Archive for September, 2021

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DI Gilmore Girls

September 19, 2021

Apparently, the Desert Island cartoon meme is inexhaustible; the New Yorker seems to have one in almost every issue. In the current, 9/20, issue, Maddie Dai gives us an odd couple whiling away the time on their island performing episodes of the tv show The Gilmore Girls. Until…

(#1)

Dai’s DI has some unusual features. Its tiny terrain is hilly; its sand has been shaped into a chair for one DIer to sit in (while watching his companion’s miming of Lorelai and Rory in the frame of the island’s faux-tv); the two shipwrecked DIers are an interracial couple; the island has not just the usual single palm tree, but an intimate pair of them. (The remote is a fine extra touch.)

As I’ve remarked earlier on this blog, the DI form allows a cartoonist to strip some rich real-world gag down to its essentials and make it pointed — but also deeply absurd by virtue of its being located on a nearly featureless DI.

In this case, Dai gives us what could have been a wry William Haefeli cartoon on the lives of urban gay men: a couple of Gilmore Girls enthusiasts playing at animating Lorelai and Rory in their New York apartment — with the watcher no doubt providing running commentary on the performer.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv | 2 Comments »

Cockateal crotches

September 18, 2021

(Male bodyparts, sex between men, visually right up against the line, so entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)

From yesterday’s “Materials for a blog”, reporting on my asking, puckishly, in Facebook:

What happens in the romantic popular song “Teal for Two”? If it’s set in a tealroom, whazzat?

Answers to these and other questions are forthcoming, but first the spur for my silly queries: a Daily Jocks ad for PUMP! men’s underwear, a display of PUMP!’s Activate homowear collection, in teal (with deep purple and white), with four teal studs in four different moose-knuckly garments, displaying four different cruise faces: We’re looking at you, buddy, cause we know what you need!

Ad copy:

Your favourite brand is back with a new collection for 2021. The PUMP! Activate collection comprises … a Trunk, Brief, Jock & Sidecut Brief, all made with premium materials to achieve unmatched levels of comfort and style.


(#1) Cockateal crotches: Cockateal, cockatool! / A-wand’ring I will go

Men’s underwear, a bird, a color, a sportive allusion to cocks of the phallic, rather than avian, sort. As in my 8/15/21 posting “Jock robin”, about Cock Robin and a jockstrap in robin’s egg blue.

(more…)

Posted in Color, Facial expressions, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Language play, Movies and tv, Music, Phallicity, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

Unfree variation, summer of 2007

September 18, 2021

From a wildly defensive comment of mine on my 9/16 posting “The pengring”, a comment about my loss of an audience in linguistics:

Story. My proposal for a course at the 2007 Linguistic Institute (at Stanford) was rejected on its merits, but was added at the last minute (after I appealed in wounded anger) because I was a local faculty member. (This is the position of the applicant for college admissions who would not be admissible on the merits but is accepted as a legacy.) The course was, by all accounts, a tremendous success and I’m proud of what I did. (I’ll post the course description and my course-end summary of its content; all of the material for the course is in a Page on this blog.)

So here it is.

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Posted in My life, Variation | 5 Comments »

Materials for a blog

September 17, 2021

Accumulated: a recent rush of bits of stuff — mostly, but not entirely, silly and playful — that might conceivably be turned into blog postings. I posted some of them yesterday on Facebook, and elicited some comments from readers there. In any case, I’m parking some notes here, rather than in computer files or little pieces of paper. This material is skeletal, but you might find some of it entertaining or thought-provoking. Warning: men’s underwear figures prominently.

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Posted in This blogging life | 8 Comments »

The pengring

September 16, 2021

In the mail yesterday (in transit for a month from Italy), this neon purple penguin key ring — a pengring, portmanteau of penguin + ring — a little gift of friendship in difficult times, from Anna Thornton — morphologist Anna M. Thornton, Professor of Linguistics at Università Degli Studi Dell’Aquila,  the University of L’Aquila, Italy:


(#1) A hollow key ring, with the hollow good for holding the pendant penguin and so finding and wielding the keys on the ring, though this particular design is usually intended to make the pendant usable as a bottle opener; I don’t, however, think I’d want to risk scratching that handsome purple surface on a bottle cap (but then twist caps have widely replaced pry-off caps, so we all have less call for bottle openers)

And from this, excursions in many directions.

I note at the outset that the penguin is one of my totem animals; my house is a riot of penguiniana (and mammuthiana as well). Anna’s choice of penguin as gift creature was no accident.

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Posted in Language and food, Music, Penguins, Poetic form, Portmanteaus | 4 Comments »

Items of gay decor

September 15, 2021

(References to penises but no depictions of them , even (alas) on plastic action figures. On the other hand, there’s a neon pink dildo, so readers might want to exercise their judgment.)

