The last of my buzzcut photos: #5, in honor of Swiss National Day (August 1st), with occasion-appropriate t-shirt and athletic shorts:
The wearied old professor, squinting into the sun in Ramona Birdland (where the squirrels and, alas, roof rats also play), at the controls of his excellent — maneuverable and very sturdy — outdoor walker (photo by Kim Darnell)
… well, not today, but this summer. From my 10/23/19 posting “OUTiL: a historical note”:
For LGBT History Month, some notes on a little piece of that history in linguistics, in the loose network of academic acquaintanceship that formed at the Linguistic Institute at UC Santa Cruz in the summer of 1991:
The t-shirt, once available in both pink and purple (design by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky)OUT in Linguistics, OUTiL, OUTIL (the abbreviation pronounced /áwtǝl/, through some wags joked about its being French outil /uti/ ‘tool’, with the expected sexual slang use).
The group was primarily social, offering physical places for LGBTQ+ folk and their friends to gather, network, talk about linguistics and their lives — with a mailing list to coordinate these gatherings, and then also to offer a net-place for such talk. Over the years, it changed its mode of operation, ending up as a private group on Facebook, with me as its administrator. But now it’s been years since I was able to travel anywhere, and I’m now an old man in fragile health, not an appropriate administrator.
Meanwhile, OUTiL has served its purpose and ceased to carry any traffic. So, in the absence of anyone willing to take over from me and revive it, I have closed it down. I removed the newsgroup — with some difficulty — this Wednesday morning. Thirty summers after the first.
The last in the series of pairings of my new buzzcut with impudent gay t-shirts new to my wardrobe (earlier: BIG FAG on a pink shirt, rainbow FAGGOT in block letters, and, yesterday, a rainbow tyrannosaurus):
(#1) Posed in front of part of the Zwicky GSU (Grammar, Style, & Usage) collection, now housed in my condo, where the piano used to be, and supported by my indoor walker (which sports new purple walker balls, not illustrated here)The t-shirt is a new version — bigger, bolder, more intense — than my first GAY AS FUCK shirt, below, which has worn over time until the colors are muted and delicate and the fabric is pleasantly soft. I see fatal holes in its near future.
(#2) Catalogue photo, not of me. With an (entertaining) asterisking strategy for taboo avoidance, unlike the flat-out FUCK of #1
(Sexually edgy topics — what do you expect from gay dinosaurs? — so you might want to exercise caution.)
Yesterday it was a rainbow FAGGOT in block letters (in the posting “Today’s garment faggotry”); today it’s all visual: a rainbow tyrannosaurus, a poignant symbol of gay obsolescence:
(#1) Yesterday I was standing in front of a bookcase, at the helm of my indoor walker; today I’m in my work nest with my Window on the World (on my plants, birds, and squirrels) behind me, sitting in my outdoor walker, which doubles as a sturdy chair (photo by Kim Darnell)
Behind me is a crocheted FUCK square, a tribute to Jesse Sheidlower and The F Word; and a postcard tribute to the male art of Tom of Finland. Just above them, not visible here, is a copy of Jump, Paradise Cove, 1987, a Herb Ritts photograph of four men disporting themselves on the beach (see my 9/9/16 posting “Herb Ritts”). Otherwise, it’s reference works on one side, my work table (with visible mouse, on its rainbow-Z mousepad) on the other.
On the shirt, see sense 2 in this NOAD entry:
noun dinosaur: 1 a fossil reptile of the Mesozoic era, in many species reaching an enormous size. … 2 a person or thing that is outdated or has become obsolete because of failure to adapt to changing circumstances.
Sigh.
Yesterday’s posting — “Big Fag in a buzzcut” — had a photo both impromptu and soulful, plus that cheeky, rather unsettling slogan. Today’s photo is posed and more magisterial (though still amiable), and the slogan is the plain rainbow “Faggot”:
(#1) “I am Professor Faggot and I’m a hell of a lot queerer than you imagined, so put aside your contempt, listen up, and I’ll guide you through things” (photo by Kim Darnell)
Below the fold, some material that’s not appropriate for kids or the sexually modest.
