Archive for September, 2022

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BFD is ASC

September 18, 2022

Yesterday, in my posting “This week’s astounding job offer”:

All of this is suppositional, and I haven’t found any source of information about the entity I’ve been calling YangCo and its programs that is not provided by YangCo. There is, however, such an entity, with a legal name I’ll conceal as the name BFD (for Big Fucking Deal) Research.

In a comment, Stewart Kramer went looking for information about a BFD organization — but BFD is my mocking concealment of the actual initialism, so he found nothing useful. I reacted to his efforts:

On the chance that the actual organization was a legitimate enterprise (with woolly, largely empty, p.r. text) being exploited by someone, I concealed its identity. But now I have been to the ASC (American Scholastic Convention) website and can say that it’s a bizarre and baffling pile of stinking dead fish.

Now I explain.

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Posted in Initialisms, Teaching and learning, This blogging life | 1 Comment »

This week’s astounding job offer

September 17, 2022

Real money! For teaching! (I taught my last class in 2010, but I’ve been surreptitiously lecturing about linguistics and gender & sexuality studies in my light-entertainment postings on this blog — yes, I’ve been using you, and I won’t stop now — though I can’t imagine that anyone would pay for this.) On the other hand, the offer e-mail is a raging wildfire of red flags, a whole trawler packed solid and piled high with stinking dead fish.

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Posted in My life, Teaching and learning, This blogging life | 10 Comments »

News for really clean penises

September 16, 2022

(No actual penises are depicted, but there’s plenty of penis-talk, so this posting will not be to everyone’s taste)

Offered on Etsy, from LoveLeeSoaps, this hot dog soap set ($12):


(#1) A (phallic) simulacrum of a phallic symbol (starting with the hot dog as symbolic penis) — but intended not for ordinary cleansing purposes (though entirely usable this way), but as a practical joke, a prank, turning on the meticulous realistic detail in the simulacrum

The ad copy:

This soap is made with moisturizing ingredients and looks just like the real thing. They would make the perfect gift for any prankster or even something special for yourself. Place it in a guest bathroom and watch your guests faces when they realize its all soap! This set is large and it even comes packaged inside a retro hot dog bag.

Of course the set is large; this is America, and size matters here.

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Posted in Language and ethnicity, Language and food, Phallicity, Pranks | 2 Comments »

Blogger, interrupted

September 15, 2022


The Blogger, tied in furious knots

I was about the do a quick posting on Roger Federer, who announced his retirement from professional tennis today — because Federer is an admirable person in a whole series of ways, and because Federer is really really Swiss (he and I share the Alpine nose!).

But I was interrupted by Life, in ways mostly gratifying, but both time-consuming and exhausting, so the piece about RF and his splendid Swissness remains unfinished.

Well, the Federer piece interrupted my progress on a “RELAX ARNOLD” posting (about something that had popped up in a Facebook ad).

And “RELAX ARNOLD” took me away from posting on two other ads that had appeared suddenly: “funny aperitif board” and “the social lives of ruff dudes”.

And those two interrupted my advance on a whole set of half-prepared postings: “tastes like glazed donuts”, “ride the wild okapi”, and more.

I can’t imagine how I’m going to dig myself out of this hole.

But, you ask, how did I spend this day (after taking in the hot news about Federer)?

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Posted in Academic life, Language and medicine, Language and sports, My life, Stanford, Switzerland and Swiss things | 6 Comments »

Who will be this year’s Schützenkönig?

September 14, 2022

I now attempt to advance on the the topic of Knabenschiessen, roughly Boys-Shooting, my previous approaches to the topic having foundered on Monday 9/12, as feelingly reported in yesterday’s posting “Knabenschiessen!” (inspired by a Frank Yellin Facebook posting on 9/12).

The basic facts, as assembled in a compact Wikipedia entry:

Knabenschiessen is a traditional target shooting competition in Zürich, held on the second weekend of September each year [the 2022 event started on Saturday 9/10 and ended on Monday 9/12].

The festival, officially held for the first time in 1889, is one of the oldest in Switzerland, dating back to the 17th century.

The competition is open to 13- to 17-year-olds who either reside or are enrolled in a school in the canton of Zürich. Originally reserved for boys (Knaben), the competition has been open to female participants since 1991. The shooting is with the Swiss Army ordnance rifle, SIG SG 550. The competition is held in the shooting range at Albisgütli to the south-west of the city center, on the slope of Uetliberg [and is organized by the City of Zurich Rifle Association in Albisgütli.] It is surrounded by a large fair.

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Posted in Compounds, Holidays, Language and sports, Social life, Switzerland and Swiss things | 2 Comments »

Knabenschiessen!

September 13, 2022

The introductory paragraph below was written in a moment of hope yesterday morning (9/12). But then I was consumed by medical problems triggered by last week’s extraordinarily high temperatures; by hours and hours of making arrangements for medical appointments (one this morning, others on each of the following mornings this week, some in the future); hours of doing work-arounds for the continuing non-renewal of my Adjunct Professor position at Stanford; and then, this morning (9/13), trying to cope — all afternoon, problem still far from fixed — with Gmail access on my computer (receiving and sending) disappearing entirely. I am crazed, distraught, angry, gasping for breath, afflicted by joint and muscle pains. But Not Dead Yet.

