Today’s dialogue between Mother Goose and Grimm:
(#1)
It’s all about the semantic relationship between the two Ns in the N + N compound wrinkle cream.
Author Archive
Wrinkle cream
October 13, 2017Clowns and their balloon animals
October 13, 2017Yesterday’s Bizarro:
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
The old cartoon meme of the clown and his balloon animals, but now seen from the viewpoint of one of the animals, who experiences the clown’s manipulations of balloons as really creepy chiropractice.
Political wagyu
October 13, 2017The gustatory-political text for today:
Rage against the media is political Wagyu for the president’s base. (NYT, “[REDACTED]’s Attacks on the Press: Telling Escalation From Empty Threats” by Michael M. Grynbaum on 10/12/17 on-line)
Traveling around with Zippy
October 13, 2017(Fun with names and language play, but mostly Zippyesque popular culture in many manifestations.)
In recent days, Zippy has gone to a psychic shop (offering “crystals, past lives, tarot cards”), to the Tropical Treat in Hanover PA, to Luna Park in Sydney (NSW), to the ghost of a Mickey Rooney hotel in Downington PA, and to the ghost of the Justin Time diner in Meriden CT.
Swords up on Friday the 13th
October 13, 2017Today is the baleful day Friday the 13th, and in the Halloween season to boot, so the Michael Lucas gay porn film company has packaged a $13 membership offer featuring Friday the 13th‘s Jason, in his hockey mask, brandishing a tremendous meat-sword. A cropped version:
(#1)
Earth Dean
October 13, 2017A brief note on a personnel change at Stanford, announced in the Stanford Report this morning:
(#1) The new Earth Dean, with lilies-of-the-valley (and a purple calla lily)
Geologist Stephan Graham has been named dean of the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences, Provost Persis Drell has announced.
Ascending and parting
October 13, 2017Two cartoons from the October 16th New Yorker: a Jason Adam Katzenstein riff on the Ascent of Man cartoon meme and an Emily Flake & Rob Kutner absurdist updating of Rick and Ilsa at the airport:
(#1) “I’m going to e-mail you this op-ed about how your generation is ruining everything.”
(#2) “If you don’t get on that plane…there’s also the 5:43, then the 9:27, but that’s got a layover in Atlanta, then…”
To understand these cartoons, you need a lot of background information, and you also need to recognize the scenes depicted in them: in #1, the Ascent of Man meme; in #2, a specific scene from the 1942 movie Casablanca. (If you don’t know Rick’s passionate speech to Ilsa in that film, #2 might only seem ditheringly silly.)
The pizza boy as cultural figure
October 12, 2017(Mostly cultural analysis, focused on gay porn. But plenty of very plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex, so this is not for kids or the sexually modest.)
(#1)
The pizza boy archetype, as depicted by young Melbourne artist Allain de Leon in DNA Magazine, April 2013
The figure is a package of symbolic content and associations, among them: the desirable youth; the delivery figure, someone who comes to your door bearing pleasurable goods for money; pizza as an American cultural emblem of warm informal social associations; and a cluster of associations of food with sex, some more general, others specific to pizza slices and whole pizza pies
The trigger for this posting is a recent ad for C1R/Catalina Video, with a sale on a new release — Pizza Boy 4 – Slice of Pie — and the three earlier films in the series, starting with Pizza Boy: He Delivers (William Higgins, 1986). The ads, which are way XXX-rated, are available in a posting on AZBlogX (“Another slice of pizza boy”). But here: a salacious image of pizza boy Steve Henson from the first film, a classic of gay porn:
Pizza Boy outtakes
October 12, 2017(About English, but in the context of a gay porn flick, with plain-language discussions of men’s bodies and mansex, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Two items of linguistic interest that came up in preparing a posting (soon to appear) on pizza boys as cultural figures, especially in gay porn, the great work of the genre being William Higgins’s 1986 The Pizza Boy: He Delivers. From scene 5 of the movie, the sexual slang canyon yodeling ‘anilingus’ and an occurrence of underwear as a plural count N.
Performance ambiguity
October 10, 2017A recent One Big Happy plays on play:
Play the Moonlight Sonata. Play the piano. Play the Moonlight Sonata on the piano.