Archive for July, 2024

From the annals of setup / payoff formula puns

July 31, 2024

A particularly elaborate example, which came to me yesterday on the Americana Music Society site on Facebook — on this site because it’s all about Johnny Cash. The story begins:

Few people know that before he was famous, the late Johnny Cash tried a chip full of salsa served backstage in Possumneck, Mississippi that changed his life. It was spicy and tangy and smoky and so good that he just couldn’t get it off of his mind. Unfortunately, there was no jar, no label.

Now, there have been rumors that Johnny had kind of an addictive personality. He would sometimes disappear for days on end. People attributed it to drugs or alcohol. The truth is that he would roam the country searching for the special hot sauce of his dreams. He heard rumors and whispers of the deadly condiment and followed them to countless dead ends. He stopped at every Tex Mex restaurant, truck stop, and Mexican grocery in the South without finding what he sought.

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Koons Ruins

July 31, 2024

🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate July (also, it seems, National Avocado 🥑 Day, so you might consider feeding your tiger some guacamole); tomorrow the rabbits bound in to inaugurate August

Today the tigers bring us an artist from my home county: Kathy Aoki, an artist I posted about back in 2019, in (as she put it in a comment on this blog yesterday) the before time. With an extraordinary project so far spanning three years, mounting an exhibition in each of those years: Koons Ruins — a project that’s simultaneously funny and disturbing, deconstructing the masculine swagger of  Jeff Koons by counterposing a monomaniac Koons-hating woman to it.

To give you the flavor of the project, just one item:


(#1) KA, Buried Bourgeois Bust, a glimpse of a decaying copy of the marble statue Bourgeois Bust – Jeff and Ilona by Jeff Koons (1991)

And its model:


(#2) The original statue (copies in a number of museums), celebrating Koons’s marriage to porn star Ilona Staller

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Sail on, silver bros

July 30, 2024

Yesterday’s (soft porn) Olympic photo from Queerly News on X: Noah Williams and Tom Daley, on the occasion of their together winning the silver in the Men’s Synchronized 10m Platform event at the 2024 Paris Olympics:


(#1) It’s a playful bro kiss by NW, at which TD (famous for his charming playfulness) feigns wide-eyed astonishment

TD is also famous as one of the world’s champion divers, a campaigner against bullying, a hot muscle twink, and a gay icon. Also for looking about 14 years old ever since he was 14 (he’s now 30). And as a good friend, to which I now turn — I’ll get back to the gay icon and the hot muscle twink in a moment, but first some Facebook discussion from yesterday about his friendship with NW. Discussion between two gay men, Michael Thomas and me:

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Truly vulgar but fun

July 29, 2024

(Sadly, not suitable for kids or the sexually modest; kids, you’ll have to go to a pool hall in your local barrio — or some similar place — to learn to sling dirty Spanish vocabulary, ’cause I’m not supposed to corrupt you by teaching you about it)

This political yard sign, in mean-street Spanish, passed on by Monica Macaulay on Facebook, back on 7/24:


MM: OMG I want this sign for our yard! (the yard in question is in Madison WI, and MM shares it with Joe Salmons; professionally, they are linguists of some eminence, which is how I got to know them)

The text (just seven words):

Chinga tu MAGA pendejo ‘Fuck your MAGA idiot / asshole’
No mas Naranja ‘No more Orange Guy’

The first line alone is a compact masterpiece of everyday US Spanish vulgarity, with chingapendejo; and the whole thing conveys political slurs on the Orange Menace. Note: naranja is a (feminine) noun meaning ‘orange (the fruit)’, hence also a (masculine) noun meaning ‘orange (the color)’, hence also a masculine noun meaning ‘an orange(-colored) man’.

The sign writer failed to work culo ‘butt, ass’ or maricón ‘fag, fairy’ into the sign, but then you can’t do every fucking thing in seven words, gimme a break.

