Archive for September, 2021

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My address, a rant

September 10, 2021

LISTEN UP!

A friend writes to ask me for my address — in this case, my snail mail address, since he has my e-mail address (and has just used it), but I get requests all the time (sent to me by various indirect means) for my e-mail addresses too. I get hundreds of appeals, of both types.

I find this baffling, and annoying. These are intelligent people, who should understand that in this wonderful world of digital tech, enormous resources are easily available for everyone to access. In particular, you can do a search.

Remember: GOOGLE IS YOUR FRIEND.

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Posted in Resources, This blogging life | 4 Comments »

9/9: not a non-event

September 9, 2021

(Astonishingly, this silly posting will devolve into references to male pubes (NOAD entertains both /pjúbìz/ and /pjubz/ as pronunciations, by the way, so do as thou wilt) and photos of hunky young men stripped down to them, so it’s not to everyone’s taste.)

It is once again Negation Day, a festival for semanticists, also customarily the day for the annual convention of No Joke, aka the Society for Language Play.

This year, the semanticists will gather en masse at the Square of Opposition, where a statue of Larry Horn, caught in mid-smile, will be unveiled; and in collaboration with the No Joke meeting, there will be staged performances of Monty Python’s “Argument Clinic” sketch. Then, as usual: a clinic for those suffering from overnegation and undernegation; and a bazaar where shoppers can rummage for negative polarity items and reinforcements for their everyday negatives. (Just Don’t Do It: because of ugly incidents in the past, metalinguistic negatives have been banned from the festival site.)

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Posted in Art, French, Idioms, Italian, Metonymy, Music, Puns | 3 Comments »

My Lollicock has come home!

September 8, 2021

Lollicock, lollicock / Oh lolli lolli lolli

(Look, this is going to be about startling pink dildos — but adorable! — and phallofellatial lollipop playfulness, in art and song, so it’s clearly not to everyone’s taste, but it’s mostly goofy rather than raunchy; and it might actually be useful for kids to learn to suck with pleasure on a rainbow lollipop with adult self-awareness rather than adolescent snickering: yes, we understand exactly what it stands for, and we’re down with that.)

My pink Lollicock dildo arrived yesterday and has been integrated into my très-gay bedroom decor. I’m past using dildos for their intended function, but am now exploring their potential as elements in artful compositions of sexually charged objects.

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Posted in Language and food, Language play, Music, Phallicity, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Lupine Sapir-Whorf allusions

September 8, 2021

(That’s the adjective /lúpàjn/; the noun referring to a flower in the pea family is /lúpǝn/ — but this is not the Lupine Express.)


Francis Barlow’s illustration of the fable, 1687

Today’s morning name: the phrase the boy who cried Whorf. A paranomasic play — wolf vs. Whorf — on the boy who cried wolf, as in the Aesop fable, alluding to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on the relationship between language and thought.

Oh, I thought on coming to full consciousness, surely someone has messed Whorfianly with the formulaic phrase.

And so they had; here I’ve just picked the first one that came up in googling: the heading The boy who cried Whorf, in Anthropology for Dummies by Cameron M. Smith, p. 48.

Then I tried some other formulaic expressions (again picking just one occurrence, the first one to come before my eyes):

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Posted in Formulaic language, Language and thought, Language play, Morning names, Puns | Leave a Comment »

The flowers that bloom on the 6th, tra la

September 6, 2021

My birthday — 9^2, 3^4 — rolls around again, in its relentless way, and people are sending me flowers. Well, electronic images of flowers. (Meanwhile, I’m wearing my, sigh, gay dinosaur t-shirt, and I had coffee ice cream for lunch dessert, because it’s my favorite and because 9/6 is, whoopee, National Coffee Ice Cream Day, as well as AMZ’s and the Marquis de Lafayette’s birthdays, 1940 and 1757 respectively.) Today, three floral compositions:

— a sidewalk-crack garden (on the street in Dovercourt Village, Toronto), posted by Randy McDonald on his Facebook page on 9/3 and sent to me by e-mail on 9/4 to cheer me up (despair lurks in doorways, ready to pounce on me and rob me of joy): cleomes and snow-on-the-mountain

