Today’s morning name, the nettlesome noun urticaria: the medical name for an allergic rash commonly known as hives. This time, I knew exactly why my morning name was in my head, and it had nothing to do with the Philip Glass music breaking in waves over me as I woke: it came right out of an re-run episode of the tv show Rizzoli & Isles that I had seen the day before.
Archive for December, 2023
Morning name: urticaria
December 24, 2023ZappaSol
December 21, 2023Z! ❄️ ☀️ ZappaSol happens when the Winter Solstice (in my hemisphere) coincides with Frank Zappa’s birthday, 12/21. And that’s today.
FZ in a New Yorker illustration by João Fazenda
Kissing the proverbial you know what
December 20, 2023From the Raw Story site, “‘The stain is on you’: Ex-RNC chair slams GOP for silence on [GP]’s call for blood purity” by Matthew Chapman on 12/18/23 (in this story [GP] refers to (Helmet) Grabpussy), beginning:
The Republican Party at large owns former President [GP]’s increasing descent into fascistic and racist rhetoric, former GOP chair Michael Steele told MSNBC’s Katie Phang [sitting in for the host of “The Beat With Ari Melber”] on Monday.
This comes as [GP] stated at a rally that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” language that has clear roots in Nazi Germany — and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) defended it furiously when cornered by reporters.
“Michael, it is not just [GP] that’s doing the bad thing, it’s the enablers that are doing the bad thing,” said Phang. “We all know why they are kissing the proverbial you know what. And, when you have somebody like Marc Short [Republican operative, chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence] saying ‘I doubt that [GP] has read Mein Kampf,’ I don’t disagree with him, I don’t think he has the capacity to read, but it is not the point. These people enable [GP] to be able to say this with zero consequence.”
In the crucial quote, boldfaced above, Phang was choosing between two idioms, both of the form kiss + object, both expressing submission to someone: the elevated idiom (with the C[ount] Sg object noun ring):
kiss someone’s ring or: kiss the ring
and the vulgar slang idiom (with the M[ass] Sg object noun ass):
kiss someone’s ass or: kiss ass
In any case, Phang chose to indicate that she was using a formulaic expression, via the formula-signaling adjective proverbial modifying the head noun of the object. She said kiss the proverbial X and not kiss proverbial X, and that would seem to indicate that she was using the elevated idiom (with ring), which comes with a definite article, and not the vulgar idiom (with ass), which is anarthrous: kiss the ring, kiss the proverbial ring; kiss ass, kiss proverbial ass.
But we can feel pretty sure that she was aiming for the vulgar idiom, because she also used a scheme for avoiding taboo words (like ass ‘buttocks’ or ‘anus’): the filler you know what replacing the taboo item (I’m not going to kiss (his) you know what, He told me to stick it up my you know what).
The result is that at first glance she just looks confused, mixing features of the two competitors for a submission idiom. But it turns out that the syntax of formula-signaling proverbial is more complex than I had thought, and she was saying exactly what she intended.
Packing Extreme Meat
December 18, 2023(A lot of this posting is about the title of a Lucas gay porn movie, slated for full release in March 2024, but with its scenes being released one by one before then — the first, baldly titled “Dom King pounds Leonardo Bravo”, out last Friday (12/15), is described in one section of my 12/16 posting “Christmas days at the gay porn factories”. Before going on to an analysis of the movie’s title, I’ll unload some of the Lucas p.r. for the flick, and provide a sweet shot of the young Argentinean bottom LB in its first scene; this stuff is all about men’s sexual parts and man-on-man sex, in crude street language, so it’s entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest. After that, you’ll get some sexual slang, though treated analytically; mostly there will be a lot of technical linguistics, but I’m trusting you to handle this material like adults. Relax, you can do it (as Frankie Goes to Hollywood didn’t quite say).)
