(About, among other things, men’s bodies and mansex, in very plain terms, so not at all suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
And for your Xmas viewing pleasure, Red Santa and Green Elf going at it like reindeer in rut in an ad for the Lucas Studios Xmas video “Bareback Christmas” (to be released on Christmas day).
(#1) The amiable, affectionate photo Lucas should have used for their ad
In the NYT on 11/30, an obituary by Margalit Fox, “Jerry A. Fodor, Philosopher Who Plumbed the Mind’s Depths, Dies at 82”, beginning:
Jerry A. Fodor, one of the world’s foremost philosophers of mind, who brought the workings of 20th-century computer technology to bear on ancient questions about the structure of human cognition, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 82.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease and a recent stroke, his wife, Janet Dean Fodor, said.
More of the obit below, then a few personal remarks, and an extended discussion of an early influential work by Jerrold Katz and Jerry Fodor, The Structure of Langage: Readings in the Philosophy of Language (1964).
Today’s Zippy offers tasty chicken on Sepulveda — no, not sultry young men, but actual fried poultry:
(#1)
That would be the orginal Dinah’s Fried Chicken, aka Dinah’s Family Restaurant, at 6521 S Sepulveda Blvd., LA. Where you can get that deep-fried feeling, as a star of movies and tv.
On the way back from a tea quest to Whole Foods this morning, we came across a handsome low evergreen shrub with stunning yellow-green plumes of leaves, hiding green berries and displaying ripened red berries. The larger scene:
(#1) SkinSpirit, the neighbor in back of my condo complex; crucial plant in bottom right corner
A SPAR message from reader Josh Bischof, with this bulletin from the internet:
From Ragan’s PR Daily “Ultimate grammar cheat sheet” by Brendan Brown on 12/6/17: “6 grammar errors that can affect your story telling”
At issue is the interpretation of the PP = after + NP here, after a long day at school; the grammar tip presupposes that this PP is, in my terms, a SPAR, a subjectless predicative adjunct requiring a referent for the missing subject — I’ll refer to this as the Referent (for the SPAR) for short — in which case general principles predict that the missing subject is the dog, which is both the nearest NP to the SPAR (the Nearest Rule) and the subject of the main clause the SPAR is adjunct to (the Subject Rule).
But PPs with the temporal P after don’t generally count as SPARs; only certain ones do — those with an NP object denoting a time span (as above) — and then those SPARs are subject to the complexities of interpretation that attend all SPARs, according to which factors of syntax and discourse context come into play (making the Subject Rule only a default and not a hard constraint).
Today’s Zippy has our Pinhead hero trading diner thoughts with a Pinhead named Nesbitt:
For two panels, Zippy spouts the idea that nothing represents, or stands for, something else; things are what they are, and that’s all there is. Meanwhile, Nesbitt runs through two idioms that he thinks of as clichés (rock s.o.’s world, takeaway), and the pair ping-pong plural platypi.
In a One Big Happy from 11/18, Ruthie and Joe pester their dad for using the word blackmail:
The kids understand the black of blackmail to be a reference to (in brief) Americans descended from enslaved people of sub-Saharan Africa, and they’ve been taught at school that the only proper, correct, etc. term for referring to such people is African American.
Previously on this blog — in #9 in a 12/16 posting “A tale of a bed: from removal to revival” — we met the stuffed woolly mammoths I called Mammuthus Major and Mammuthus Minor on the headboard of my new bed. Elsewhere in my bedroom there are two more toy mammoths, much bigger than these: a once-“animaltronic” hulk with a dark brown rubber-like plastic skin; and a somewhat smaller and more fanciful stuffed toy with a purple, blue, and yellow cloth skin — creatures I call Fey and Butch, shown here (in their native teak and blue habitat) in a somewhat impressionistic photo:
(#1) Fey and Butch, bathed in yellow light
Another crowded seasonal category — I’ve already been through music, decorations, clothing, and food — in which there seems to be no end of entertaining folly. In this case, no end of shirtless men in Santa or elf costumes (down to a cap and nothing else).
On color coding: a red Santa cap can be worn by Santas or elves, while green or green+red indicates an elf.