— from Benita and Ed Campbell (outside of Denver), a Jacquie Lawson electronic birthday card, “Golden Chain”: laburnum (yellow), drumstick alliums (purple and blue), plus seven parrots and a peacock

— from Rod [Williams] & Ted [Bush] (in Oakland), a different Jacquie Lawson card, “Birds and Flowers”: an arrangement of flowers to be identified, plus several little chirpy birds, with the accompaniment of a much-abbreviated orchestral arrangement of Chopin’s Grande valse brillante

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Posted in Art, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and plants, Music, My life, Photography | 4 Comments »

Masculinity messaging from Sweden

September 5, 2021

It started with an ad (on my Facebook page yesterday) from the Ron Dorff company (previously unknown to me) that struck me for its reserved erotic message:


(#1) [from the accompanying text:] The very first fragrance by Ron Dorff [Paris – Stockholm] Discipline Sport Pour Homme: Fresh, clean, and refreshing, the perfect reinvigorating scent after a tough session at the gym. Get $10 off the full-size bottle.

Notes on the photo. A handsome, “naturally” well-muscled (rather than gym-ripped) young man, shot in soft focus, wearing only a standard white gym towel, resting his arms against his legs (touching his body — this is significant). His haircut is conventional. His face is very lightly scruffy, his body utterly smooth and dry, almost ethereally beautiful: an idealized beautiful male body. The towel, however, is fastened to make a V pointing towards his crotch; and a small bottle of Ron Dorff Discipline Sport is tucked into it, pointing up, so that it mimics an erect — reinvigorated — penis peeking above the towel.

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Posted in Libfixes, Masculinity, Underwear | 2 Comments »

Drogo, Scavenger of Boys

September 4, 2021

(Owlishly raunchy, but nevertheless quite raunchy, with male buttocks on display: not for everyone’s taste.)

A bit of free verse for Labor Day 2021, commandeering Falcon Studio’s holiday gay porn sale ad in the service of poetry:

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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Poetry | 3 Comments »

How does Wilderrama sleep at night?

September 4, 2021

From the tv series NCIS, Season 14 Episode 6, “Shell Game”, an exchange between the NCIS-Agent characters Tim McGee (played by Sean Murray) and Nick Torres (played by Wilmer Valderrama, whose name I am forever telescoping into the portmanteau-like Wilderrama) that turns on joking with senses of the interrogative adverb how — in McGee’s question “How do you sleep at night”, intended to convey modal + means how ‘by what means is it possible?’; and Torres’s response “On my back. Naked.”, conveying truth-functional + state how ‘in what state?’.


(#1) Torres and McGee in the NCIS episode “Love Boat”, Season 14 Episode 4

Then I turn to WV the man, as a hunk with a wonderful smile (two things I post about on a fairly regular basis), and as a performer with a notable actorial persona.

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Posted in Actors, Ambiguity, Errors, Faces, Facial expression, Modality, Modification, Movies and tv, Portmanteaus, Semantics, Telescopings | 4 Comments »

From the culture desk: images

September 3, 2021

Or: Pomodoro will get you Bellows, and Monet too. (Backward in time ran the artists until reeled the mind.)

A passing mention of Arnaldo Pomodoro recently — I don’t even remember where — took me immediately (but electronically) to the Columbus Museum of Art, where back in the 1980s the artist installed one of his Sfera con sfera sculptures in a prominent place (the central  courtyard of the museum, as I recall), where I visited it often, to admire it: big, solid, reflective (both literally and figuratively), complex (worlds within worlds).


(#1) Sfera con sfera in Trinity College, Dublin

Searching on Pomodoro and the CMA together then brought me to the Joy of Museums site for the CMA, which promised a Virtual Tour of the museum — but offered only thumbnail sketches of three of the museum’s holdings, not showing them in their settings or giving the history of their acquisition. (The site does offer whatever documentary footage already exists about the museum, but it doesn’t create its own tours of museums.)

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Posted in Art, My life | 8 Comments »

Briefly noted: the Steeds entertain

September 2, 2021

In the 9/6 New Yorker, Edward Steed offers his own Desert Island cartoon, in which the DIslanders are ready for guests — party hats! a table set for eight! with candelabra! — but none are on the horizon:

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Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

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