Archive for September, 2025
September 30, 2025
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tigers seeing off the month of September; meanwhile, the October Oz-rabbits are massing behind the great fence that separates the two months, and will soon burst through, to blanket the calendrical landscape
Today I will step way from the events of the day and of my life to pick up a recurring theme on this blog, that of the cultural type the queen, moved by catching an admirable exponent of the type, the actor Peter Paige, in an episode of the tv drama Bones (S6 E14, “The Bikini in the Soup”, from 2011):
(#1) Emily Deschanel (as Temperance “Bones” Brennan), Peter Paige (as Darren Hargrove), David Boreanaz (as Seely Booth); Paige plays Hargrove with plenty of queeny mannerisms, but also a certain degree of slyness (he looks serious here because he’s being arrested) (screen shot from IMDb)
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Posted in Academic life, Actors, Effeminacy, Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »
September 29, 2025
It was already a difficult day, and then in my mail:
To whom it may concern at Arnold Zwicky’s Blog,
Copyright Agent US, Inc. works with professional photographers and leading image agencies across the globe to protect their copyrights on the internet.
We hereby draw your attention to an image used on the following link: [https://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/06/26/from-south-america]/ (herein after the âImageâ). [this is my 5/26/2012 posting “From South America”, with pictures of a flowering Jacaranda mimosifolia tree in South Pasadena CA and a florist’s assortment of Alstroemeria cultivars in various colors (both originally found on Wikipedia, I believe, but that was 13 years ago)]
Our Partner, Visions Video & Photography, holds the rights to represent the Image in question and they are unable to find a license purchased under your company’s name or domain. Accordingly, we are contacting you to ensure that the appropriate license was obtained. It is possible that you have acquired the correct license for the Image, for example, from the photographer themselves or your creative agency under a written sub-contract. If that is the case here, we ask that you provide evidence of proper licensure to allow us to review your case.
Infringement is unauthorized use of intellectual property. In essence, it deprives the rights holder of the benefit of their original creation. If no evidence that a license was purchased is provided, then a payment claim would be required to resolve and compensate for the illegal use of the Image. This will also avoid the need for judicial intervention if the matter is not resolved.
You can log in directly and pay this claim here: [URL]
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Posted in Language and plants, Language and the law, My life, Photography, This blogging life | 1 Comment »
September 29, 2025
29 September: penultimate September, and also Michaelmas (the Feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael; the Feast of the Archangels; or the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels). Brief notes about the day; and then, in the midst of very difficult times (during which I am failing at almost everything, and in great pain), a report on some moments of pleasure that help to get me from day to day.
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Posted in Events and occasions, Holidays, Language and religion, Music, My life, Signs and symbols, Singing | Leave a Comment »
September 28, 2025
From Benjamin Dreyer on Facebook yesterday:
It’s once again been brought to my attention that many people seem not to grasp that Ice Capades is a play on words and that they are not in fact capades on ice.
(I myself learned this at a rather advanced age, but: earlier than today.)
Well, Ice Capades originated as a play on words, but that doesn’t mean it still is (only) a play on words. History is not destiny. BD tells us, in fact, that many people — I would say almost all of us — don’t appreciate that it originated as a play on words. Which is to say that for all these people it is not a play on words, but an odd compound of ice and capades. Just as, for almost everyone these days, the name of SRI International (a Silicon Valley R&D nonprofit institute) is just a string of letter names, not an abbreviation for anything, despite the fact that the organization began its life as the Stanford Research Institute (I know this, but I’m a very old man, 6 years older than the Stanford Research Institute); SRI is now an orphan initialism.
So now, a lot of facts.
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Posted in Initialisms, Language and sports, Language change, Libfixes, My life | Leave a Comment »
September 27, 2025
From one of my crew of transgender friends, family, students, and colleagues, a pointer to the book To Survive on This Shore (Kehrer Verlag, 2018):
(#1) Cover of the book; from photographer Jess T. Dugan’s website for the book:
Representations of older transgender people are nearly absent from our culture and those that do exist are often one-dimensional. For over five years, photographer Jess T. Dugan and social worker Vanessa Fabbre traveled throughout the United States creating To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults. Seeking subjects whose lived experiences exist within the complex intersections of gender identity, age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, socioeconomic class, and geographic location, they traveled from coast to coast, to big cities and small towns, documenting the life stories of this important but largely underrepresented group of older adults. The featured individuals have a wide variety of life narratives spanning the last ninety years, offering an important historical record of transgender experience and activism in the United States.
The resulting photographs and interviews provide a nuanced view into the struggles and joys of growing older as a transgender person and offer a poignant reflection on what it means to live authentically despite seemingly insurmountable odds.
To Survive on This Shore exists as a book, limited-edition portfolio, museum exhibition, and community exhibition. It has also been used extensively in educational initiatives and political campaigns.
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Posted in Age, Books, Gender and sexuality, Photography | Leave a Comment »
September 27, 2025
Briefly noted. From Randy McDonald on Facebook yesterday, a nighttime-atmospheric photo of the Chew Chew Grill / Chew Chew’s Diner, 186 Carlton St., Toronto ON (open 8 am to 4 pm):
All-day breakfast, hot sandwiches, and burgers in a space with booth seating and train-inspired decor
You get the remarkable name, a kind of ludic trifecta — punning (choo punning on chew), imitative (choo-choo ‘train’), and metonymical (chew in the name of an eating place) — plus the wonderful train mural, especially vivid at night.
Posted in Art, Language and food, Metonymy, Onomatopoeia, Photography, Puns | Leave a Comment »
September 26, 2025
In today’s Bizarro cartoon, a hybrid portmanteau, a portmanteau name for one kind of hybrid referent, a referent with an assortment of features drawn from the referents of the contributing expressions; think of triceradoodle (referring to a hybrid of a triceratops and a poodle cross) = triceratops + doodle ‘a poodle cross’ (to be illustrated below):
(#1)Â Venus flytrap + bear trap = Venus bear trap: the appearance of a giant Venus flytrap leaf, with the bait of a foothold bear trap (if youâre puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon â Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip â see this Page)
To come: details about the two contributing referents, the Venus flytrap and the (foothold) bear trap; then a factor that makes this portmanteau especially rich and satisfying, in contrast to the less complex (but far more preposterous) triceradoodle.
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Posted in Furnishings and tools, Language and animals, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »
September 26, 2025
From Chris Ambidge on the soc-motss Facebook group yesterday, moose and squirrel in West Hollywood:
(#1) Rocky and Bullwinkle, a plaster, fiberglass, paint, and steel statue (1961 original by Bill Oberlin, 2014 restoration by Ric Scozzari), donated by Jay Ward’s family for the City of West Hollywoodâs Urban Art Collection
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Posted in Art, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »
