Passed on by Billy Green last June, this hot news story from the website Only In American: For America, By Americans: a 6/26/17 posting by Marion Uncmeier, “Gays Invent Mini-Crossbow To Shoot Straight Men With Homosexual Chemtrail Tipped Toothpicks and Turn Them Gay”:
(#1) The gay crossbow
Two phallic postings from November:
on 11/5/17, “Alpine news for penises”, about a giant wooden penis on an Austrian mountaintop
on 11/6/17, “Revisiting 11: news for wooden penises”, about Finnish military “camp cocks” carved from wood and serving as talismans for the soldiers
Then from my friend K to me:
The mountain penis is fun. [The camp cocks one] unfortunately brings to mind too many instances of rape used as a weapon of war.
I went on to question her interpretation and to riff some on what a wooden penis might “mean”.
Sitting in my queue since last June, when Isla Flores-Bayer defended her Stanford linguistics dissertation. First, an informal announcement from John Rickford, one of Isla’s advisers (lightly edited by me):
Isla Flores-Bayer has successfully defended her PhD thesis on social meaning and stylistic variation in Chicano English. Her work is an important contribution to sociolinguistics and the study of Chicano English, innovatively combining a community study, a stylistic case study, and a perception/matched guise experiment
The exam was held in the Nitery in El Centro Chicano at Stanford, the first time they ever had a PhD oral exam there, and Director Frances Morales memorably and movingly said to Isla, during the open question session: “We waited many years for you to come along, and we are so proud of you!” Thanks to her and to other Centro staff, Elvira Prieto and Margaret Sena, for helping to get the conference room ready for this big event, and for supporting Isla so strongly during her Stanford years. And to Ramón Martinez, new prof in Education, for serving as outside chair, his first stint in this role, and the other members of the oral committee: Rob Podesva (co-adviser, with me), Penny Eckert, and Tom Wasow.
The principals in The Nitery:
(#1) Martinez, Wasow, Rickford, Flores-Bayer, Podesva, Eckert
An old Gary Larson cartoon:
(#1)
Maybe yes, maybe no. Painting a label L on something or affixing L to something is a kind of ostensive definition: This is an L. And ostensive definitions aren’t fail-safe: just how much of the thing L is associated with to is an L?
… and betting on baldness.
Through the Australasian Association of Philosophy’s Facebook page, this To φ Or Not To φ (Daily Nous Philosophy Comic) by Tanya Kostochka:
(#1) And that’s just the beginning: cf. I’m Louise with I’m your daughter
… and the stages of shirtless Kellan Lutz.
A little while back, I stumbled into watching the 2014 The Legend of Hercules for the, omigod, second time. Starring an immensely muscled Kellan Lutz as the great hero of myth, embedded in a famous stinker of a movie whose faults are at least in part linguistic. Though it does offer tons of glistening male flesh for aficionados.
(#1) Exhibit #1: Lutz as Hercules
The cartoon caption contest drawing in the most recent New Yorker:
(#1) Drawing by Michael Maslin, Contest #609, March 26, 2018
What elements do you need to recognize to compose a caption?
(There will some be free verse that is flagrantly sacrilegious and violently carnal, and there will be some outrageous art, and, yes, this posting’s about oral and anal sodomy between men, though with a mostly historical and literary cast — so you might want to exercise your judgment.)
It began with Penn State academic librarian (and my friend) Christopher (Xopher) Walker coming across a Facebook posting that began with the words “nameless sodomites”, which seized his attention. It was a publisher’s blurb for a new book in Italian on men’s sexuality and criminal behavior:
When I searched for the expression, I unearthed a reference (by the Cambridge Medievialist William Burgwinkle) to (Saint) Peter Damian seeing nameless sodomites through the confessional curtain. I then suspected that the phrase might have had some currency as a fixed expression — but in any event it’s a poetically arresting phrase, with the rather antique sodomite paired with an allusion to the medieval custom, in some places, of burning sodomites at the stake after priests had taken anonymous confessions of their mortal sins. Later custom, in the U.K. and the U.S. at least, was for sodomites to be named and shamed in court and then publicly hanged.
(Gay porn in several media, some featuring BDSM and other fetishes. Use your judgment.)
Annals of parodies and puns on titles, with a gay slant: Fifty Shades of Grey (the books and the movie), Justice League (the movie).
