More word play in John Atkinson’s Wrong Hands:
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Exploiting an ambiguity in the preposition on and a concomitant ambiguity in the noun tape — an ambiguity that’s been around ever since magnetic tape was first used to record readings of books (quite some time ago, though audiobooks didn’t become a significant business until the 1980s). Meanwhile, the Books on Tape company was founded in 1975, but book on tape is still commonly used as a synonym of audiobook.
From the northern edge of the world, specifically: the town of Inuvik NWT in Canada, from which a postcard showing this welcoming billboard:
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The card was from Chris Waigl (bought in Dawson City YT), who mailed it from the extremely small town of Chicken AK.
And now there’s a surprising lot of stuff to say about the card.
A Mr. Lovenstein comic, on the bagel and the donut hole:
(#1) “Oh, you don’t look Jewish”, said the donut hole to the bagel [AMZ]
This year on the Pride catwalk, it’s shorts and one-piece garments. In stunning show-off colors.
(Mostly about men’s bodies and mansex, flagrantly, in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Every year, as a lead-up to Stonewall Day, June 28th, comes a much more specific — male and sex-drenched — observance, a celebration of fellatio by men in public places: June 25th, the feast day of St. George Michael of the Beverley Tearoom:
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While the topic might strike you as mere gratuitous raunchiness, or this take on it as mere flippant cleverness, and I’ll cop to both the sexual vulgarity and the ostentatious playfulness, I’m also serious about mansex in public places as a set of social practices worthy of both systematic study and a celebratory appreciation of its values for its practitioners.
It looks simple at the start, but then (as Mark Liberman explained earlier today on Language Log, in “[REDACTED]’s “cocked and loaded”: a tangled history”), it gets intriguingly convoluted.
It starts with Iran shooting down an American drone, upon which Helmet Grabpussy first ordered a military strike on Iran and then called it back. Grabpussy tweeted:
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And with “cocked & loaded”, we were off into the worlds of technical terminology, formulaic expressions, and speech errors — and then, thanks to Bill Maher, gay porn videos.
Today’s Zippy, with Mr. Toad’s chide … deride … upbraid — a one-line poem and an exercise in lexical semantics:
(#1) Mr. Toad condescends to the counterman at the Nameless Diner
A week from today (on the 28th) is Stonewall Day, this year the 50th anniversary of the original event, which helped to catalyze a long tradition of homophile organizations and protests into annual Gay Pride events all over the world: events that are protests, defiant demonstrations, celebrations of community, and parties, all in one.
The occasion has presented the Disney companies with a public relations opportunity — if they play their cards right, they can be seen as celebrating diversity — and a business opportunity as well — they can sell Disney-identified products to the lgbt community (in special locations, for a limited time, not out in the public eye). Which brings us this carefully calculated Pride sale:
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First came the Frazz strip from yesterday, sent to me by John Baker because he thought it would be of special interest to me (for reasons that will quickly become clear):
(#1) Frazz, the school janitor who’s also a Renaissance man, copes with the puzzlement of one of the students
And then a visual composition with what is obviously a Magrittean disavowal — a visuoverbal humor form realized variously in (at least) paintings, drawings, cartoons, and web graphics (there’s a Page on this blog about it) — that appeared in numerous slightly different versions on Facebook recently, baffling me:
(#2) Ok, it’s not a moon, but what, I wondered, is it? And what does it have to do with the Magritte original?
(Men’s bodies and mansex, not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
In the Daily Jocks mailing yesterday, this heavily sexualized ad for WaterShorts swimwear (in black, aqua, lime, and coral), the first swimwear from the premium homowear company PUMP! (an old acquaintance on this blog) — with a caption of mine in run-on free verse:
(#1) The Magnficent WaterSports