Archive for January, 2024

Beating them off

January 11, 2024

(Manual sex acts as the theme, discussed in both clinical and street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

This is very much a Mary, Queen of Scots, Not Dead Yet posting. I failed to get a Hot Hunks of Christmas posting out yesterday, though I was close to finishing it, when at 2:20 in the afternoon, my net access (also my phone and my cable tv) went down for 6 hours, derailing my life (and marooning me from contact with the outside world). Now I offer you this small, unambitious posting, just to show that I have not indeed died. (My medical state is a strange mixture of, on the one hand, terrible incapacitation and constant pain, and, on the other, absolutely splendid recovery on some fronts. But I have gotten this day as a gift to use. To write for you.)

I bring you this Irish radio report on the recent Golden Globes awards (quoted yesterday on Facebook):

The Cork actor [Cillian Murphy, in Oppenheimer] beat off fellow Irishmen Barry Keoghan and Andrew Scott [in the competition for Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture], as well as Leonardo Di Caprio and Bradley Cooper.

Commenters picked up the inadvertent double entendre in beat off, one quipping and boy were his arms tired! (suggesting a malady of wankarm, the manual counterpart of the well-known oral-sex affliction cockjaw). Gay male readers might have read the Irish radio report as the fulfillment of an extraordinary fantasy, of getting off all four of these hot actors in single encounter.

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Mammoth Drop, near Woolly Hole

January 9, 2024

(Along the way, some direct talk in street language about man-on-man sex, so not for kids or the sexually modest)

On AZ’s Astounding Bookshelf, the remarkable Mammoth Drop: Murder, Mammoths, and Mimosas (Kea Wright Mysteries) by R. J. Corgan, independently published in 2022 in paperback and Kindle editions. An ad for the book (supplied to me on Facebook yesterday by Michael Palmer, with a link to the Amazon site for the book):


(#1) Obviously up my alley: as a fan of murder mysteries and a highly visible homo, with a woo(l)ly mammoth as my totem animal (MP has my number)

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The best bits of me

January 8, 2024

A 2022 strip from the webcomic dinos & comics, an exchange between two dinosaurs who, in other strips, profess their love for one another. (The creators of the comic have gone to some trouble not to gender these two dinosaurs; Blu is blue, Brn is reddish brown, but otherwise they’re identical in appearance.) Whatever their romantic status might be, they are certainly involved in a deep friendship with one another; in this strip, Brn reports one of the great satisfactions of deep friendship: in the company of your friend, you feel that you’re the best person you can be:


(#1) dinos & comics — on its website, described as “a comic about depressed dinosaurs who find hope in each other” — came to an end a little while back, and has been succeeded by a new series, dinosaur couch, in which the title makes clear the theme of therapy and counseling in the comics.

Still other themes: the search for human connection and for meaning in a meaningless world. All of this sounds earnest, and possibly helpful to your mental health, but it fails to capture the charm, wry insights, frequently self-mocking  tone, and occasional downright silliness of these comics.

Meanwhile, the visual style is minimalist.

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Three shoeshis

January 6, 2024

Yesterday, in my posting “Today’s food punmanteau”, about this composition:

(#1)

The memic shoeshi is a work of art, made (mostly) from food; it is neither edible nor wearable — though it could be deconstructed, and some of its materials eaten.

In other occurrences, shoeshi is in fact food — edible sushi in the shape of a shoe.

In still others, shoeshi is in fact footgear — footwear in the shape of sushi.

And that’s what’s up f6r Epiphany: 👑 👑 👑 the three shoeshis — the art (above), the food, and the footwear.

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Today’s food punmanteau

January 5, 2024

(Today has been difficult, so this is the best I can do in the way of posting — opening up a topic for further postings, soon to come.)

It starts with this memic shoeshi image I encountered today on Facebook, passed on through various friends and acquaintances, as these things are. A truly wonderful composition:


The memic shoeshi; shoeshi here is a punmanteau: a pun and a portmanteau

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Seaman Apprentice Crunch

January 4, 2024

From the annals of cartoon understanding, today’s (Wayno / Piraro) Bizarro strip, which is incomprehensible if you don’t know a crucial piece of American popular culture (and Wayno’s title, “The Early Years”, won’t be much help to you):


(#1) Someday Seaman Apprentice Crunch will command his own ship, and then he’ll be Captain Crunch, familiarly known as Cap’n Crunch, and he’ll give that name to a sweet breakfast cereal that American kids have been enjoying for 60 years (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

Note that Crunch is drinking from an 8-ounce milk carton (while his naval companion is having a beer).

