(Consider the topic before reading on.)
That would be National Masturbation Day, May 7th, today — launching National Masturbation Month, lusty May:
(#1) From my 5/4/18 posting “Then, if ever, come lusty days”
(#2) “Black Solo” (from the Porn for Women TV site), cropped
Specifically, self-lust, self-pleasure. A regular topic on this blog — write about what you know, they say, and I’ve been practicing this one for about 67 years — also an occasional hook for movie comedy.
(Several shirtless people, in case that annoys or distresses you, but otherwise mostly about music.)
According to my calendar, today is both World Naked Gardening Day and World Accordion Day, which naturally led me to imagine a naked gardener playing the accordion. But my calendar turns out to be half wrong: World Accordion Day is fixed on May 6th; World Naked Gardening Day, on the other hand, is a movable feast, the first Saturday in May, which this year was the 4th.
However, the two occasions did coincide exactly in 2017, and at least one accordion-playing gardener squeezed nude for that occasion.
The punchline to a wonderful two-line bilingual joke, realized in this cartoon:
(#1)
First, some analysis of the Japanese-Spanish joke. Then some reflections on its appearance, all over the net, in both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking contexts, without attribution to an artist or identification of a source. And, finally, a likely account of its origin, in the Zona Dorado district of Mazatlán, Sinaloa, Mexico.
Another posting about the objects of everyday life and how good design can provide us with small pleasures. In this case, the wooden arches that grace my condo complex, serving as entrance ways on the street, as trellises for vines, and as decorative elements for people on the street as well as for those of us inside the complex. The current installation (recently repaired):
(#1) Dark-stained wood in the morning sun: four uprights; horizontally on top, two lintels (lintels going left to right) deep and ten rafters (rafters going front to back) wide; ivy climbing on the two front uprights
(That’s my place, 722, on the left, the stairs to 718 and 720 on the right.)
The repair job replaced the right back upright and all the stuff on top. Some details below
Found on Pinterest, this photo from the Vintage Dancer site’s posting “Vintage Hiking and Camping Clothes – 1910 to 1950”:
(#1)
[blog caption] Around 1900, tweed and plaid prints were symbolic with sportswear for the upper classes. Here both suits and knickers were options for hiking and gardening? (watering can?)
Among the everyday examples of a phenomenon subjected to analysis in an awesome new paper by Joan Bresnan, “On Weak Object Pronouns in English”, which she will present at the Lexical Functional Grammar conference this July in Canberra (LFG2019, 8-10 July, sponsored by the ARC’s [Australian Research Council] Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, program on-line here).
Joan’s paper is a demonstration of what can be done with serious resources — really big databases, serious statistical tools, complex analytic tools — in investigating very ordinary, but intricately structured, phenomena, and in how you might try to integrate the approaches of usage-based frameworks with those of formal grammar.
For me the paper has a special resonance, because the analysis develops some ideas of mine in a little note from 1986 that appeared only in a working papers volume and has mostly gone unnoticed since then: “The Unaccented Pronoun Constraint in English” (OSU Working Papers in Linguistics 32.100-113, 1986).
… and pour melted chocolate over me, and I’ll be your Penguin: p … p … p … pick me up!
I’m a McVitie’s Penguin biscuit bar, and I’m all yours:
(#1)
… and the monster that guides the elderly. Both pieces of outdoor art in Switzerland, the first in the town of Glarus (in my ancestral canton of Glarus), the second in the city of Zürich.
(#1) The Caring Hand in Glarus
My 4/22/19 posting “The Easter egg in the salt mine” took off from this archive photo used in an Economist article:
(#1)
The article tells us nothing about the provenance of the photo or about the scene represented in it, though in the context of the article, we’re invited to suppose that the photo shows us the retrieval of Raubkunst, art seized by the Nazis from Jewish families during World War II. From which we guess that the soldier is an American G.I., the time is 1945, and the locale is one of the Nazi storage places for stolen art, perhaps even one of the celebrated salt mines used for this purpose. (All of this is assumption and guesswork, not a single actual fact in the pack.)
The painting in the photograph is in the courtly style of the 18th century — I speculated on what the scene might be — but not one famous enough to be identified through various sorts of searches.
Then in a comment, John Baker came to the rescue, enabling me to make substantial advances: the painting is a Fragonard (apparently a minor one) — as it turned out, one recovered by Americans in a gigantic hoard of Raubkunst in Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria (the fantasy castle Ludwig II built for Richard Wagner).
Plant news from my house, now we’re definitely into summer here in Palo Alto — plus a notice that my 4/13 posting on Easter egg quotations has been fixed, sort of: the idea and the term are introduced, with an Economist example in an issue on synthetic biology, a subtly deployed quotation from Gertrude Stein (which leads to a Gertrudian snowclone).
