Archive for March, 2021

Johnny Rapid evolves

March 20, 2021

(Men’s bodies and talk about sex between men, in street language, so not at all appropriate for kids and the sexually modest)

A follow-up to my 3/13 posting “Pornstars do this so you don’t have to”, in which pornstar Johnny Rapid engages in challengingly athletic sex — in 2021 as the top in 69spitroasting (in NakedSword’s Lake Need), in 2015 as the bottom in Flying Cowboy.

Then, yesterday, in my e-mail, the HUNT e-magazine (for Falcon / NakedSword gay porn) issue 249, with the high-puffery article “Model Spotlight – Johnny Rapid”, about the actor’s evolution from the 2011-15 guy to the 2015 one:

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Personas and poses

March 19, 2021

(Guys in nothing but their underwear, references to their bodies in plain terms, visually close to the line — so not to everyone’s taste.)

The story begins on 3/16 with a Daily Jocks mailing about a PUMP! sale, featuring the model I’ve called Aradesque.

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Briefly: the mouse that peeved

March 18, 2021

A Tom Gauld cartoon, originally from the Guardian of 8/23/14, then in his collection Baking with Kafka (2017):

(#1)

Some peeve to feel superior, some say they peeve to shame others into learning the “correct” variants (it’s for their own good), some say they peeve to relieve the physical distress of hearing variants they’ve been taught to view as incorrect (just make it go away).

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A jointed-limb portmanteau and a sugary front-clipping

March 18, 2021

Two recent Wayno/Piraro Bizarro strips, from the 15th and (for St. Patrick’s Day) the 17th, both of linguistic interest: among other things, the portmanteau arthropodcast in the first; and the front-clipping ‘shmallows (for marshmallows, of the psychedelic sort) in the second:

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Casual Outings

March 17, 2021

The current issue of The G&LR (The Gay & Lesbian Review) — volume 28, number 2, March-April 2021 — is in fact the 150th issue of the magazine, and comes as a book, Casual Outings (plus a minimal, 15-page, supplement of book reviews, without any of the customary articles). The front cover:


(#1) (from p. 64) [The illustrator Hefling] is now a retired professor, having taught theology, philosophy, and Great Books at Boston College for thirty years. Besides drawing and (digital) painting, his artistic pursuits include calligraphy and manuscript illumination.

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Treading down the thorny path

March 16, 2021

Two evergreen topics in grammar and usage: so-called “split infinitives”, where some usage critics have insisted that they must always be avoided, however unnatural the results of this avoidance are; and modifier attachment, where jokes are often made about one of the potential attachments, however preposterous the interpretation associated with this attachment is.

The two topics are connected through their unthinking devotion to dogmas of grammatical correctness: avoid split infinitives, avoid potential ambiguity. A devotion that leads adherents down the thorny path of usage rectitude to using unnatural syntax and entertaining preposterous interpretations.

But first, the thorny path. The (tough) counterpart to the (easy) primrose path.

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lookit, looky

March 15, 2021

My morning names a few days ago: surprising places the verb look has gone.

To come: the story of these items, from the OED. The related stories of some uses of say and like. All having moved from relatively concrete to much more abstract uses, serving discourse functions of various kinds.

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The Zanzibar carnival

March 14, 2021

From the Economist‘s 2/20/21 issue, p. 39 “Tree trade: Coconut shy”, beginning:

Zanzibar: Why palm trees are driving property moguls nuts

The island of Zanzibar has more than 4m coconut trees, and each one has an owner

There’s a simple and obvious pun in this: in the noun nuts referring to plant products vs. the adjective nuts ‘crazy’.  But then there’s the N + N compound coconut shy (a specifically British item that I was pleased to have recognized), which bears every mark of an Economist playful allusion to a carnival game, but with a play on shy (adjective? the aversive verb?) that bears somehow on fruit tree ownership on Zanzibar. Here I can only report that I don’t get half of the joke.

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Pornstars do this so you don’t have to

March 13, 2021

(All about sex between men, discussed mostly in street language, so totally unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)

It started with a mailing yesterday from the NakedSword gay porn folks, advertising the 2021 flick Lake Need, with a reproduction of the DVD cover, on which Johnny Rapid, Jesse Bolton, and Cyrus Stack together perform a complex sex act (69spitroasting) that requires considerable athleticism and agility. The three men carry it off as an aesthetically satisfying arrangement of bodies — until you think about whether you could do it yourself, and realize that this is something much better left to the professionals.

That led me back to an earlier period of Johnny Rapid’s porn career, which included a flick in which he engaged in an equally challenging two-man sex act (Flying Cowboy) with Rafael Alencar, an act that’s both beautiful to look at and deeply intimate, tremendously sexy. But it’s really not something to try at home — again, it’s much better left to the pros.

I put the two images together in an AZBlogX posting “Johnny Rapid” today, which led one of my LiveJournal readers to judge that:

The positions assumed in both of those photos look uncomfortable to the point of impossible.

Well, yes, but that’s what we pay Johnny Rapid and his brothers in porn for. They do it — they realize physically challenging sexual fantasies — so we don’t have to.

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leprobates

March 12, 2021

Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro (Wayno’s title: “Mythical Miscreants”):


(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)

leprobate, a portmanteau of leprechaun reprobate. Naughty, naughty boys.

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