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The Hot Days of Christmas, days 2 – 4

January 3, 2024

I have this digital-artist friend (on the other side of the country) who proposed to give me a Christmas gift: daily cards (delivered by the USPS) for the AI Hot Hunk Days of Christmas (with Hot understood as HomoHot ‘arousing to homos’); the (very sweet) idea was to arouse me on a daily basis with a surprise hot guy, one for each of the 12 days from Christmas to Epiphany Eve, as in the song. Mail delivery this Christmas season has been — let me put this in a kindly fashion — erratic. The  day 1 card arrived on day 4, not an unreasonable journey across the country, but then nothing, nothing at all, through to day 8 (8 maids a-milking, New Year’s Day), when the artist and I began to fear that the cards had gone astray, been seized by the post office, whatever, so that I anxiously awaited yesterday’s (day 9) mail. Which brought me days 2 through 4, whew.

By then, the artist had supplied me (by e-mail) with an X-rated version of day 5  (which their printers had rejected as too raunchy) and also its steamy but non-X substitute. So today (day 10) I’m hoping for the day 6 card. And then on from there. Meanwhile, I’ll improve the hours until the mail comes by showing you days 2 through 4.

Along the way, the artist compressed the AI Hot Hunk Days of Christmas to the Hot Days of Christmas, which I think is a stroke of abbreviatory genius, and hereby adopt for my postings from now on.

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Z of the Amazon

January 2, 2024

An announcement on the Language Typology mailing list on 12/30:

we are hosting the ninth Syntax of the World’s languages in Lima (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú) between July 23th and 26th 2024. We are “cooking” (the culinary verb is in order when we talk about Peru) a very nice and welcoming conference for all of you, so we really hope you come over … SWL IX will provide a forum for linguists working on the syntax of less widely studied languages from a variety of perspectives.

This from the organizer, Roberto Zariquiey, at PUCP. Whoa! A splendid Z-name, one I’m sure I’d never seen before. And, extra points, on an Amazonian linguist. (I suppose it would have been too much to hope that RZ came from the town of Zaraza in Venezuela.)

You see, as a Z-person, I’m keenly aware of the letter Z, unconsciously aware of words (especially names) with a Z in them, which is why I’m so sure that the name Zariquiey is new to me. More on implicit attentiveness below.

Then there’s the question of the origins of the name. My family name, Zwicky, has been a Swiss name for hundreds of years, centered very specifically on a small town in the Alps. But there are some variant spellings. Also the possibility of a historical connection to somewhat similar names in Bavaria, and of those names to another set of names from the Slavic areas of Eastern Europe, More on those names below too. There are some surprises, like the remarkable spelling Tsviki, first seen in Belarus (but then people get up and move to new places, so there are now Tsvikis in the Miami area and New York City).

The family name Zariquiey doesn’t look much like any of the Swiss, Bavarian, or Slavic names (Slavic Zawickey is about as close as it gets), and it’s way separated from them geographically as well: apparently, almost all the Zariquieys in the world come from Spain, or from what is pretty clearly a Spanish settlement, in Peru (where RZ comes from). At some point, I will write RZ — I have his e-mail address — and ask him what he knows about his family’s origins. I’m somewhat reluctant to do this, though, since as you’re about to see, he’s a busy person, intellectually and emotionally committed to a program of intense and pressing research in Amazonia. On the other hand, as you can also see from the tone of his SWL IX announcement above and judge from his Radcliffe Institute photo (to come in a moment), he seems like a pretty cool guy.

In any case, now I dive right into information about RZ and his research. With all the other stuff to follow

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The AI Hot Hunk Twelve Days of Christmas

January 1, 2024

🐇 🐇 🐇 RABBIT RABBIT RABBIT to inaugurate the month of January, in screaming caps to inaugurate the new year; it’s also Holy Dick Day, or (in more conventionally churchly terms) the Circumcision of Christ; and the 8th day of Christmas (warning: the 5th day of Christmas will bring us to significant penis-talk, which is not to everyone’s taste)

This is a tale of massively failed communications. It begins with my posting yesterday “The 7th day of Christmas”:

That would be today, December 31st, New Year’s Eve. … Back on the 4th day, December 28th, my mail brought me a digital-art celebration of the 1st day [by one of] my digital-artist friends. For the occasion, a partridge of sorts in a pear tree of sorts, and … starring a fabulously hot object of gay sexual desire.

(#1)

… All three components … have that air of hyper-reality that I find especially desirable in digital compositions; not trompe-l’oeil, but a kind of magic realism.

… [about the peculiar partridge,] I have inquired of the artist, but they haven’t risen to the bait.

Ah, that’s where things started to go awry.

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