Real money! For teaching! (I taught my last class in 2010, but I’ve been surreptitiously lecturing about linguistics and gender & sexuality studies in my light-entertainment postings on this blog — yes, I’ve been using you, and I won’t stop now — though I can’t imagine that anyone would pay for this.) On the other hand, the offer e-mail is a raging wildfire of red flags, a whole trawler packed solid and piled high with stinking dead fish.
Author Archive
This week’s astounding job offer
September 17, 2022News for really clean penises
September 16, 2022(No actual penises are depicted, but there’s plenty of penis-talk, so this posting will not be to everyone’s taste)
Offered on Etsy, from LoveLeeSoaps, this hot dog soap set ($12):
(#1) A (phallic) simulacrum of a phallic symbol (starting with the hot dog as symbolic penis) — but intended not for ordinary cleansing purposes (though entirely usable this way), but as a practical joke, a prank, turning on the meticulous realistic detail in the simulacrum
The ad copy:
This soap is made with moisturizing ingredients and looks just like the real thing. They would make the perfect gift for any prankster or even something special for yourself. Place it in a guest bathroom and watch your guests faces when they realize its all soap! This set is large and it even comes packaged inside a retro hot dog bag.
Of course the set is large; this is America, and size matters here.
Blogger, interrupted
September 15, 2022
The Blogger, tied in furious knots
I was about the do a quick posting on Roger Federer, who announced his retirement from professional tennis today — because Federer is an admirable person in a whole series of ways, and because Federer is really really Swiss (he and I share the Alpine nose!).
But I was interrupted by Life, in ways mostly gratifying, but both time-consuming and exhausting, so the piece about RF and his splendid Swissness remains unfinished.
Well, the Federer piece interrupted my progress on a “RELAX ARNOLD” posting (about something that had popped up in a Facebook ad).
And “RELAX ARNOLD” took me away from posting on two other ads that had appeared suddenly: “funny aperitif board” and “the social lives of ruff dudes”.
And those two interrupted my advance on a whole set of half-prepared postings: “tastes like glazed donuts”, “ride the wild okapi”, and more.
I can’t imagine how I’m going to dig myself out of this hole.
But, you ask, how did I spend this day (after taking in the hot news about Federer)?
Knabenschiessen!
September 13, 2022The introductory paragraph below was written in a moment of hope yesterday morning (9/12). But then I was consumed by medical problems triggered by last week’s extraordinarily high temperatures; by hours and hours of making arrangements for medical appointments (one this morning, others on each of the following mornings this week, some in the future); hours of doing work-arounds for the continuing non-renewal of my Adjunct Professor position at Stanford; and then, this morning (9/13), trying to cope — all afternoon, problem still far from fixed — with Gmail access on my computer (receiving and sending) disappearing entirely. I am crazed, distraught, angry, gasping for breath, afflicted by joint and muscle pains. But Not Dead Yet.
I did achieve my minimal goals for symbolic recognition of the two cultural holidays yesterday, but at 7 p.m. had to give up on explaining Knabenschiessen to you in a timely fashion. But I’m not sure when I’ll be able to craft a posting. Watch this space.
[9/12] In one part of my life, the Chinese-culture-friendly part, this is the third and last day of the Mid-Autumn Festival weekend, for which I will sacrifice a red bean mooncake as the sun sets. In another part, the Swiss-culture-friendly part, this is the third and last day of (as we would say it in English) Boys-Shooting weekend, for which I am wearing (by fortunate accident) my Swiss flag gym shorts (I have four handsome lightweight gym shorts I rotate through by the week — last week’s Pride Rainbow pair just came out of the washer). (I am also wearing a pink Gay as Fuck t-shirt, but that’s untethered to any immediately relevant gay-cultural occasion.)
The agonism and the ecstasy
September 11, 2022(There will be (all-male) slices of a Rubens masterpiece, but the centerpiece of this posting is an act of aggressive fellatio, so it’s not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Not at all what I intended to be doing with my morning, but Chance intervened; Chance the Bringer of Felicitous Juxtaposition has a side career as a gardener, as in Being There. First , this morning he brought me an e-ad for a new gay porn DVD, Briar Basin Ranch – Act I, the cover of which shows that aggressive fellatio, in a fine composition of light and shadow playing on tensed muscles.
Reminding me of agonistic scenes in Baroque painting. While I was trying to dredge up some specific examples, Chance kindly pointed me to a Facebook posting yesterday by Randy McDonald, reporting on a visit to the Art Gallery of Ontario, where he encountered Peter Paul Rubens’s The Massacre of the Innocents (ca. 1610), showing the biblical Massacre of the Innocents of Bethlehem by the soldiers of King Herod, as related in Matthew 2:13-18 — a painting that’s all light and shadow playing on the tensed musculature of the murderers (and on the contorted faces of the victims’ families). Bingo.
