcel Proust, the madeleines, Remembrance of Things Past, and involuntary memory; in case you’ve forgotten, the title, “Remembrance of Flings Past” is there to nudge your memory. All this Proustian stuff comes from high culture, but like other Great Books, Great Art, and Great Music, it’s worked its way into a pop-culture meme that anyone can use for jokes and that everybody’s supposed to recognize.

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Posted in Books, Comic conventions, Diners, Language and food, Memory, Pop culture, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

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