Two recent One Big Happy strips, featuring Ruthie: the sign strip and the ladder strip
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Archive for March, 2017
Ruthie copes
March 28, 2017Pride of Madeira
March 28, 2017On our last visit to the Gamble Garden in Palo Alto, we came across an impressive cluster of thick stems (clearly some years old) standing about 3 feet tall, with conical clusters of buds at the top of the stems. The only label we could find was for an obviously irrelevant plant (a daisy-like composite).
But then this morning we went back, and it was in gorgeous purple-blue bloom. Back home, I thought to try a strategy that almost never works in Google searches: describing the plant (“tall spires of purple flowers”), but this time I hit paydirt right away, with a page devoted to plants with tall stalks of purple/blue flowers. Echium candicans aka fastuosum:
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Michael Ontkean
March 28, 2017(About actors, movies, and tv, with very little language stuff in it.)
Watching Twin Peaks (the original tv series) on Netflix, and delighted to see Michael Ontkean (cute, amiable, and hunky) in it again. I’m a great fan of smiles, so here’s the young Ontkean smiling:
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Bizarro compounds
March 28, 2017The Bizarro from the 22nd:
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
Interpreting N + N compounds can be the very devil, as I point out on this blog every so often, sometimes in connection with cartoons (where the possibilities for ambiguity are easily exploited). What to make of Girl Scout cookies (Girl Scout + cookies)?
Members Only: two moments
March 27, 2017(Well, it’s about gay porn, so not to everybody’s taste.)
Following my look at Pacific Coast Highway, I’ve been revisiting more William Higgins gay porn — just up, Members Only (1982), in which three L.A. buddies hang out in a hot tub, telling steamy stories about their sexual encounters (with, of course, a finale three-way indoors). The front cover of the DVD, much cropped (because it’s dense in dick):
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Cast (several of them already established pornstars in 1982): Jon King, Derrick Stanton, Greg Hanson, Rick Vega, Giorgio Canali, Bill Curry, Danny Scott, Marc Silver, Rick Peters. One scene has Scott and Silver flip-fucking, quite satisfactorily. Two things: I went to check on which guy was Scott and which Silver and what their careers were like, only to discover that Members Only seems to be the only porn flick that actors with those names ever appeared in, and there are no images of or information about either of them that I could find. They are apparently porn ghosts.
One of them, playing the owner of a house that the other is doing landscape work on, struck me as immediately, recognizably, gay, even just in repose. And now I’m wondering what I’m picking up on.
The demented rabbit p.r. pitch
March 27, 2017More remarkable p.r. pitched to the NYT obituarist (among other things) Margalit Fox (reported by her on Facebook today):
Hello Margalit
I wanted to make sure you had the story about ‘Hoppy The Easter Bunny,’ the first-ever hologram-bunny who comes to life to decorate homes and parties.
The full story is below. You are welcome to review Hoppy and other _____ products, share the story, etc, so long as _____ is cited as the source and when possible, linked to. If you would like to interview the _____ founders and leadership about the new trend in digital decorating, please let me know.
- What Does Hoppy the Easter Bunny Do?
He hops, paints eggs, grows flowers, and even preforms magic tricks. …
- How Does Hoppy Come To Life?
Hoppy’s animated loop-able scenes can be projected onto walls, screens, and special hollusion material that makes it look like Hoppy is standing anywhere in your home…
An early “is is”? Probably not.
March 27, 2017Jon Lighter on ADS-L yesterday, offering “An early “is is”:
1964 Jere Peacock To Drill and Die (N.Y.: Bantam) 257:
[(1)] “The thing of it is,” Waldron said … “is that this order was set up for you personally.”
The earliest example of Isis on record up to this point is from Dwight Bolinger in 1971 (details in a 2007 handout of mine, “Extris, extris”); 1964 would be an antedating, but not a remarkable one. Still, I’m dubious that (1) is a report of Waldron saying:
(2) The thing of it is is that this order was set up for you personally.
More likely it’s a report of:
(3) The thing of it is, …is that this order was set up for you personally.
JoBroButts, Hills Bros. coffee, and gaybros
March 27, 2017It starts with this image from a “JoBros” Pinterest board (you post about a Jonas Brother, Pinterest knows where you’ve been and wants to take you back there):
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Nick, Kevin, and Joe, but especially Nick
I was going to just post this as a way to start the new week with a modest appreciation of male bodies (I’m unapologetic in these matters), but then I saw two directions for further comment: the Bros in JoBros, and the Jonases’ projections of masculinity (which is what leads to all those Pinterest boards and fan sites celebrating the three men, but especially Nick, who revels in displaying himself). And that will eventually take me to reflections on integrating a masculine identity with a gay one, made poignant by the gaybros movement.
The wishing ill
March 26, 2017The Rhymes With Orange from the 23rd:
Language play based on wishing well, understood either as a synthetic compound (with well understood as an N: ‘a well for wishing (for something)’, specifically ‘a well into which one drops a coin and makes a wish’ (NOAD2)) or as a nominal based on the V + Adv idiom wish s.o. well ‘feel or express a desire for someone’s well-being’ (Oxford dictionaries site). The cartoon then treats wishing ill as exactly parallel, to the point of positing an N ill, referring to a well-like object into which one drops a coin and makes a wish for misfortune.
On the boulevard of broken dreams with Kip Noll
March 26, 2017(There will be plain-talking discussion of men’s bodies and sexual practices of several kinds, so this is not for kids or the sexually modest.)
The boulevard in question is Sepulveda Boulevard (my morning name for Friday), part of which is a piece of the Pacific Coast Highway, the locus of William Higgins’s 1981 gay porn flick of that name (PCH), starring Kip Noll. Meanwhile, what we know of Noll’s life involves a substantial career in all kinds of sex work, including a lot of work as a dance hall boy, that is, a male stripper for men, and almost surely work as an escort for men, that is, as a male prostitute or stud hustler — two occupations that fit senses of the label gigolo (originally the masculine version of a French term for ‘dance hall girl’, and then ‘prostitute’). Which brings us to “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams”, a song that refers to “gigolos and gigolettes” — male and female prostitutes — strolling on a Parisian boulevard. (This is in France, and in a pop culture fantasy, two places where hustlers and hookers are regularly construed as picturesque rather than socially dysfunctional; a similar example, the movie Gigolette, is to come below.)
These investigations wil eventually take us to picturesque locations in Spain (where the Sepulvedas come from) and also to “the dark, underground world of a New York City gigolo”, as presented in Michael Lucas’s penis-heavy gay porn flick Gigolos (2007). A long distance from the sunny surfer beaches of southern California, but Noll eventually danced his dick off (and probably sold it as well) on the mean streets of New York.