My neon pink DJX Trough jockstrap (in size L) has arrived from the antipodes (the company is in Australia, but the jock was shipped from New Zealand) and been installed in its place as an item of decor in my living room. Meanwhile, my new Lollicock neon pink dildo has come to rest on the desk in my bedroom; it has become a Desk Dildo. And I am finally releasing a portrait of three gay action figures and their three companion mammoths, engaged in a ritual celebration under the blazing bedroom sun (on what I still think of as Jacques’s dresser, even though it’s the one I use in daily life — the dresser on which J once erected a small shrine to Mark Wahlberg in his (Marky Mark’s, not J’s) Calvins).

Anyway, it’s all dick-heavy (on the scene and even in reminiscence), though there are no discernible actual dicks.

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Posted in Clothing, Mammoths, Phallicity, Toys, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

May I use you?

September 14, 2021

Well, really, May I use your blog?

More adventures in blogging, this time in dealing with correspondents who want to use my blog for some purpose of their own, in exchange for something; the nature of these proposed deals is usually unclear to me, though I’ve been slowly learning. Here, two cases, of somewhat different sort, to which I’ve assigned the names: the Strong Family Circus; and Matt Thomas, Content Supplier.

With a cartoon for the occasion:


Cartoon from Gaping Void Culture Design Group (more on them below)

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Posted in Language and business, Linguistics in the comics, Music, This blogging life | Leave a Comment »

Stick to your own kind

September 13, 2021

(There are passages in the middle of this of extraordinarily crude obscenity, which should be exposed and reviled, not hidden away. I offer this warning, but no apology.)

Over rice pudding (that characteristic, iconic dish of American roadside eateries), a confrontation between Zippy the Pinhead and a Roundhead enforcer of law and order, a mysterious Masked Man attired all in white (someone much resembling the Lone Ranger, defender of American goodness, power, and purity), over Zippy’s citizenship status and his freedom of action — a confrontation set in the Village Diner in a mythical Wild West (an establishment much resembling a diner of that name in Millerton NY):


(#1) The standoff at the Village Diner

Claim A

ZP: Pinheads are Wild West citizens, free to move about the territory as they wish.

MM: Not at all. Pinheads are alien interlopers, who must be interned in camps we call circuses, with their own kind, in locations reserved for them, away from real citizens.

Claim B

ZP: Some Pinheads are clever and wise, some are silly, ornamental, and entertaining, but they are all harmless. In any case, Pinheads are entitled to dress and act as they wish (within reasonable limits set by fair and just laws).

MM: Not on the street in front of respectable citizens, they aren’t. They’re deranged, dirty, and dangerous — scarcely distinguishable from wild animals. My duty as the protector of American values is to rope them up and drag them to the camps. In fact, I would prefer to shoot the hell out of the sonsofbitches, but current bleeding-heart laws tie my hands and prevent me from giving them the punishment they deserve.

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Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Taboo language and slurs | 8 Comments »

Read the message in my face

September 12, 2021

(Warning: there will eventually be a naked male pornstar, but without his naughty bits visible, plus some mention of feminism and same-sex attraction.)

Two faces that recently caught my eye. I saw them first in a rich context, including the rest of the pose they were in; a background behind the pose; information about the place where the larger photo appeared; and some knowledge about that place and the function of the photo there. Here they are, as bleached of context as I could manage: just the faces:


(#1) Call this person A


(#2) Call this person B

What personas are these two people projecting? What are they like, and what are they doing in the photos?

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Posted in Clothing, Faces, Facial expression, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Photography, Slogans | 5 Comments »

Growing boldly where no flowers had grown before

September 11, 2021

Thanks to Randy McDonald, yet another pop-up garden wrested from cracks in the concrete jungles of Ontario:


(#1) [RMcD:] “I saw this [intentional accidental garden] back on 22 September 2017, walking north on quiet residential Palmer Avenue in Niagara Falls ON towards the train station”

Randy chronicles the street scenes of Toronto in great detail — gets the buildings and the streets and the sky above them to talk to us — and also the everyday scenes wherever he happens to go on his travels. So, here, in Niagara Falls ON in 2017.  (This week in 2021: Charlottetown PEI.)

This is a pop-up garden, composed of fast-growing annuals, mostly marigolds (and a white flower, maybe snow-on-the-mountain), that will shrivel, go brown, and die when frost comes. For the moment, it flourishes in brave defiance in this amazingly inhospitable place, the crack between curb and sidewalk. Where it clearly could not have sprung up unbidden, but had to be nurtured by human hands and carefully fashioned to look wild and spontaneous.

Take tough seeds and give them human care, and showy garden flowers can grow boldly where none had grown before.

(more…)

Posted in Language and plants | 1 Comment »

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