I did achieve my minimal goals for symbolic recognition of the two cultural holidays yesterday, but at 7 p.m. had to give up on explaining Knabenschiessen to you in a timely fashion. But I’m not sure when I’ll be able to craft a posting. Watch this space.

[9/12] In one part of my life, the Chinese-culture-friendly part, this is the third and last day of the Mid-Autumn Festival weekend, for which I will sacrifice a red bean mooncake as the sun sets. In another part, the Swiss-culture-friendly part, this is the third and last day of (as we would say it in English) Boys-Shooting weekend, for which I am wearing (by fortunate accident) my Swiss flag gym shorts (I have four handsome lightweight gym shorts I rotate through by the week — last week’s Pride Rainbow pair just came out of the washer). (I am also wearing a pink Gay as Fuck t-shirt, but that’s untethered to any immediately relevant gay-cultural occasion.)

 

Posted in Holidays, Language and culture, My life, Switzerland and Swiss things, This blogging life | 4 Comments »

The agonism and the ecstasy

September 11, 2022

(There will be (all-male) slices of a Rubens masterpiece, but the centerpiece of this posting is an act of aggressive fellatio, so it’s not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Not at all what I intended to be doing with my morning, but Chance intervened; Chance the Bringer of Felicitous Juxtaposition has a side career as a gardener, as in Being There. First , this morning he brought me an e-ad for a new gay porn DVD, Briar Basin Ranch – Act I, the cover of which shows that aggressive fellatio, in a fine composition of light and shadow playing on tensed muscles.

Reminding me of agonistic scenes in Baroque painting. While I was trying to dredge up some specific examples, Chance kindly pointed me to a Facebook posting yesterday by Randy McDonald, reporting on a visit to the Art Gallery of Ontario, where he encountered Peter Paul Rubens’s The Massacre of the Innocents (ca. 1610), showing the biblical Massacre of the Innocents of Bethlehem by the soldiers of King Herod, as related in Matthew 2:13-18 — a painting that’s all light and shadow playing on the tensed musculature of the murderers (and on the contorted faces of the victims’ families). Bingo.

As for the facial expressions, I note once again how hard it is to distinguish ferocity from intense pleasure — or, for that matter, either of these from intense pain.

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Posted in Art, Facial expressions, Gay porn | Leave a Comment »

Plush life

September 11, 2022

(Penis plush and dildos too, in detail, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

Breaking News for Penises: you can now purchase adorable soft-plush penis-simulacrum stuffed toys. Some for you to cuddle with. One that is, delightfully, a second-order simulacrum: a stuffed-toy simulacrum of a dildo, the dildo being a sex-toy simulacrum of a penis — and, even better, this one is a stuffed squeaky toy for dogs. Eventually, there will be a photo of Fido gently mouthing Peter Woofington, a gigantic plush play-dick in warm but unlikely flesh tones. With goofy crossed eyes.

As a bonus, you get two fabulous recordings of Billy Strayhorn’s jazz standard “Lush Life”: Ella Fitzgerald singing the words, John Coltrane transforming the music. Plus my confession that when I came across Peter I somehow missed the canine connection entirely and so fell to speculating about the anal life expectancy of a plush dick and to some alarm at the idea of taking into my body a dildo that squeaked (presumably with pleasure, but still).

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Language of sex, Language play, Logos, Music, Phallicity, Puns, Signs and symbols, Toys | Leave a Comment »

Mortal power

September 9, 2022

The 8/11/22 Rhymes With Orange, exploiting an ambiguity in the noun killer as the modifier N1 in N1 + N2 compounds, in this case in killer abs (literal ‘abs that are killers, abs that kill’ vs. figurative ‘abs that are killer / remarkable’):


(#1) In the worlds of advertisements featuring beautiful people, the health and fitness literature, and soft porn, figurative killer abs are commonplace; abs that kill, however, have (so far as I know) never once appeared on a police blotter

Wider topic: the figurative modifiers of mortal power — premodifying killer (killer abs, a killer app), postmodifying of death (the cruise of death, referring to a penetrating sexual facial expression).

Male body parts and sexual connections between men plus a ton of linguistic expressions in their social contexts, what more could I ask for?

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Posted in Address terms, Beheading, Clipping, Facial expressions, Language and the body, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Nicknames, Penguins, Semantics of compounds, Truncation | Leave a Comment »

Great age

September 8, 2022

A note from my sister-in-law Virginia Transue (my (late) man Jacques’s (late) older brother Bill’s wife — Virginia and I are the survivors) on Facebook yesterday, in the matter of my 9/6 birthday, this year my 82nd:

VT: Funny how every single year you are 5 weeks ahead of me [her birthday is 10/12]. What a great age we have both reached.

AZ > VT: Yes, always those five weeks. What a great age we have both reached: I’d like to read that as having great ‘of ability, quality, or eminence considerably above the normal or average’ — at an apogee — but you might well just have meant ‘of an extent, amount, or intensity considerably above the normal or average’ — exceptionally large. Well, whatever, somehow we’ve gotten here.

A little lexicography, some personal history involving my first male lover (also a survivor), and it will end with Elaine Stritch singing.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Holidays, Music, My life, Theater | 1 Comment »

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