Two late July developments: the latest in a series of ever-shorter buzzcuts (with Kim Darnell wielding the clippers), finally reaching a minimal one that satisfies me thoroughly. Shorter than the crewcut that carried me through my late high school years, and requiring no styling. A bit shorter than the easy-care buzzcut my dad settled on in the last years of his life.
Huge hoary linguistics professor, wearied but smiling with pleasure — note the smile lines at the corners of the eyes — at his buzzcut and at the pink neon claim (both amiable and outrageous) to social space for his kind (photo by Kim Darnell)
Ok, I’m leading with the meat of the story, the expression adult adjacent industry as a modifier of the noun firm ‘business company’ — an expression I believe was entirely new, and astonishing, to me (and so far seems to be attested only in the specific piece of e-mail, from what I’ll call the X Group, that brought the expression to me yesterday as a blogger and to at least one other blogger).
The expression is stunningly euphemistic, ultimately referring to a class of businesses that sell sex: adjacent is euphemistic for direct involvement in (it’s not merely near to, but digs right in with gusto), and the involvement in question is in the adult industry, a euphemism for the sex industry, in particular for the branch of it that supplies photographic and/or written pornography (hot stuff). (NOAD on the relevant sense of the adj. adult: … [d] sexually explicit or pornographic (used euphemistically to refer to a movie, book, or magazine).)
The point of the X Group’s mailing to me was to enlist my blog in a scheme of advertising and sales on behalf of the adult adjacent industry firm — call it Firm Q — with money to be made for me. The assumption of the mailing was that such transactions are the very purpose of blogging, and (to judge from the advice that the company now provides) WordPress seems to agree that blogging is all about making deals. In fact I get approached, on average, once a day — some days none, but some days three in a row — by a company that wants me to enter into some sort of advertising or sales deal with them. Nothing as spectacular as an adult adjacent industry firm (earlier today: advertise a site providing information on what to do in Wilmington NC in exchange for the site’s advertising my blog and so boosting my blog’s search engine score).
Note 1: I actually pay WordPress a fee to keep this blog free of advertising.
Note 2: I never respond to these overtures, even to say a polite no; my earliest experiences with these things was that if you replied at all, that merely encouraged the sender to think you might eventually be open to their invitation, so that they redoubled their efforts. Deletion and stony silence are the only way.
Not entirely irrelevant digression: I’m now taken with the phrase adult adjacent industry firm and have been chanting it as a tetrametrical mantra, aDULT aDJAcent INdustry FIRM (WS WSW | SWW S); repeat it three times for pleasure. It might also work to celebrate sturdy young men engaging in anal intercourse with one another on video — the sort of often-avowed interest of mine that presumably led the X Group to fix on my blog as one that might enter into an intimate relationship with the as-yet-unidentified Firm Q.
But, back to beginnings. Let me start with Margalit Fox.
Brief report from my house on things falling apart, or Why I Hardly Post Anything of Substance These Days. New medical problems — no serious details now, but a symptom of one is enormous exhaustion, so sleeping 10 to 12 hours a day, so not getting much done; and my hands all painfully seized up with arthritis in a terrible flare-up. But yesterday I had some remission and could slowly say farewell to my succulent garden. And then, later, could take some time at the computer slowly clearing out a chunk of a giant iceberg of unanswered e-mail going back to 2009 — a Monument of Things Undone, things that will never be done.
Yes, I’m not dead yet, but I’ve had grave difficulties in getting even a tiny posting together. So here’s today’s (7/23) Mother Goose and Grimm cartoon, from the meta-cartoon world:
We’ve seen piles of cartoons in which speech balloons play a role as physical objects in the cartoon’s world: people point at their contents, they act as actual balloons carrying someone away, etc. Now it’s the artist’s signature.
(Some male body parts, depicted and discussed in plain, but not raunchy, terms. So not squarely in the Sex Zone, but not tasteful either. Caution advised for kids and the sexually modest.)
For me, it all started with a recent ad on Facebook for suit sets (sleeveless tank tops with bikini underpants) from the Fabmens company in a variety of intriguing patterns, including a (more or less) rainbow “color block” pattern seen here from the rear:
(#1) The design of the underpants strikingly accentuates the wearer’s ass / butt / bum cleft / crack / cleavage, in a way that in my queer fashion I (at least) find decidedly hot
