Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

Roll over, roll over

October 1, 2024

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to bring in October, a month that embraces: Hangul Day (10/9), a linguistic holiday (celebrating the excellent Korean orthography); NCOD, National Coming Out Day (10/11), a gay holiday (also, not accidentally, the JHT-AMZ wedding-equivalent anniversary, from the time long before same-sex marriage); and Halloween (10/31), a strange religiocultural holiday — the three occasions together in this parody of the Gunpowder Treason rhyme:

Roll over, Roll over
The first of October
Hangul, coming out, and black cat;
I have no doubt
That coming out
Is something to celebrate at!

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Gimme a Z, gimme an X

September 24, 2024

Mike Pope on Facebook yesterday, about this banner on e-mail that had come to him:

— MP: I mean, wtf is “Zix®” and why would this banner across an email in any way reassure me about anything?

Followed by this exchange between Mike and me:

— AZ > MP: Ordinarily, I’d expect you to look it up yourself, but as a Z-person (and indeed as Zot, son of Zip), I had to check it out myself. To discover that

Zix Email Encryption is now Webroot™ Advanced Email Encryption powered by Zix™

— MP > AZ: I CAN look it up, but I’m playing the part of Ordinary Email User here, for whom something like this banner is … nothing. … If I were spoofing/phishing emails, it would be very easy to add this same banner to my outbound emails to provide an illusion of security.

I take Mike’s point here, but will now forge on to something completely different, in a substantial alphabetic digression inspired by the trade name Zix, which manages to pack two association-rich letters from the end of the alphabet, Z and X, into a monosyllable.

But first, a note that the encryption company was not the first to see the imaginative potential in a Z…X name.

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Cadbury’s puds

September 6, 2024

On Facebook today, an astonished observation by Martyn Cornell:

It’s early September — must be time for selling Christmas confectionery in the supermarkets of Britain …

Providing us with this store display for Christmas versions of Cadbury’s Puds:


The original Cadbury Pud — a brand name —  is a Cadbury milk chocolate bar with a truffle centre, hazelnut pieces, and crunchy puffed rice pieces

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Acres of dildos

August 26, 2024

(Consider the title. I’m about to show you dildos by the bushel and talk about them rudely, so this posting is definitely not for kids or the sexually modest)

An e-mail summer sale offer from Fort Troff on 8/23 with the mail header:

For Ur D!ick Fix

What does my d!ick need for its fix? A boost from behind, in the form of dildos, acres of dildos:

46 total shapes + sizes
Each cock in 4 tones
Firm INNER core

184 different dildos, all soft on the outside, firm on the inside!

The Fort Troff ad, showing a happy young man luxuriating amidst acres of dildos:

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Accepting variation, or not

August 17, 2024

A brief posting designed to work my way towards further postings about recent exchanges with Richard Vytniorgu, on the occasion of his new book (released on 6/21):

RV, Effeminate Belonging: Gender Nonconforming Experience and Gay Bottom Identities, Emerald Publishing, 2024

My plans for posting about RV’s book spun off so many aspects of the work that I have been unable to organize this material into a coherent posting (while still getting through daily life, which has often been challenging in recent months), so I’ve temporized by posting little, more manageable essays on other, unrelated, topics. But I really have to get to some of the Effeminate Belonging material.

Today’s wedge into one bit of this material comes from a Peanuts comic strip, one that first appeared on 8/4/69 (posted recently on Facebook by Jeff Bowles);


Lucy relays to Linus their grandmother’s disapproval of his security blanket

Gramma’s disapproval is implicitly two-pronged. Prong 1 is that having a security blanket is, variously:

different, atypical, unusual, ill-adjusted, nonconforming

while Prong 2, unspoken, is that it is also

undesirable, reprehensible, even contemptible, potentially threatening

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For the quiet room, the loudest food

August 9, 2024

An Asher Perlman cartoon in the 8/12 issue of the New Yorker — deliberately contrived so as to present a puzzle in cartoon understanding:


(#1) Where are we? Who are those guys? What’s “the quiet room”? What’s “the loudest food on the planet”, and why would anyone want a bucket of it?

I ask these questions because it took me a while to get the cartoon; I was just baffled at first, distracted (as Perlman no doubt wanted me to be) by “the quiet room” and “the loudest food”, and so missed the counter with things for sale under it, and the machine with bits of stuff shooting into the air … oh, a popcorn machine! And then it all fell into place.

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Lowry, Looking Back

August 7, 2024

Like my earlier “Sparky Schulz and the least of us”, this was not my intention for a posting today, but you work with what you get, and what was delivered to me this morning was a paperback copy of Lois Lowry’s Looking Back: A Book of Memories (the 2017 revised and expanded edition; the first edition came out in 1998). The looking in the title alludes to the organization of the brief sections of the book around snapshots of LL, her family, and related subjects. In addition, apposite quotations from LL’s works head many of the sections.

The cover and the publisher’s blurb:


The cover of the book: a snapshot of LL and her sister Helen as girls, looking awkward in monstrously unflattering bathing suits

In this moving autobiography, Lois Lowry explores her rich history through personal photographs, memories, and recollections of childhood friends. Lowry’s writing often transports readers into other worlds. Now, we have the opportunity to travel into the real world that is her life. This edition features a refreshed design, an introduction by bestselling author Alice Hoffman, and material from Lois from the past twenty years, including the making of The Giver movie.

