My signal accomplishment for this day was an hour of singing Sacred Harp hymns along with the wonderful YouTube videos of All-Ireland Sacred Harp conventions of years past. Eventually, I’ll celebrate just one song, SH276 Bridgewater, which is such a favorite that it has on occasion triggered my slipping into a state of ecstasy.
Archive for February, 2026
My accomplishment for 2/25
February 27, 2026Toys, potatoes, and dogs
February 26, 2026The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip for 2/25: Mr. and Mrs. Potatohead with their Potatohead dog:
The toy: Mr. Potatohead and his detachable-bodypart family; the potato: the russet; the dog: the Jack Russell terrier (note russet as a potato-pun on the dog name Russell) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
To understand this cartoon, you need to recognize it as an instance of the potatohead cartoon meme, based on the toy. Now, some details.
How long is it?
February 25, 2026This is, first of all and primarily, the announcement of a dissertation oral presentation in Stanford’s Department of Linguistics:
The role of syntactic structure, contextual information, and supra-contextual information in durational patterns of words in spontaneous spoken English by Tony Velasquez
on Monday, March 9, 2026, 10:00am-11:15am, in Wallenberg Hall, Room 124. Committee: Arto Anttila (advisor), Robert Podesva, Dan Jurafsky, Katherine Hilton, and Tanya M. Luhrmann (Professor of Anthropology serving as University Chair); the format for this open part of the oral exam is a 30-45 minute talk by the PhD candidate followed by questions from those attending, for a total of no more than 75 minutes.
Tell us their story!
February 25, 2026(Underwear models displaying their bodies, with allusions to various forms of intense man-on-man sex, so not to everyone’s taste)
A Daily Jocks sale ad in my email today (2/25):
[ad text:] Cellblock13 at Daily Jocks — buy 2 & save 30%
What sort of dramatic relationship from the world of the butch faggy — Red Guy and Blue Guy, resplendent in their gorgeous intense colors — is illustrated here? Tell us their story!
The megalomania of a small penis
February 24, 2026(Well, all about penises and what men think about their own and other guys’, so edgy for many people — but mostly clinical in content and tone, not at all raunchy)
Stephan Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine strip of 2/24, about what we might call little-dick grandiosity — the common belief that megalomania is (in general) a compensation for having a small penis:
There is in fact no evidence for this idea; and we might legitimately question whether there are any actual cases of little-dick grandiosity, as I put it so crudely above, at all
Dear Ed
February 23, 2026Reprinted on Facebook recently by Jeff Bowles, Charles Schulz’s Peanuts cartoon from 11/3/1988, in which Snoopy the writer upbraids an editor — someone I think of as the powerful but irrationally unappreciative son-of-a-bitch Ed — for failing to print his stories and make him rich and famous:
Me, I share with Snoopy a history — in my case, long past — of having my articles callously rejected by Ed. I did not seek riches, though I was happy to get some royalties from my writing; the currency of academia isn’t financial but reputational: having an audience for my ideas and my creative writing.
Lizard warning
February 23, 2026Yes, yes, I am bombarded with blizzard warnings, for the terrifying storm now bringing NYC and the surrounding areas to a standstill. But, bafflingly, though I am fully aware that the warnings are about a blizzard, I keep hearing them as announcing a lizard warning — as if I must now beware of a rain of cold-stunned iguanas falling from the trees or an advancing army of marauding Komodo dragons.
Sadly, since we are now in the zone of terrifying creatures, I have to tell you that Gojira / Godzilla is a reptilian (or dinosaurian) monster, or kaiju, not a squamate one (all lizards are reptiles, but not all reptiles are lizards). You should indeed be alarmed by the news that Godzilla is on the rampage in your neighborhood — that means it’s slated for utter devastation — but such a bulletin is not, technically, a lizard warning. It would be a grievous usage error to race through the streets screaming the lizards are coming! the lizards are coming!
Two remarkable performances by Jesse Jackson
February 22, 2026I come to celebrate two television performances by Jesse Jackson (who died a few days ago) that have made my day: one that totally broke me up in laughter and one that made me weep with his regard for and buoying up of the least among us, little children.
The thumbnail history. As background about Jackson as a political force, from Wikipedia:
Jesse Louis Jackson (né Burns; 10/8/1941 to 2/17/2026) was an American civil rights activist, LGBTQ rights activist, politician, and ordained Baptist minister. A protégé of Martin Luther King Jr. and James Bevel during the civil rights movement, he became one of the most prominent civil rights leaders of the late 20th and early 21st centuries and an ardent and early supporter of LGBTQ rights. From 1991 to 1997, he served as a shadow delegate and shadow senator for the District of Columbia.
Now: Jackson reading Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” on Saturday Night Live in 1991 as a passionate and devout reading from the pulpit; and Jackson in a 1972 appearance on the children’s tv program Sesame Street, exhorting a gaggle of Rainbow Coalition kids in the liberatory chant “I am somebody”. Laugh with me, weep with me.
New frontiers in porn for gay men
February 22, 2026(Once more into man-on-man sex described in street language; kind of silly, and actually rather sweet, but way too raunchy for kids or the sexually modest)
In my e-mail this morning (2/22), a gay porn sale ad from ASGmax: for Almost Real (part 1), In the Name of Science, featuring Nico Coopa and Ryder Owens, from the studio Next Door Films, released on 2/14/26. The video tells the tale of a “synthetic intimate robot” — not an AI creation, but a character played by an actual porn performer, which somewhat takes the edge off the kinkiness of getting a blow job from a robot or the unpleasant prospect of getting fucked by one. (The only machines I want up my ass are anal probes and dildoes that are entirely under my control — nothing with any sort of mind of its own.), The whole ad, in all its details, but with the dicks fuzzed out for WordPress modesty (I will, however, describe them):
Catamite’s delight
February 21, 2026(This posting is all about man-on-man anal sex, with photos, in the plainest of street language (F-bombs will fall like snow), so it is utterly out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest; entertaining in its own grossly raunchy way, but spectacularly NSFW)
I’l ease into things, starting with some background about the noun catamite, taking off with NOAD‘s entry: