(Below is the introduction to what was intended to be the fourth and final posting — “The groaning phallic board” — in what I’ve come to think of as The Tale of Raunchy Appetizers. But I was felled, once again, by hours of irrestistible exhausted sleep (no, I don’t know why, but my life has been very unpleasant for a while). Back in the world to get some dinner, but I’ll never get this posting done today. Think of this as a Halloween teaser; save it for its eventual continuation, along the lines promised below
Archive for October, 2022
Invitation to the groaning phallic board
October 31, 2022The inevitable holiday porn pun
October 31, 2022(Transparently, celebratorily, crude and graceless, not for kids or the sexually modest.)
🧛‍♂️ 🧛‍♂️ 🧛‍♂️ (the Day of the Vampire) Very briefly, today’s holiday greetings from the rampant sexpigs at Fort Troff:
On the cheese ball watch
October 30, 2022(There will be some digressions into vulgar sexual slang and explicit descriptions of sex acts, so some sections of this posting are not recommended for kids or the sexually modest.)
Adventures on Facebook that start with cheese balls and then branch to the coinages giggalicous and snickerfacient. So things are pretty much all over the map. I set things off on FB with this message, which mingles all three topics :
— AZ on 10/26: I find it giggalicious that some company is offering “dairy-free cheese balls”. But I am admittedly easily amused, to the point where I have always found “cheese balls”, all by itself, to be snickerfacient.
Google translates
October 29, 2022I’ve been sleeping most of my days away, not happily, so not advancing on raunchy appetizer boards and the like. Thanks to Hana Filip, reporting on Google Translate, for today’s Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting.
Today on Facebook, from Hana:
Discussion (somewhat edited):
(more…)
Farewell to Twitter
October 28, 2022As of this morning, I have deactivated my Twitter account (so eventually it will disappear completely). Today’s changes in the way the platform is run meant that I needed to get off it, not just to avoid trolling and flaming, but also (more important) to avoid being hacked.
Doctor F notes Baron F’s slip
October 27, 2022Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, yet another in their long line of Psychiatrist cartoons (today with Dr. Sigmund Freud as the therapist and Baron Victor Frankenstein as the patient) — a conventional form that, in the hands of an ingenious cartoonist, can be used as the vehicle for almost any joke:
(#1) The Baron makes a Freudian slip; Wayno’s title: “Unexpected Insight” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)Doctor Doctor, this is no whim
I got a bad case of having created him
No pill’s gonna cure my ill
I got a bad case of having created him
Freudian slip, Frankensteinian slip: master, monster.
Yes, yes, a pile of bits and pieces jumbled together here (and full appreciation of the cartoon calls for lots of further background knowledge), so there’s plenty to talk about — and was, even before I introduced Robert Palmer into the mix. So grab your torches and pitchforks and let’s advance on this assemblage of oddly fitting parts.
The dubious appetizer board
October 26, 2022A digression from today’s intended posting, “The groaning phallic board”, the final chapter in the story of a raunchy appetizer board, which began in my 10/20 posting “The Funny Aperitif Board”. One of the photos of this appetizer board:
AÂ Facebook ad for a wooden appetizer board in the outline shape of the male genitals (head with frenulum and urinary cleft), gently bent shaft, and testicles — highly stylized, highly schematic, but with these crucial details;Â shown here with the compartments filled with appetizers of various sorts, and with accompanying bowls of other appetizers
The story continued in my posting yesterday, “Appetizer boards”, about two conceptual categories — the foodstuff category to which appetizers belong (call it SMALL-START-FOOD); and the implement category to which food-service boards and platters belong (call it FOOD-SERVER-THING) — and the accompanying lexical fields of appetizer vocabulary and appetizer-board vocabulary.
I then went to collect some more images of the raunchy appetizer board and similar objects, only to discover some really fishy stuff (which is what this posting is about). And then I was struck down for the rest of the day by overwhelming exhaustion and deep, unpleasant sleep. So this my Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting for the day.
The intended posting, “The groaning phallic board”, is still to come, and it has lots of surprising neat stuff in it that turned up in my searches for appetizer-board images. Â Just not today.
Appetizer boards
October 25, 2022A follow-up to my 10/20/22 posting “The Funny Aperitif Board”, with its entertaining word confusion between appetizer and aperitif — but now getting serious about the two categories involved in the compound appetizer board:
the foodstuff category to which appetizers belong (call it SMALL-START-FOOD);
and the implement category to which food-service boards and platters belong (call it FOOD-SERVER-THING)
I’ll put off the funny part — the (intentionally) phallic appearance of the appetizer board in question — for a third posting in this series, taking off from my 9/11/22 posting “Plush life” (with its distinction between four modes of phallicity). But before we go on to ransack the modern English lexicon, let’s stop to appreciate the inspiration for all of this, the Grassooze appetizer board, laden with meal-preliminary foodstuffs:
Three lithographs from 1857
October 24, 2022Male nudes from Bernard Romain Julien’s 1857 Cours de Dessin, showing students how to draw figures from life; inexpensive paperback versions of Romain Julien’s instruction books are still available in the US, and seem to be popular; they also stand alone as compendia of the artist’s work, which was especially focused on portraits, bringing his searching gaze to faces.
Three pages from the Cours de Dessin, as encountered recently by Joel Nevis Y Flores and Jusquifabio NevisyFlores at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, Chile (more on J&J and their holiday in Santiago below, but it’s already significant that the two men are married — in the US, on 4/28/12).
My sister-in-law’s birthday
October 23, 2022Marriage with deceased wife’s sister is trivial, whatever vexations it might have presented to British light-opera law. I’m here to talk about birthday celebrations for deceased husband-equivalent’s deceased brother’s wife: Virginia Bobbitt Transue; of Auburn AL for most of the year, Machiasport ME during the summer; nurturer of chamber music in Auburn and of a family spread around the country; Â energetic, enthusiastic, and charming friend of nearly five decades now; and a kid, a whole month younger than me (my birthday is 9/6), so that there’s a month in the fall when I am nominally a year older than she is (the scheme of reckoning ages in our culture has its goofy corners), but that this is righted on 10/12 — the day after NCOD, National Coming Out Day (which is a big thing in my world) — and she and I always take note of the event. 1940 rules!
That was, alas, 11 days ago ago — my life has been overfull with event and then I’ve been felled by sickness — but now I’m here to effervesce a little more about Virginia and then, in a second posting (to come  in a while) to go all social-sciency on you with observations about the (often covert) kinship categories in my sociocultural world and about the labels we use in English for the relationships in question, which enable me to talk about her as my sister-in-law — ‘the wife of the brother of my husband’ = ‘my husband’s brother’s wife’ — and her to talk about me as her brother-in-law — ‘the husband of the brother of her husband’ = ‘her husband’s brother’s husband’.