Archive for February, 2018

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Nanette Fabray

February 28, 2018

From the NYT on the 23rd on-line, “Nanette Fabray, Star of TV and Stage Comedies, Dies at 97” by Anita Gates:

(#1) Fred Astaire and Nanette Fabray on the set of The Band Wagon

Nanette Fabray, whose enthusiastic charm, wide smile and diverse talents made her a Tony Award-winning performer in the 1940s and an Emmy Award-winning comic actress in the 1950s, died on Thursday at her home in Palos Verdes, Calif. She was 97.

Warm memories for me, since I came to know her first in the 1953 movie musical The Band Wagon, which I saw as an impressionable young teen at the Radio City Music Hall. (I have the DVD and watched it again last weekend, with great pleasure.)

(more…)

Posted in Actors, Dancers, Death notices, Movies and tv, My life | 1 Comment »

POP on the half shell

February 28, 2018

Paul Noth in the March 5th New Yorker:

(#1)

A POP (phrasal overlap portanteau): home birth + Birth of Venus, with the two expressions combined linguistically, and also conceptually in Noth’s drawing.

(more…)

Posted in Art, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus | 2 Comments »

Ballet Down the Highway

February 28, 2018

In #2 in Tuesday’s posting “Dancing with the cars”, I returned to the world of male ballet dancers with a photo of Bolshoi soloist Jacopo Tissi suspended in mid-air during the ballet Etudes — a demonstration of extraordinary athleticism. Tissi himself is young (born in 1995), good-looking, well-spoken (he gives good interview), and also an amazing musclehunk. A friend I showed this posting to then noted that I also posted a lot about the conventional fantasy figures of gay porn — cowboys, firemen, truckers, pizza boys, hitch-hikers, and so on — and was there a genre for male dancers too?

The short answer is no, for fairly obvious reasons (which I’ll write about below). But my question then was whether there’s any ballet-based gay porn. The answer here is yes, at least one film: Jack Deveau’s 1975 Ballet Down the Highway. Straight trucker falls for gay male ballet dancer, lots of mansex ensues.

Which has now gotten showings as an art house film, at a venue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

(#1) Poster for the Brooklyn showing in 2015

(more…)

Posted in Dance, Dancers, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language play, Movies and tv, Slang | Leave a Comment »

In service to Erebus

February 27, 2018

(Men’s bodies and mansex, not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Yesterday’s Daily Jocks ad, for the Erebus line of underwear from the 2Eros company, an ad that spins out an fantasy of delicious dark sexiness. Two montages showing the new Nightmare color (dark violet) and the new Underworld color (dark blue) — earlier colors are Darkness (black) and Inferno (red) — with my perfervid caption below the fold:

(#1) Darko in Nightmare

(#2) Darko in Underworld

(more…)

Posted in Captions, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language in advertising, Names, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

Retro chic

February 27, 2018

Today’s Zippy, set in Hyde Park NY:

(#1) At the Eveready Diner in Hyde Park

(This strip has been cropped to remove political content.)

The building is a huge 1995 Paramount diner, a symphony in stainless steel and neon, designed to evoke classic diners of the 1950s.

(more…)

Posted in Diners, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Dancing with the cars

February 26, 2018

Another pun committed by the Bizarro/Wayno collaborative:

(#1)

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)

ballet, valet, what’s the difference? And who can resist a man in a tutu? (Cue Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo.)

(more…)

Posted in Dance, Dancers, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Camo Traplat poses

February 25, 2018

(Men showing off their bodies. Racy but not X-rated.)

The main image from yesterday’s Daily Jocks ad, for a sale on Code 22 clothing — with my caption:

(#1)

Camo Traplat, the
Darling of the locker room,
Flexes for the boys, from
Pecs to glutes,
Sweats up his red-hot
Training tank top.

(more…)

Posted in Captions, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

News for penguins: yakking it up, chasing bubbles

February 24, 2018

My friends keep me up to date on entertaining penguiniana I might have missed. Two recent contributions: a video about noisy penguins afflicting a researcher; and a whole fresh area of penguiniana: zoos amusing their penguins with bubble machines (which seem to provide much the same pleasures as falling snowflakes).
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Posted in Music, Penguins | Leave a Comment »

Computer annals: Reyes Korzybski and the avalanche of spam

February 24, 2018

The latest affliction in my technological life: an avalanche of comments spam on this blog, thousands a day, almost all of it from the same commercial site (which I will not, of course, reveal here). Each with a perky message or query, each labeled as from a named person — the names fairly obviously created by random choice from a giant database of personal names and surnames. I only notice the names that happen to be at the top of the spam file, but they’re often entertaining. This morning’s treasure is Reyes Korzybski, obviously an eccentric but regal Pole from the rocky shores of Marin County CA.

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Posted in Names, Technology | 1 Comment »

Death’s end

February 23, 2018

Mick Stevens in the February 26th New Yorker:

(#1) The Grim Reaper reaped

I was immediately reminded of the 5th verse of the Isaac Watts 1707 hymn text “Lo! what a glorious sight appears”, which is set as the 3rd verse of the Sacred Harp song Promised Day (#409 in the 1991 Denson Revision of the book):

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Posted in Comic conventions, Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »

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