Author Archive

30 twats in a field

July 19, 2015

Passed along by Mike Pope, this supremely annoying video clip in which a man poses what sounds like a question riddle to a woman, who can’t interpret the question, and the man, chuckling offensively, just goes on repeating the question. But if she didn’t get the trick early on, she’ll be stuck indefinitely in her incomprehension — and by the time her tormentor finally provides hints that might let her see the trick, there’s no hope she’ll get out of the processing hole she’s in.

I would label the man as an asshole or a total dick, but since the speakers are British, I prefer to call him a first-class twat.

But check it out for yourself:

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Geoffrey Nauffts

July 19, 2015

On Law & Order: Criminal Intent on cable this morning, an episode with a very familiar face that I couldn’t put a name to. The man turned out to be named Geoffrey Nauffts, but I still couldn’t place him. He’s a veteran actor on tv, in the movies, and on stage, as well as an award-winning playwright. And he’s openly gay. Here’s the playwright at his desk:

(#1)

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Briefly: Word retrieval errors based on semantics

July 19, 2015

A particularly nice error I committed in writing up “Late summer porn sales” (here):

now that Independence Day and gay pride days are past and Memorial Day is about six weeks in the future

Memorial Day instead of Labor Day.

This is, first of all, a semantics-based word retrieval error, rather than a phonologically-based one; Labor and Memorial are not at all phonologically similar, but they are semantically similar — both names of US holidays. Even better, they are semantically opposed: in a convention of US culture, Memorial Day is the beginning of the summer season, Labor Day the end of it.

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Sitcom watch: Ted Danson

July 19, 2015

On cable, episodes of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (the original CSI, set in Las Vegas) go by, including recent ones with Ted Danson as a crime scene investigator. Danson made his mark in the memorable sitcom Cheers, an ensemble comedy that addressed many serious themes during its 11 years.

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Protecting fictional brand names

July 19, 2015

It’s all about Duff Beer, on The Simpsons:

(#1)

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Morning names: Vibrafoam, Vibram

July 19, 2015

Two similar brand names, both kinds of portmanteaus, but otherwise very different: acoustic insulation, sturdy soles for shoes.

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The Importance of Being Incomprehensible

July 19, 2015

Yesterday’s Calvin and Hobbes:

Calvin continues his art criticism, now providing an artist’s statement in defense of his sidewalk art. (I have an aversion to artist’s statements, especially if they use the word Weltanschauung.)

Mirror image

July 18, 2015

A David Sipress cartoon in the July 20th New Yorker:

Looking at text in a mirror is one way to reverse the image. But so is looking at it from the back side of a glass window, as here. The bar’s customer is just going along with the reversal.

You do wonder about the pronunciation of the reversed text. (There are people who’ve gotten pretty good at “talking backwards” — reversing the acoustic signal. The linguist Yuen Ren Chao used to do this as a kind of parlor trick.)

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Late summer porn sales

July 18, 2015

(Mostly about gay porn and advertising for it, but there’s some language stuff in there.)

We’re into the latter part of the summer season, and there aren’t many occasions to celebrate in the US, now that Independence Day and gay pride days are past and Labor Day is about six weeks in the future. That presents a challenge for gay porn studios, who like to have holidays to hang sales on. Two of them —  C1R (Channel 1 Releasing) and TitanMen — have taken the challenge, with rather different approaches.

C1R wasn’t inventive; they just declared a “summer splash sale” and offered up chunks of their inventory, plus a new flick, It All Cums Down to Cock (cramming cum, the down of go down on, and cock into a six-word title). The material in their ad, reproduced in an AZBlogX posting (note: visually and verbally X-rated), is undistinguished except for a steamy shot from the new flick (with slim twink Devin Dixon admiring hunk Jason Phoenix’s penis).

But TitanMen went for playful cleverness, with a “Christmas in July” ad campaign (details on AZBlogX).

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“beat a urine”

July 17, 2015

At first glance this looks like word salad, and things aren’t helped much if I tell you that it’s a VP, that it’s attested, and that it wasn’t an inadvertent error. Context, we need context.

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