Archive for December, 2021

Enhanced phallicity

December 10, 2021

(All about things that are phalloid — penis-like — to one degree or in one way or another — with illustrations, though no actual human penises will appear here. But it’s clearly not to everyone’s taste.)

A recent theme in my gay home decor (which is deeply playful but also flagrantly sexual, and littered with books as well): 3-D printings of things that are not merely phallic by nature, but (also) deliberately designed to resemble penises in some detail; they are doubly phallic. The neck and head of a brontosaurus, or of a giraffe; an elephant’s trunk; a banana.

In the world of double phallicity, it’s not just objects of the natural world; plenty of phallic artifacts can be similarly enhanced: salt and pepper shakers, chandeliers, lollipops, all can be — and have been —  engineered to resemble male genitalia in some detail.

Meanwhile, phallic artifacts — notably, tower buildings and rockets — can have their phallicity upped to some degree, without any intention on the part of the designers to simulate a glans penis or testicles or whatever (but sometimes it happens anyway, to public amusement).

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The photoon from Satilla Shores

December 9, 2021

On Facebook on 11/23, Charlie Fulton offered this photoon — a photograph intended as a cartoon — and provided it with a caption, in this case a brief text expressing a personal opinion of his about some event, not depicted in the photoon, without any explicit connection between the event and the photograph. So Charlie’s captioned photoon takes a ton of context and background knowledge to appreciate, but (in my opinion) it’s very cleverly bitter (measured bitterness being a CF specialty).

The photoon, with Charlie’s caption:


(#1) [CF:] Ah, the clever “toenail defense” tactic. I should have seen it coming.

The only really easy part of the comprehension exercise is recognizing the objects in #1 as the edible seeds — known in English as Brazil nuts — of the Bertholletia excelsa tree  (native to South America).

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The illusion of macrophallicity

December 8, 2021

(A posting about (among other things) big penises, gay porn, the male body, and man-man sex, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

It begins with an ad for last week’s 2021 Cyber Week sale from the Falcon family of gay porn sites, reported on in my 12/2/21 XBlog posting “Johnny Torque and friends”. Illustration #1 there (JT in Naked Sword’s Frat House Cream), cropped for WordPress modesty, though what remains is nevertheless important, plus text from AZBlogX:


(#1) The photo from AZBlogX has been cropped exactly at the tip of Torque’s penis; this version is all that WordPress allows

Featuring the lean pornstar Johnny Torque in a pose engineering to make it appear that he has an extraordinarily long cock, reaching, when fully erect, almost all the way to the cleft between his pecs; actually, the shot was made from below, looking up, and his upper body was somewhat bent forward over his cock — actions that together make the tip of his cock look quite close to his chest.

This is the illusion of macrophallicity (noun macrophallicity ‘possession of a big dick’ < adj. macrophallic ‘having a big dick’ < noun macrophallus ‘big dick’; and note also the useful noun macrophallicism ‘veneration of big dicks’, denoting a characteristic preoccupation of American men).

To appreciate the illusion, consider the distance ∆g-c between your genital top (the top of your vulva if you’re a woman, the top of the base of your penis if you’re a man) and that spot on the lower border in #1 just a bit below the intermammary cleft, between your breasts / pecs. Torsos differ in length, of course, but mine is roughly the same as Johnny Torque’s, and ∆g-c for me is over a foot, which would give JT a truly world-class macrophallus. In fact, his cock is a standard porn cock, reported to be just over 7ʺ long.

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What’s on the menu?

December 6, 2021

By Matt Diffee, in today’s (12/6) New Yorker:


(#1) There is a header on the menu that says Breakfast Served All Day, intended as an assertion that all the breakfast items are served all day — but understood by these diners as a label for a category of menu items, or even for a specific menu item, a label similar to Breakfast Special or (Special) Breakfast of the Day (an item whose identity is further specified on the menu or by a server)

(Yes, there is yet another reading, in which the diners are supposing that they can have their particular breakfast order served to them throughout the day, as one monumentally extended meal.)

So a rather complex kind of ambiguity, which might seem unlikely to be significant in real life, until you look at some actual menus without the knowledge that the assertion Breakfast Served All Day is a commonplace on menus at American family-style restaurants (fancy places don’t serve breakfast all day). But even if you’re firmly in possession of that knowledge, some menu designs invite the label understanding.