Puns, clever and raunchy

July 28, 2024

Sunday (7/28) is once again Punday, with a clever pun from the PunHub site and a couple of raunchy puns in a gay porn ad on the Gay DVD Empire site. (Warning: the raunchy section is unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

Part 1: rounding up the sheep. (Let us sing: Bringing in the sheaves / Rounding up the sheep) Passed on to me this morning by Virginia Transue, this cartoon / meme from the PunHub site (whose name is itself a play, on PornHub — there’s also a PubHub, about UK pubs):


(#1) A little festival of phrasal verbs: round up ‘approximate (a number) by altering it to the next larger round number’ vs. round up ‘collect (animals) together for some purpose’

The lexical story from NOAD:

verb round: [with object] …  2 alter (a number) to one less exact but more convenient for calculations [AZ: especially in the PHRASAL VERBS round off / up / down]: we’ll round the weight up to the nearest pound | the committee rounded down the figure | let’s just round it off to an even ten dollars.  PHRASAL VERB round up [a] drive or collect a number of people or animals together for a particular purpose: in the afternoon the cows are rounded up for milking. …

with the direct object of the collecting verb round up understood metonymically, in the sheep-counting context, as the numerical size of the flock (rather than the flock itself).

The PunHub site is an enormous collection of puns (and dad jokes) with various accompaniments, including a store — at which you can order their 2023 book

Is This a Joke? No, It’s a Book!: 100 Puns and Dad Jokes from Instagram’s Largest Pun Comic Creator
by Conor Smith.

Part 2: bred & breakfast at the All the Way Inn. (Kids and the sexually modest should leave this posting NOW.) Also in this morning’s e-mail, from the Gay DVD Empire site, a sale pitch that includes this twice-punning item:


(#2) This time my association is not to a song, but to an antique dirty joke based on the question How far is the Old Log Inn? (To satisfy WordPress modesty, I’ve had to fuzz out four rock-hard pornstar dicks — but that lets us focus on their faces, their torsos, and (for three of them) their (interestingly varied) thigh muscles), plus the  breakfast items, all of which are intended as sexual symbols

I’ll get to some of the richness of this goofy image in a little while, but first the p.r. pitch from Gay DVD Empire, with some more gay porn word play:

It’s not just the eggs that are “over easy” at the All the Way Inn, NakedSword Originals’ Bred & Breakfast. Owned and operated by handsome proprietor Heath Halo, the B&B is nestled in the heart of Venice Beach, California, and, for some reason, it seems to attract the hottest traveling men. Take road-tripper Derek Kage, for example. His piercing eyes and stunning good looks pull Heath into a wild morning of edgy sex that leaves them both dripping wet. Then there’s hotel handyman Beau Butler, who’s ready to fix guest Sumner Blayne’s enormous leaking pipe. Later, Carter Collins and Damian Night celebrate their second anniversary by sunning themselves in the property’s garden, eventually helping to relax each other with hot oil and a passionate outdoor fuck. Things get a little more intense when Drew Valentino and Ty Santana take over one of the B&B’s deluxe suites to cement their dom/sub relationship with a fiery, raw fuck-down. Finally, Sean Xavier and Hazel Hoffman serve Heath their own kind of “breakfast in bed” right in the middle of the kitchen. Welcome to Bred & Breakfast: All the Way Inn, where guests check-in to check each other out.

The central puns. The name All the Way Inn puns on the location adverbial all the way in ‘fully inside’ (the asshole, in the gay porn context), while bred and breakfast puns on bed and breakfast / b&b ‘ a guest house or small hotel offering sleeping accommodations and a morning meal’ (NOAD), with bred being the PSP of the verb breed ‘pedicate bareback’ (verb pedicate ‘ to have insertive anal sex with (a man), to fuck (a man) in/up the ass, to ass-fuck (a man)’, adverb bareback‘without a condom’).

The visual symbolism of the components of breakfast. The first man pours coffee — the stream of coffee symbolizing the stream of piss in watersports. The third man holds a plate of pancakes, pancakes usually being a vaginal symbol, but in a gay context an anal symbol. The fourth man holds up a doughnut in one hand while balancing a tray of them with the other, the doughnut being a common symbol of the anal ring. So they’re all happily enjoying their b&b breakfast — everybody’s at least smiling, and the third, très gai, guy is laughing with pleasure — while symbolically engaging in a same-sex orgy.