As for the facial expressions, I note once again how hard it is to distinguish ferocity from intense pleasure — or, for that matter, either of these from intense pain.
Plush life
September 11, 2022(Penis plush and dildos too, in detail, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
Breaking News for Penises: you can now purchase adorable soft-plush penis-simulacrum stuffed toys. Some for you to cuddle with. One that is, delightfully, a second-order simulacrum: a stuffed-toy simulacrum of a dildo, the dildo being a sex-toy simulacrum of a penis — and, even better, this one is a stuffed squeaky toy for dogs. Eventually, there will be a photo of Fido gently mouthing Peter Woofington, a gigantic plush play-dick in warm but unlikely flesh tones. With goofy crossed eyes.
As a bonus, you get two fabulous recordings of Billy Strayhorn’s jazz standard “Lush Life”: Ella Fitzgerald singing the words, John Coltrane transforming the music. Plus my confession that when I came across Peter I somehow missed the canine connection entirely and so fell to speculating about the anal life expectancy of a plush dick and to some alarm at the idea of taking into my body a dildo that squeaked (presumably with pleasure, but still).
Mortal power
September 9, 2022The 8/11/22 Rhymes With Orange, exploiting an ambiguity in the noun killer as the modifier N1 in N1 + N2 compounds, in this case in killer abs (literal ‘abs that are killers, abs that kill’ vs. figurative ‘abs that are killer / remarkable’):
(#1) In the worlds of advertisements featuring beautiful people, the health and fitness literature, and soft porn, figurative killer abs are commonplace; abs that kill, however, have (so far as I know) never once appeared on a police blotter
Wider topic: the figurative modifiers of mortal power — premodifying killer (killer abs, a killer app), postmodifying of death (the cruise of death, referring to a penetrating sexual facial expression).
Male body parts and sexual connections between men plus a ton of linguistic expressions in their social contexts, what more could I ask for?
Great age
September 8, 2022A note from my sister-in-law Virginia Transue (my (late) man Jacques’s (late) older brother Bill’s wife — Virginia and I are the survivors) on Facebook yesterday, in the matter of my 9/6 birthday, this year my 82nd:
VT: Funny how every single year you are 5 weeks ahead of me [her birthday is 10/12]. What a great age we have both reached.
AZ > VT: Yes, always those five weeks. What a great age we have both reached: I’d like to read that as having great ‘of ability, quality, or eminence considerably above the normal or average’ — at an apogee — but you might well just have meant ‘of an extent, amount, or intensity considerably above the normal or average’ — exceptionally large. Well, whatever, somehow we’ve gotten here.
A little lexicography, some personal history involving my first male lover (also a survivor), and it will end with Elaine Stritch singing.
The Sprinkles carrot cake caper
September 8, 2022As reported in my 82nd birthday posting “Three greetings for 9/6/22”, while I was holed up at home in severe and debilitating heat misery on the day, some friends e-mailed me delightful greetings — visual, verbal, and musical — and a hundred or so of them wished me a happy birthday, mostly via Facebook. Meanwhile, I ordered up some coffee gelato (it was also National Coffee Ice Cream Day, and that’s my favorite ice cream flavor) and a carrot cake (which is, well, cake, but very flavorful and chewy and not terribly sweet, and it comes with a lovely cream cheese frosting, all of which suits my tastes). I found no way to honor the Marquis de Lafayette (born 9/6/1757), though here I’ll give my summary from the Lafayette section of my 9/7/19 posting “Big sexy prime birthday gay ice cream”:
A man of enormous physical courage who took up the family military career at the age of 13 and later pursued an extraordinary public career devoted to advocating for democracy and human rights in two countries [mine and his], and managed somehow to live to the age of 76.
Then on the day after came sweet messages from people apologizing for having missed the day itself. But as I said to one of these (an old friend, an admirable person, and one of the small core of my regular readers — so someone whose good words were especially important to me):
I’m inclined to view my birthday as a fairly large region in time, not just one day. The net congratulations largely achieve the purpose of maintaining and reinforcing relationships, and that doesn’t have to happen on just one day.
And from one of the Aging Life Care of California folk (who, among other things, take me to medical appointments, of which I have a great many), who recently began reading this blog. Full of apologies for having missed the actual day, which I countered with the Region Theory of Birthday Time (above), and then bearing a gift box of four Sprinkles muffins, from the company’s Palo Alto store (in Stanford Shopping Center). A box notably including
dark chocolate (Belgian dark chocolate cake with bittersweet chocolate frosting, in curls)
carrot (walnut-studded carrot cake with cinnamon cream cheese frosting)