Archive for November, 2024
November 30, 2024
đ
 đ
 đ
 three tigers for ultimate November and the feast day of St. Andrew the Apostle, patron saint of đ´ó §ó ˘ó łó Łó ´ó żÂ Scotland đ´ó §ó ˘ó łó Łó ´ó żÂ (and several other countries) and of fishermen, fishmongers, rope-makers, textile workers, singers, miners, pregnant women, butchers, farm workers. and more
A follow-up to my 11/28 posting “Today’s surprise etymology”, about the history of Jordan almond, which elicited a nice brief comment by David Preston about Baker’s Chocolate and German Chocolate Cake. Which I now elaborate on.
(more…)
Posted in Common & proper, Ethnonyms and demonyms, Etymology, Language and food, Names | 4 Comments »
November 28, 2024
(Not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
Ok, one more little posting before I tackle writing about the last week in my life, parts of which were spectacularly awful, but through most of which I coped admirably and in good spirits, I don’t know why or how. This simultaneously disastrous and miraculous week ended with my delicious Thanksgiving dinner, of Korean soy and black vinegar chicken on japchae, a last-minute replacement for the long-planned Mexican homestyle pozole, which had to be shelved when the cook was incapacitated. Details to come.
(more…)
Posted in Gay porn, Idioms, Language of sex, Language play, My life, Puns | 1 Comment »
November 28, 2024
Flashed briefly past me, an ad for Jordan almonds for the holidays, which evoked some memories and also led me to check the etymology in NOAD (which gets this stuff from the OED):
noun jordan almond: a high-quality almond of a variety grown chiefly in southeastern Spain. ORIGIN late Middle English: jordan apparently from French or Spanish jardin ‘garden’. [AZ: though other etymologies have been suggested].
These almonds are commonly sugar-coated:
In which case the name is usually spelled Jordan almond. Jordan almonds are often associated in the popular mind with the Jordan River or the country of Jordan.
(more…)
Posted in Etymology, Language and food, My life | 4 Comments »
November 28, 2024
The Wayno Bizarro for today, 11/28, is an exercise in cartoon understanding:
(#1) Wayno’s title: “Horrifyingly Tasty”; I would have suggested the more bloodthirsty “Eat Your Gods” (if youâre puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon â Wayno says there are 3 in this strip â see this Page)
But it’s all totally baffling unless you recognize the references to Charles Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts; you really have to know about Linus and the Great Pumpkin. (Meanwhile, your appreciation of the strip will be enriched if you know that today is US Thanksgiving, a harvest festival for which the traditional foods include pumpkin pie for dessert.)
And while we’re talking festivals, the cartoon is a festival of ambiguities in English, structural and lexical.
(more…)
Posted in Ambiguity, Common & proper, Grammatical categories, Holidays, Language and food, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Parsing, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »
November 27, 2024
(Men’s bodies and man-on-man sex, discussed bluntly, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
On Pinterest this morning, this painting by Polish queer artist Wojciech WoŠ(now working in Berlin):
(more…)
Posted in Art, Color, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, Lexical semantics, Male art, Phonetics, Polish, Spelling | Leave a Comment »
November 26, 2024
Or: the first flower of winter.
Today appeared the first fully open flower on my cymbidium orchids, on the plant I named Rogue Yellow last year, when its buds opened fully a month early, in the second week of December:
Rogue Yellow’s first two fully open (slightly greenish) blossoms, in December 2023
So: this year even earlier, in the last week of November, on Thanksgiving Eve Eve. Its flower stalk shot up, two feet in two days, at Halloween, then gathered itself up to burst, today, into floral fireworks heralding winter. (Meanwhile, chilly rains have come.)
(more…)
Posted in Holidays, Language and plants, Seasons | Leave a Comment »
November 26, 2024
From Chris Ambidge (one of the Wardens of the Spheniscid Zarchives) on Facebook this morning:
(#1) [CA > AZ:] Arnold! Have you considered … penguin slippers? Keeping Feathers McGraw underfoot might be the best way to make sure he doesn’t get into mischief
From the Coddies website:
CoddiesÂŽ Wallace & Gromit Feathers McGraw slippers:
Silent but villainous, Feathers McGraw is the ultimate plush slipper icon!
Slip into the soft embrace of Wallace & Gromit’s Feathers McGraw himself with Coddies’ new plush slippers, designed to capture the essence of Aardmanâs criminal mastermind. They fit like a glove – not unlike the red rubber glove perched atop Feathers’ head – a disguise so brilliant in its simplicity that it once outwitted Wallace and even the local law enforcement.
(more…)
Posted in Clothing, Compounds, Language and food, Language in advertising, Movies and tv, Names, Penguins, Shoes, Trade names | 1 Comment »
November 24, 2024
(There will be mentions — in vernacular but not actually vulgar terms — of male-male sexual practices that some will find icky, so this posting will not be to everyone’s taste; and it might stretch some kids’ horizons a bit, so a gentle warning)
From back on 10/30, e-mail from Gadi Niram, with a video gift for me, saying: I found this video (and the young man in it) to be quite a pleasant diversion:
(#1) Screen shot from the video, which you can view here
A shirtless young man in ripped denim shorts playing the 3rd movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata (Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27 No.2) on a fancy grand piano (with a mirrored fallboard, as in the finest piano lounges). alongside the pool at at what looks like a tropical oceanside resort. (For a bit of extra sexiness, those shorts are down far enough in the back to expose the waistband of his black Calvins; here the girls and the gay boys swoon.)
(more…)
Posted in Back formation, Compounds, Context, Conversion, Derivation, Language and the body, Language of medicine, Lexical semantics, Morphology, Music, Portmanteaus, Technical and ordinary language | 4 Comments »
November 23, 2024
đ đ today’s the Big Game in these parts — Stanford vs. UC Berkeley, 12:30 (PT), blessedly at Berkeley; the rain has given way to overcast skies, with occasional sunny breaks
From sun to sun, art to art: it starts with a Ukrainian sculpture of Icarus (who recklessly flew too close to the sun, defying the gods, and so plunged to his death); moves through a Russian painting of Icarus with his father Daedalus (who warns his son not to fly too high or too low); from there to van Dyck’s earlier painting of this same scene; which leads to a van Dyck self-portrait with a sunflower, a Helianthus that’s turned to him as to the sun itself: perhaps the painter as an incarnation of the sun god Apollo.
(more…)
Posted in Art, Language and plants, Myths, Poetry | 3 Comments »
November 22, 2024
(Photo of phallic and homoerotic artworks, piled all over an apartment — not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
Today’s find on Pinterest, from the Coveteur site (in its own words: “a multifaceted lifestyle brand that brings you insider access to the people shaping today’s cultural conversation”), “Inside an NYC apartment with a most unusual art collection” by Leah Faye Cooper on 1/17/19:
(more…)
Posted in Art, Collages, Language and the body, Male art | Leave a Comment »