So in its way the ad photo is charming and funny, four explosively sexy naked studs goofing off with one another and abusing their food and drink symbolically. Everybody’s going to get what he wants, maybe even what he needs.

 

Wrong window, said the sea lion, absurdly

July 27, 2024

This Charlie Hankin cartoon in the July 29, 2024 New Yorker:


(#1) Hankin is an old acquaintance on this blog; see the Page on my postings about his cartoons

The cartoon shows people queuing up at multiple windows in a bureaucratic office, each line for one type of applicant (as, in the US, at the (state) department of motor vehicles, the (federal) unemployment benefits office, or the municipal permits bureau), with one clerk for each line; in the cartoon, each queued applicant comes with some kind of ticket in hand. So far, that’s a familiar situation.

But then it’s made absurd when the clerks are aquatic mammals; a sea lion appears in the cartoon, which also refers to otters, but who knows what the other clerks are like: a manatee, a dolphin, a seal, a whale (or perhaps a polar bear, a beaver, a muskrat, a mink, a water shrew, a capybara or a hippopotamus) — given a choice, I would go to the otter or the capybara, but that’s my personal taste.

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Annals of diminutive /li/

July 26, 2024

Just two days ago, it was (piecrust) crumblies. Now, Benita Bendon Campbell has sent me e-mail connecting crumblies to (garment) greeblies — which, as it turns out, I posted about on this blog way back in 2012. My personal experience with the two terms dates to the 1960s, and is bound up with my history with my late wife, Ann Daingerfield Zwicky (1937 – 1985); Bonnie (BBC) was Ann’s best friend (and has been a close friend of mine since 1960).

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Esperanto Day

July 26, 2024

Probal Dasgupta notes on Facebook the significance of 7/26: on 7/26/1887, L. L. Zamenhof (15 December 1859 – 14 April 1917) published (in Warsaw, under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto) his Dr. Esperanto’s International Language (Esperanto: Unua Libro), describing what has become the most widely used constructed international auxiliary language (PB is, among many things, an Esperantist).

So this is Esperanto Day — also, I note, the birthday of psycholinguist Eve Clark (an old friend and Stanford colleague, recently elected — wow! — to the British Academy: born 1942) and of Rolling Stone Mick Jagger (still rocking, even though he’s almost as old as I am: born 1943).

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A taste for snails

July 25, 2024

Nelson Minar writing on Facebook on 7/19 alludes to the controversial oysters vs. snails bath scene in the 1960 movie Spartacus:

Facebook has now figured out that I prefer snails to oysters so it is serving me ads featuring improbable men’s butts instead of improbable women’s butts. It hasn’t figured me out on the daddy / twink axis yet though.

I was derailed for a moment by a vision of a rock band called Improbable Butts. And, entertained by NM’s report that he’s a snail guy, derailed for a longer period by this vision of a notably phallic rainbow snail:


(#1) From the Craiyon site, an AI image generated from the prompt “A whimsical rainbow-colored snail with a trail of sparkling slime”

But now to Spartacus, after which I can return to snails as food and the verb eat.

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What shall we do with the leftover pie dough?

July 24, 2024

Now we sing, to the tune of “Drunken Sailor”:

What shall we do with the leftover pie dough? … …
Cut it into slabs and then you bake them.

Do that, and you get the yummy stuff that Ann Daingerfield Zwicky called piecrust crumblies (a family term whose origin was lost to her); she used that name, so I did too, and my guy Jacques, and probably Elizabeth (Daingerfield Zwicky) as well, so maybe now Opal (Armstrong Zwicky) too. Such things get passed around.

(Spelling note: I will use the solid spelling piecrust, but many writers use the separated spelling pie crust; these are stylistic variants, and are listed as such by, among other sources, NOAD.)

Now it turns out that there’s a term of culinary art for the stuff; food writers seem to call them piecrust treats —  a specialization of NOAD‘s

noun treat: an event or item that is out of the ordinary and gives great pleasure: he wanted to take her to the movies as a treat.

Whatever you call them, they’re just one possible answer to the question in my title, so let’s survey the uses of leftover piecrust dough.

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