Part the First: four guys with big dicks. The Lucas Entertainment press release for the whole film, in gayporntalk:
Release Date: Mar 01, 2024
Performers [alphabetically ordered by first name]: Austin Ponce, Craig Marks, Dom King, Jacob Lord, Jeffrey Lloyd, Kosta Viking, Leandro Bravo, Sean Xavier
Some guys have such huge dicks that they can barely keep them under control… that’s when you know they’re PACKING EXTREME MEAT! Dom King unleashes his huge cock on Leandro Bravo and pounds him bareback. Kosta Viking and Jacob Lord suck and fuck until they nut. Sean Xavier slams Craig Marks with his enormous piece of man meat. And Jeffrey Lloyd funds Austin Ponce with his fat uncut dick!
[Linguistic note. Most of this is familiar ornamental gayporntalk: pound and slam ‘fuck’, nut ‘ejaculate, come, shoot’. But fund (with) used like award or bestow (with) as yet another way to convey ‘fuck’ (fucking as figuratively giving your dick to another man, bestowing it on him, bestowing him with it) is new to me. Promoted no doubt by the orthographic / phonological similarity between FUND and FUCK.]
From the first-released segment, I give you, not the big-dicked muscle-stud topman DK, contemptuously pounding Argentinean ass, but his lean, hairy, and very hot, novice pussyboy LB (as a receptive / bottom, long retired from active service, I note that I view the label pussyboy as playful and celebratory):
On the beach: Leandro Bravo in basic black
Part the Second: based on a hot-cock POP. This section is about the title Packing Extreme Meat, which is a pun on Packing Extreme Heat, so I turn now to the VP pack extreme heat. Which is an unusual (but attested) type of POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau). Whose contributing phrases are figurative expressions, one conveying ‘having a big penis’, the other ‘being sexually arousing’. And whose shared (overlapping) material — heat — has different senses in the two contributors, so that the portmanteau is also a pun, a punmanteau, if you will.
Yes, it’s complicated. It just has to be unpacked bit by bit. Stay with me.
I’ll start with two general observations about POPs, one about their form (about where the shared material comes in the two contributors — in the middle, at the beginning, or at the end), the other about their interpretation (about whether the shared material has the same meaning or different meanings in the two contributors — in what I’ll call vanilla POPs vs. pun POPs). There will be generous collections of examples from real life; don’t be alarmed by all this abstract description.
— Where does the shared material come? In your everyday POP, the shared material comes in the middle, but the beginning and the end are other possibilities:
medial sharing: A B C = (A B) + (B C) — sweet tooth fairy = sweet tooth + tooth fairy; Chia pet cemetery = Chia pet + pet cemetery; Home Birth of Venus = home birth + Birth of Venus; Billy Zane Grey = Billy Zane + Zane Grey (almost all POPs are of this form)
initial sharing: A (B + C) = A B + A C — paranormoralegal = paranormal + paralegal (a minority option)
final sharing: (A + B) C = A C + B C — L. Ron Mother Hubbard = L. Ron Hubbard + Mother Hubbard (another minority option)
— Is the meaning of the shared material constant or divergent in the two contributors? There are many vanilla POPs, like sweet tooth fairy, Chia pet cemetery, and Home Birth of Venus above. But there are also a ton of pun POPs, along the lines of:
snow border collie = snowboarder + border collie; Edgar Allan po’boy = Edgar Allan Poe + po’boy
similarly: Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young Frankenstein, Fleetwood Macchiato, Half a Key Largo, Pacific Rim job, iPad Thai
Yes, the really memorable pun POPs tend to be pretty outrageous; they figure in elaborate pun jokes.
Now: pack extreme heat. This is a final-sharing pun POP:
pack extreme heat = pack heat + extreme heat, with contributors:
— pack heat, a verb + object idiom (meaning ‘carry a gun’), with the slang noun heat ‘weaponry; weapon, gun, pistol’ as object
— extreme heat ‘high temperature’
On its face, that would yield an expression meaning something like ‘carry a gun that’s hot to the touch’. But then both contributors are understood figuratively, and sexually; remember that we’re working our way up to the title of a vehicle to (in elevated language) aid gay men to achieve ejaculation through masturbating to the filmed performances. It’s a gay jack-off flick, people, so its title pretty much has to be a dirty play on words; that’s why both parts now acquire dirty figurative senses: the gun of pack heat can be taken as a sexual metaphor, for a (big) penis, so that the phrase can convey ‘have a big cock / dick’. Meanwhile, there are also sexual metaphorical uses of heat, referring to sexual receptivity, sexual arousal, or the quality of being sexually arousing. so that extreme heat can convey high sexual involvement (in mind and/or body).
Voilà! Packing Extreme Heat, an excellent title for a gay porn movie: easily understood as satisfyingly down and dirty (even if you don’t understand the linguistic mechanisms that make it work); admirably raunchy, without using any off-color vocabulary at all (unlike, say, the Treasure Island Media gay porn flick Ruin the Cunt — which, like the Lucas film, is largely focused on bareback anal sex between men.)
Hold that thought about admirable raunchiness. I’ll get back to that in a moment.
But first I’ll do my duty as a linguist to fill in some of the lexicographic details on pack heat from standard sources, rather that just spouting glosses off the top of my head. (Extreme heat is, I think, entirely straightforward.) From NOAD:
phrase pack heat: North American informal carry a gun: he was busted at JFK for packing heat.
And from GDoS:
noun heat: 4 (US) weapons, arms [AZ: this is the M[ass] use, which might be better glossed as ‘weaponry’; but the entry also has C[ount] uses, glossed as ‘pistol’]
One last turn of the sexual screw. Ok, in Packing Extreme Heat, the Lucas Entertainment people had a fine title available to them. But they then decided to gild this lily with a paint gun, pushing the big-dick image hard by punning on pack extreme heat with the off-color pun meat ‘penis’ for the more innocent-seeming slang noun heat. Bringing us Packing Extreme Meat, for the holiday jack-off season (and on until March 1st, when the whole work will be officially released).
I know, I know, subtlety is not their strong point.
Food, art, or joke?
December 17, 2023(Sexually transgressive gingerbread folk, so not to everyone’s taste. But massively silly.)
Well, you could eat them, but would you? Probably not, so it looks like they’re jokey folk art. I’m talking about gingerbread houses, in particular the 7 entrants in the 2023 on-line Gingerbread Competition, year 14, overseen by my old friend, the vagrant multinational (and enthusiastically gay) dancer-artist Matt Adams (hard to describe: when I first met him, he was a bartender at the Three Seasons fusion-Vietnamese restaurant up the street from my house in Palo Alto; now he lives with his husband Justin in the Netherlands), who is to be distinguished from the (straight but also admirable) Stanford-PhD linguist Matthew Adams, also of my acquaintance.
On to the winner, #3, and the runner-up, #7.
Christmas days at the gay porn factories
December 16, 2023(Packed with racy photos from gay porn, with male sexual parts and man-on-man sex discussed in street language, so entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)
Two mailer ads today, from two different gay porn studios, both for scenes in new movie releases, illustrating two different approaches to the Christmas season. A 12/15 mailer ad for new scenes from Falcon’s Cum All Ye Faithful, headed:
Dean Young & Drake Von Spread Holiday Cheer in Latest Falcon Update
And a 12/15 mailer from Lucas Entertainment with a scene from the new release Packing Extreme Meat, headed
Dom King Pounds Leandro Bravo
The Falcon scene is an affectionate but urgent pairing of two attractive twinks (both in cheesy Santa hats), bottom DY and top DV, folded into a somewhat flimsy larger Christmas-related story (which I’ve posted about earlier on this blog). The two young actors are playing out a formulaic sexual encounter for the pleasure — and perhaps the sexual release — of their audience, though every recorded performance is a variation on the formula. The attractions of any specific performance depend on how the sexual formula is varied, just as our enjoyment of a Roadrunner vs. Wile E. Coyote cartoon (all of them variations on a formula) depend on how the comic formula is varied.
The Lucas scene is raw sex, no recognition of the Christmas season at all — the hell with Christmas, let’s fuck!! Though once again, the performers, rough, dominant top DK and novice submissive bottom LB, are playing out a formulaic sexual encounter for the pleasure of their audience.