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Puns, clever and raunchy

July 28, 2024

Sunday (7/28) is once again Punday, with a clever pun from the PunHub site and a couple of raunchy puns in a gay porn ad on the Gay DVD Empire site. (Warning: the raunchy section is unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

Part 1: rounding up the sheep. (Let us sing: Bringing in the sheaves / Rounding up the sheep) Passed on to me this morning by Virginia Transue, this cartoon / meme from the PunHub site (whose name is itself a play, on PornHub — there’s also a PubHub, about UK pubs):


(#1) A little festival of phrasal verbs: round up ‘approximate (a number) by altering it to the next larger round number’ vs. round up ‘collect (animals) together for some purpose’

The lexical story from NOAD:

verb round: [with object] …  2 alter (a number) to one less exact but more convenient for calculations [AZ: especially in the PHRASAL VERBS round off / up / down]: we’ll round the weight up to the nearest pound | the committee rounded down the figure | let’s just round it off to an even ten dollars.  PHRASAL VERB round up [a] drive or collect a number of people or animals together for a particular purpose: in the afternoon the cows are rounded up for milking. …

with the direct object of the collecting verb round up understood metonymically, in the sheep-counting context, as the numerical size of the flock (rather than the flock itself).

The PunHub site is an enormous collection of puns (and dad jokes) with various accompaniments, including a store — at which you can order their 2023 book

Is This a Joke? No, It’s a Book!: 100 Puns and Dad Jokes from Instagram’s Largest Pun Comic Creator
by Conor Smith.

Part 2: bred & breakfast at the All the Way Inn. (Kids and the sexually modest should leave this posting NOW.) Also in this morning’s e-mail, from the Gay DVD Empire site, a sale pitch that includes this twice-punning item:


(#2) This time my association is not to a song, but to an antique dirty joke based on the question How far is the Old Log Inn? (To satisfy WordPress modesty, I’ve had to fuzz out four rock-hard pornstar dicks — but that lets us focus on their faces, their torsos, and (for three of them) their (interestingly varied) thigh muscles), plus the  breakfast items, all of which are intended as sexual symbols

I’ll get to some of the richness of this goofy image in a little while, but first the p.r. pitch from Gay DVD Empire, with some more gay porn word play:

It’s not just the eggs that are “over easy” at the All the Way Inn, NakedSword Originals’ Bred & Breakfast. Owned and operated by handsome proprietor Heath Halo, the B&B is nestled in the heart of Venice Beach, California, and, for some reason, it seems to attract the hottest traveling men. Take road-tripper Derek Kage, for example. His piercing eyes and stunning good looks pull Heath into a wild morning of edgy sex that leaves them both dripping wet. Then there’s hotel handyman Beau Butler, who’s ready to fix guest Sumner Blayne’s enormous leaking pipe. Later, Carter Collins and Damian Night celebrate their second anniversary by sunning themselves in the property’s garden, eventually helping to relax each other with hot oil and a passionate outdoor fuck. Things get a little more intense when Drew Valentino and Ty Santana take over one of the B&B’s deluxe suites to cement their dom/sub relationship with a fiery, raw fuck-down. Finally, Sean Xavier and Hazel Hoffman serve Heath their own kind of “breakfast in bed” right in the middle of the kitchen. Welcome to Bred & Breakfast: All the Way Inn, where guests check-in to check each other out.

The central puns. The name All the Way Inn puns on the location adverbial all the way in ‘fully inside’ (the asshole, in the gay porn context), while bred and breakfast puns on bed and breakfast / b&b ‘ a guest house or small hotel offering sleeping accommodations and a morning meal’ (NOAD), with bred being the PSP of the verb breed ‘pedicate bareback’ (verb pedicate ‘ to have insertive anal sex with (a man), to fuck (a man) in/up the ass, to ass-fuck (a man)’, adverb bareback‘without a condom’).

The visual symbolism of the components of breakfast. The first man pours coffee — the stream of coffee symbolizing the stream of piss in watersports. The third man holds a plate of pancakes, pancakes usually being a vaginal symbol, but in a gay context an anal symbol. The fourth man holds up a doughnut in one hand while balancing a tray of them with the other, the doughnut being a common symbol of the anal ring. So they’re all happily enjoying their b&b breakfast — everybody’s at least smiling, and the third, très gai, guy is laughing with pleasure — while symbolically engaging in a same-sex orgy.

So in its way the ad photo is charming and funny, four explosively sexy naked studs goofing off with one another and abusing their food and drink symbolically. Everybody’s going to get what he wants, maybe even what he needs.

 

Wrong window, said the sea lion, absurdly

July 27, 2024

This Charlie Hankin cartoon in the July 29, 2024 New Yorker:


(#1) Hankin is an old acquaintance on this blog; see the Page on my postings about his cartoons

The cartoon shows people queuing up at multiple windows in a bureaucratic office, each line for one type of applicant (as, in the US, at the (state) department of motor vehicles, the (federal) unemployment benefits office, or the municipal permits bureau), with one clerk for each line; in the cartoon, each queued applicant comes with some kind of ticket in hand. So far, that’s a familiar situation.

But then it’s made absurd when the clerks are aquatic mammals; a sea lion appears in the cartoon, which also refers to otters, but who knows what the other clerks are like: a manatee, a dolphin, a seal, a whale (or perhaps a polar bear, a beaver, a muskrat, a mink, a water shrew, a capybara or a hippopotamus) — given a choice, I would go to the otter or the capybara, but that’s my personal taste.

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Everything Nancy

July 18, 2024

Released on the 9th, a cartoon feast of a volume from Sunday Press (in Palo Alto), distributed by Fantagraphics: The Nancy Show: Celebrating the Art of Ernie Bushmiller by Peter Maresca and Brian Walker:


(#1) The cover: all about Nancy — but Sluggo’s not far away, and Ernie’s hovering over them both

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