(About men’s genitals and man-on-man sex, in street language, with an image that’s WordPressable only because I’ve fuzzed out a ton of penises — so entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
Today only: yet another flash sale from gay-pornmongers Falcon | Naked Sword:
From Steven Levine, continuing his observations in the Netherlands, on Facebook yesterday:
[SL:] A McDonald’s in Haarlem. I can’t decide if I think this is creative reuse or a violation of sensibility. Either way, what a building.
Ah, a continuation of my architecture theme, specifically in my posting “Durability, utility, beauty” from yesterday, where I looked at architectural design as simply the design of very large everyday objects, subject to the same judgments that we apply to kitchen tools, downspouts, typewriters, and the like.
In this case, there’s a certain cognitive dissonance (Steven’s “violation of sensibility”), between the elegant design of the building and the crass display of a fast-food restaurant. (On the other hand, for a McDonald’s, this display is positively modest and unobtrusive.)
(Obviously unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
cock time, an atrocious pun on clock time, from the Tumblr gallery of penis4u: a very substantial, fully erect penis wearing a (sturdily masculine) watch. In the hope of getting the image on WordPress (it is transparently NSFW and certainly not acceptable on Facebook), I have cropped the photo so that it shows only a few inches of shaft — which might as well be a piece of light colored wood.
I post fairly often on the design of everyday objects, looking especially for genuinely useful things that are also a pleasure to use, hold, or see. Now, I find myself getting thoughtful postings from someone at Tumblr — a side effect of my having to join Tumblr in order to get at some racy male photography that I have since posted — the 8/1 posting Firmitas, utilitas, venustas being about guiding principles for the mind, eye, and hand of the architect: that is, about the design of very large everyday objects.
I have no link to this posting, only the mailing, so I’ll reproduce that in full for its interest in the principles of good design, and the pleasure of its writing, which is both personal and analytical. (I don’t know who the writer is. The posting is unsigned — the e-mail reply address is merely welcome@tumblr.com — and I see other identification of them, so Tumblr cognoscenti are presumed to know who the voice of the site is. Grr.)
The text under the line. Then some comments and illustrations.
From Steven Levine, reporting from Amsterdam, on Facebook this morning:
If you have time to learn only one Dutch word, I’d say wildplassen makes an excellent candidate.
(#1) Du wildplassen ‘wild pissing’, with Du wild in the sense ‘free, loose’ (yes, it also has the sense ‘savage, fierce’, and that adds to the excellence of the signage)
(From a while back, but this exchange, on a very small bit of usage, between SRA (Stephen R. Anderson, the Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics Emeritus at Yale University, now living in North Carolina) and AMZ (me), came during various medical crises on my part, so never got posted. But now …)
The usage issue set out in 7/18 e-mail from SRA to AMZ:
I guess lots of people send you weird things they saw online for commentary. Let me join that crowd.
In a story today on NPR about the soldier (apparently on his way to discipline on an assault charge) who ran across the demilitarized zone in Panmunjom into the arms of the North Koreans, we read that
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he expected to have more information on the man in the coming hours and days.
“I’m absolutely foremost concerned about the welfare of our troop,” he told reporters during a Tuesday briefing, offering little other information than what has already been confirmed.
He obviously is referring to this individual guy as the troop he’s concerned about. I can’t find any instances of troop as a singular referring to an individual and not a group, but I’m not all that good at Google-searching for that kind of thing. The singular exists, of course, but it’s not the singular of [our] troops. Is this somehow a usage in the military?
Today’s Zippy strip, with an undisregardable piece of public art in Manhattan’s fashion district:
(#1) The giant button and needle leaning on the kiosk of the Fashion District Information Center
Now: about this sculpture — the kiosk structure and the sculpture itself were removed last year — and then about its bright yellow stand-alone replacement, unveiled in February of this year.
Dan Piraro’s Bizarro from Sunday 7/30, in which Vikings with bunny-eared helmets demand horned helmets:
(#1) No more eating grasses, it’s time for Viking pillaging and plundering in an appropriately fierce costume (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 10 in this strip — see this Page)
Now, you’re thinking, I’m going to tell you that actual Vikings didn’t wear ornamental horned helmets, just to look fearsome; that instead they wore more effectively protective helmets of thick leather; and that the horned helmet thing is totally an invention of artists — or some disappointing shit like that. And I am.
It’s a good story, and it makes for amazingly impressive operatic scenes and a totally menacing muscle-hunk Marvel comics superhero (among other things), but all that horns stuff is fanciful.
Another chapter in the annals of phallicity. From Owen Campbell on Facebook yesterday:
(#1) Owen sucking on an Otter Pop
Owen’s comment:
At my job, teenagers deliver freezies [AZ: freezies ‘Otter Pops’]
otter pops (often no longer understood as a brand name) are also known as freeze pops or ice pops; freezies might be a regional term, but I’ve been unable to get information about it in any of the likely lexicographic sources: the OED, GDoS, and DARE. For what it’s worth, Owen’s in Winnipeg MB.
Now, two things: about Otter Pops; and (very briefly) about Owen.
(This posting starts out merely being racily suggestive, but then I diverge into cheerleading for smaller penises and cataloguing the pleasures of fellatio, so it turns into something unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest. Though I look back at this section and think: I wish I’d had this to read as a kid, as a very young fagling with shame about the size of his penis and an unfocused yearning to learn how to perform fellatio to my satisfaction and my partner’s)
From Steven Levine on Facebook this morning, posting from the Netherlands:
[SL:] Pastries in Haarlem, about which I have no comment but the obvious.