Now the details, and the photos.
Two formula comics
December 15, 2023⬅️ 🚘 Nishi Day, 12/15, the day when I traditionally set off driving west from Columbus OH to Palo Alto CA for the winter quarter; and the day before 🎂 🎉 the December Birthfest (celebrating Ludwig Beethoven, born 1770; Jane Austen, born 1775; and my excellent friend Ned Deily, born 1952)
In today’s Comics Kingdom feed, two strips that turn on formulas, but of two very different kinds. First, a Rhymes With Orange that illustrates a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau), a joke form that manages to combines two strikingly unrelated elements whose names happen to overlap — in this case a postmortem medical procedure (called an autopsy) and a confused, disordered state (referred to as topsy-turvy). And then, a Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon, yet another of their forays into the Psychiatrist cartoon meme, set in a psychiatrist’s office and involving a patient on an analytic couch plus a therapist, in an adjacent chair, taking notes on the session; the patient or the therapist or both are astonishing characters, and the setting allows for all manner of jokes to be worked into their encounter — in this case, an everything-bagel patient and a baker therapist, confronting the patient’s anxiety at wanting more (Wayno’s title: “Too Much is Never Enough”).
But now, to the toons!
Seasonal unicorns
December 14, 2023… decked out in red and green, in lovely Christmas smocks; also throughly wired and wielding gear, both vintage (what appears to be a record player) and modern (iStuff), along with Christmas gift boxes:
(#1) A delightful card from Dean and Tim Allemang; on the back it has the Walgreens logo:
(#2) So it’s a Walgreens card, but after much searching on 12/11, I couldn’t find it anywhere on their site (they are demons about their photo cards, but hopeless about everything else)
Then on 12/12, Erick Barros labored on my behalf to find any trace of the card on the net, with no success at all.
Meanwhile, I wrote Dean to applaud the card and report on our fruitless searches, asking if he knew anything about the artist or the composition. And got a surprising answer.
I’ll take Manhattan
December 13, 2023An Ellis Rosen pun cartoon (which came by me on Facebook this morning) in which ER manages to treat Manhattan, the name of the island that’s one of the boroughs of New York City, as a pun on Manhattan, the name of the cocktail (made with whiskey, sweet vermouth, and bitters). This is a signal achievement in joke puns, managed by exploiting Godzilla / Gojira, from the Japanese movies, a radioactive prehistoric reptilian monster with a ravenous appetite for urban infrastructure, especially city buildings and large vehicles:
The cartoon, situated in a world of reptilian monsters (a world that’s a translation from our everyday world of restaurant dining); as a bonus, in an inset, the cartoonist’s thumbnail sketch of himself
On his Instagram page, ER says he’s re-posted this old cartoon of his because of the new Godzilla movie.
The rogue orchid
December 13, 2023This is about the cymbidiums in my little patio container garden. They’re winter-blooming flowers in the local climate — normally, they send up their first shoots around Thanksgiving, as the weather grows cool and the rainy season approaches. This year, most of them behaved normally: around (American) Thanksgiving weekend, at the end of November, at least 7 shoots appeared, suddenly (it’s often hard to discern them among the foliage, so there might be more), and growing to a foot or more in length in a few days. The buds then open very slowly, about a month later (after New Year’s), but then the blossoms will last for months, the last finally succumbing when real heat returns, usually early in June.
Always the first to bloom is a very pretty yellow cultivar (I have several clones of it).
This year the autumn weather was deranged, with heat waves alternating with record cold snaps. My patio plants went berserk. The hydrangea decided it was spring, and produced several flower-heads in October. One, but only one, of the yellow cymbidiums decided it was winter, and sent up a stalk around Halloween, a whole month early. This rogue orchid is now splendidly blooming, a kind of Advent surprise — very cheering when many days are gloomy, foggy, or frost-flirting.
On Monday (12/11) Erick Barros took a ton of photos of Rogue Yellow, at various angles, orientations, and degrees of closeness, from which I have chosen two to show to you. (Winnowing the competitors down to two took a good bit of my time yesterday.)