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As butch as it gets

December 5, 2021

(Note: there will soon be a digression into the world of left-handed umliterature for gay men, with some raunchy material in it. I’ll issue a warning when it looms, so you can leave if it’s likely to affront you.)

As butch as it gets, at least in world of buzzcuts. Below, today’s silver fox job by Kim Darnell. Since it’s my head, it’s a kinder, gentler buzzcut, inviting you to run your hands over its fine silky hair — please do, it will feel great to you, and to me too — not an aggressive leatherman-syle buzzcut.


(#1) No studded leather harness for me, but instead a rainbow-colored FAGGOT t-shirt, with which I disarmingly claim the status of Big Fag for myself; it goes along with those nice eyes

No, it is not snowing here: that’s sunlight reflecting off the plant leaves on my patio. Just a trick of the light.

Otherwise, not much new in the photo, except for a book in the bookcase right behind me: William E. Jones’s 2016 True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell, the story of pornographer McDonald and his eccentric zine. And this is where the sexually modest should exit.

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Lumber linguistics

December 4, 2021

Today’s Zippy strip takes exploits the giant hammer outside the Ford Lumber Co. in Fort Washington MD to skitter over language-related matters — the metaphorical character of many common idioms, the innateness of language (abilities), natural language ontology — to lodge in a fixation on food that Zippy finds intrinsically funny (in this case, egg creams and V-8 juice):


(#1) Zippy’s attributions are a bit wonky — it’s Lakoff, not Chomsky, who hammers on the centrality of metaphor, though linguistic nativism is indeed a Chomskyan preoccupation — but then Zippy’s a surrealistic Pinhead, not a pinhead professor, and anyway, you say linguist, the popular mind thinks Chomsky, so Zippy has his finger on the pulse of the people here (even if ontology pours into egg creams for him and even if he seems to be hammered on V-8)

Meanwhile, there’s the news from Fort Washington MD.

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An American tradegy

December 3, 2021

This morning, Stephanie Ruhle, reporting a Michigan school shooting on MSNBC, and confronting the word tragedy (with /ǰ … d/ ), replaced it by tradegy (with /d … ǰ/), transposing the two consonants; she noticed the error, and “corrected” it by, alas, a repetition of tradegy, which she didn’t notice, so she just went on. Then in a later report on the shooting, she again referred to it as a tradegy, this time without noticing. 

As an error in spelling — TRADEGY for TRAGEDY — this transposition of consonants is common enough to have been listed in Paul Brians’s Common Errors in English Usage, p. 207 (and on the website), where Brians remarks:

Not only do people often misspell “tragedy” as “tradegy,” they mispronounce it that way too.

Here I think that Brians’s focus on errors in written English has led him astray, led him to treat what is at root an error in pronunciation — with the erroneous pronunciation then carried over to spelling — as an error in spelling that then is then carried over into pronunciation. Admittedly, the latter transfer is part of the story for some speakers, but the problems begin with inadvertent speech errors like Stephanie Ruhle’s. An inadvertent speech error that seems to be part of a larger phenomenon.

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Typos are the very devil

December 2, 2021

Tom Gauld in the 11/27 New Scientist (on-line on 11/24):


(#1) (on the New Scientist site:) “Tom Gauld makes a deal with the devil, with a soupy twist”

Three things: the Faustian bargain; versions of the story (tons of them); and the typo.

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Break, break, break

December 1, 2021

🐇 🐇 🐇 In the 11/2 One Big Happy, Joe fails to honor a promise, which of course makes Ruthie think about hyphenating printed text:

(#1)

NOAD on the verb break (Joe: sense 3a; Ruthie: sense 1a) and the noun word (Joe: sense 3b; Ruthie: sense 1a):

verb break:

1 [a] separate or cause to separate into pieces …

… 3 [with object] [a] fail to observe (a law, regulation, or agreement)

noun word:

1 [a] a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used with others (or sometimes alone) to form a sentence and typically shown with a space on either side when written or printed

… 3 (one’s word) [a] one’s account of the truth, especially when it differs from that of another person: in court it would have been his word against mine. [b] a promise or assurance: everything will be taken care of — you have my word. …

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