Archive for January, 2020
January 31, 2020
We advance upon a surprising gift of the Pennsylvania Dutch to American culture: Groundhog Day (February 2nd). In earlier years, this blog provided coverage of Marmota monax (the groundhog / woodchuck), its holiday, and the comic movie, comic movie, comic movie. Now comes Alex (Alessandro Michelangelo) Jaker on Facebook:
I think that, the same way that the Easter Bunny visits and leaves candy [notably, chocolate eggs] and jelly beans at Easter time 🐰🍬🍫, we should start a tradition where, on Groundhog Day, the Friendly Groundhog stops by to visit during the night, and leaves the children a bag of nuts. 🐿🌰🥜
I replied (alas, emojilessly):
Even better: Marmo the Enchanted Groundhog, who leaves a bag of magic nuts.
And Alex countered with:
Or how about: “Chuck the Magic Marmot”.
Much to munch upon here.
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Posted in Art, Double entendres, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and the body, Language play | 4 Comments »
January 31, 2020
A very sweet Twitter comment on my posting yesterday “Roses now, or roses later”, from London Sacred Harp (@LDNSacredHarp):
Read these beautiful reflections on singing from the #SacredHarp in the face of real and impending mortality, and Give. Him. The. Roses. We wish Arnold the most elegant and highly scented hybrid teas, blowsy cabbages, striped Bourbons, Titania’s sweet musk roses and eglantine…
(Clearly a message from a specific person, not from the London Sacred Harp singing group as an organization, but I don’t know whose actual voice this is.)
A lovely wish, understood figuratively — my little patio garden in Palo Alto is entirely unsuitable for roses (it’s mostly cymbidiums and geraniums, plus some succulents) — but it taps into two rose-related matters, one general (roses as remembrance gifts), one personal (two hybrid tea roses in memory of my man Jacques Transue, a red Mister Lincoln in Bucks Harbor ME (where his family has long had a summer place), a peach-pink Gemini in Columbus OH).
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Posted in Language and plants, My life, Signs and symbols, Social life | 1 Comment »
January 31, 2020
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo, posing a puzzle in cartoon understanding:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 8 in this strip — see this Page.)
Ok, you need to recognize the Potato Heads; the cartoon takes place in a world of Potato Heads, with their removable and interchangeable features. But it takes place simultaneously in the everyday world, or at least this world as represented in American popular culture — so we’re expected to recognize this as a police station, with a Wanted poster on the wall and a uniformed (male) cop at a desk, holding the detached head of a PH (Potato Head). He’s engaged with a (female) citizen, who looks at the head and, mustache in her hand, says “That’s close, but can we try it again with the mustache?”
Ok, so she wants to see the PH head with the mustache added to it. Why? And why would that be funny?
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Posted in Art, Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Understanding comics | 1 Comment »
January 30, 2020
(Plenty of talk about male genitals. Not particularly salacious, but some might prefer to avoid this material.)
The term is osteopenia, which I briefly had hopes would combine the stems osteo– ‘bone’ and peni– ‘penis’ and so mean something like ‘hard penis, erection, boner’ (As I’ve noted elsewhere on this blog, I’m fond of penises. For some guys, it’s sports cars; for me, it’s penises.) . But alas, no. From NOAD:
noun osteopenia: reduced bone mass of lesser severity than osteoporosis. ORIGIN 1960s: from osteo– and Greek penia ‘poverty’.
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Posted in German, Language and medicine, Language and the body | Leave a Comment »
January 29, 2020
On Sunday at the Palo Alto shapenote singing, we came to #340 in the 1991 Denson Sacred Harp, Odem (Second), with the chorus “Give me the roses while I live”. Counterbalanced, as it turns out, on the preceding page by #339, When I Am Gone, with the second verse “Plant you a rose that shall bloom o’er my grave, / When I am gone”.
Roses now, or roses later.
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Posted in Aphorisms, Death notices, Language and religion, Music, My life, Proverbs | Leave a Comment »
January 28, 2020
Riffs on gay porn in difficult times. The penis portion of this presentation — with five stone-XXX-rated images — is in my AZBlogX posting “Humongous fucks Adonis”. This posting, further expounding on that material, is literally free of penises, but it’s extravagantly about men’s bodies and mansex, mostly in street language, so it’s entirely unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest.
It all began with some moments of recreational gay porn use, focused on what I think of as “sweet sex”, which took me back to scene 2 of the 1984 Falcon flick The Bigger the Better:
(#1) Cover of the Bijou Classics re-release, featuring Rick “Humongous” Donovan from scene 1
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Posted in Art, Combining forms, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Masculinity, Morphology, Myths, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »
January 26, 2020
(In the illustrations section below, there are some racy images; just a warning for the sexually modest.)
From the annals of ambiguity: the Mother Goose and Grimm from the 20th:
(#1)
Both terms of the ambiguity are of interest on their own: short-form location names (as in Men’s Fragrances in Meet us in Men’s Fragrances, with the PP in Men’s Fragrances functioning as a VP adverbial, referring to the place of the meeting) vs. (subject-oriented) predicative adjuncts (as in Meet us without a shirt, with the PP without a shirt functioning to denote some characteristic — here, shirtlessness — of the referent of the subject).
Mother Goose intended the VP location adverbial reading of in Women’s Dresses, where Women’s Dresses is the name of a department in a department store (readers are expected to know, even these days, what department stores are and how they are organized and labeled). The dogs Grimm and Ralph understood instead the predicative adjunct reading of in women’s dresses, and so they appeared wearing women’s dresses, outré though that might be.
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Posted in Abbreviation, Ambiguity, Linguistics in the comics, Metonymy, Phallicity, Semantics, Syntax | Leave a Comment »
January 24, 2020
Today’s Wayno/Piraro collabo, on the opposition of hospitality and animosity, which I take to be an homage to Terry Jones (of Monty Python’s Flying Circus), who was released from life’s afflictions three days ago:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page.)
Wayno’s title for the cartoon is “Putdown Service”, a play on turndown service, and that‘s an allusion to the hospitality industry.
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Posted in Compounds, Humor, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Movies and television, Names | 2 Comments »
January 22, 2020
Today’s Wayno/Piraro collabo, another little exercise in cartoon understanding:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.) Wayno’s title: “Number, Please”
No doubt you recognize the speaker as Satan / the Devil / Beelzebub, but the cartoon will still be incomprehensible unless you know that there’s a particular three-digit number that’s sometimes said to belong to Satan.
Pursuing this topic on my man Jacques’s birthday, today, will lead us, through a favorite verse of his, on a circuitous route passing through a mysterious British village, Chicago, and Santa Monica, on its way to the Big Gay Village, where men hug, spoon, and screw. (There will eventually be a content warning. I’ll warn you when the screwing is imminent.)
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Humor, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Parodies, Poetry, Pop culture, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »
January 21, 2020
A literally eventful time of the year, surrounding the Mournful Valley of my life, that rift of bereftness between Ann Daingerfield’s death day, 1/17, and Jacques Transue’s birthday, 1/22; see my 1/16 posting “At the rim of the Mournful Valley, singing”.
By accident, in this period fall two odd celebratory dates: 1/20, Penguin Awareness Day; and 1/21, today, Squirrel Appreciation Day. Plus, on a Monday in or near this period, MLK Day in the US (this year: yesterday, 1/20/20).
This year I’ve been terribly sick and deeply dispirited, but I was cheered by coming across a sweet photograph of a young Jacques and a squirrel he had, to some degree, tamed:
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Posted in Holidays, Language and animals, Language and plants, My life | Leave a Comment »
