I’ll get to the fangs and the pumpkin eventually, but first a taxonomic puzzle in botany and two botanical puzzles in (Mexican) Spanish, triggered by this Pinterest photo from a while back:
(#1) [as captioned by its (Mexican) poster] Lirio plantasonya
(Several shirtless people, in case that annoys or distresses you, but otherwise mostly about music.)
According to my calendar, today is both World Naked Gardening Day and World Accordion Day, which naturally led me to imagine a naked gardener playing the accordion. But my calendar turns out to be half wrong: World Accordion Day is fixed on May 6th; World Naked Gardening Day, on the other hand, is a movable feast, the first Saturday in May, which this year was the 4th.
However, the two occasions did coincide exactly in 2017, and at least one accordion-playing gardener squeezed nude for that occasion.
Another posting about the objects of everyday life and how good design can provide us with small pleasures. In this case, the wooden arches that grace my condo complex, serving as entrance ways on the street, as trellises for vines, and as decorative elements for people on the street as well as for those of us inside the complex. The current installation (recently repaired):
(#1) Dark-stained wood in the morning sun: four uprights; horizontally on top, two lintels (lintels going left to right) deep and ten rafters (rafters going front to back) wide; ivy climbing on the two front uprights
(That’s my place, 722, on the left, the stairs to 718 and 720 on the right.)
The repair job replaced the right back upright and all the stuff on top. Some details below
(Hunky male models in very little; lots of lexicography to come in later postings, but here lots of plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex, so not advised for kids or the sexually modest.)
The 3/37 Daily Jocks ad in e-mail — with the header Bottomless Shorts 😳 — now with a caption of mine:
(#1)
He navigated the
Corridors of the Blue
Boy Bar, savoring its
Pygian gloom, signaled
Red in the smoky
Dusk of desire, whispered
Shoot me, please,
Shoot the Moon
It starts with a monstrously meatless “Reuben” sandwich and ends in the villages of England’s East Midlands in the 19th century. The links: Reuben the sandwich and Reuben the name, kale the leafy green and Cale the name.
One of the breakfast specials at the Palo Alto Creamery this morning was (FCWB):
Fried Chicken Waffle Benedict
That’s parsed:
[ [ Fried Chicken ] Waffle ] [ Benedict ]
‘eggs Benedict on a fried chicken waffle’, that is, on a waffle with (Southern) fried chicken on it. (Actually, the original is short for Fried Chicken Waffle Eggs Benedict, but that would have been too long to get on the specials board.)
Immediately, I wondered if FCWB was a subsective compound — did this thing count as an instance of a Benedict, that is, as eggs Benedict? — or was its name resembloid, the dish merely (metaphorically) Benedict-like? (See the Page on this blog about postings on resembloid composites.) My immediate judgment was clear: for me, FCWBs are just too far from the BENEDICT category: the waffle too distant from an English muffin, the fried chicken too distant from a slice of ham, and anyway the thing came with maple syrup, as (soul-food) chicken waffles do, and sweet Benedicts are way over the line for me.
But then I looked at recipes on the net, where the world of things called Benedict is far larger than my Benedict world, and where cooks make FCWBs and restaurants serve them. And I felt obliged to entertain the possibility that there are people who think that the BENEDICT category (with dishes called Benedicts in it) includes FCWBs in it. The answer to the query about the status of the compound might well be: resembloid for some, subsective for others. That wouldn’t be unparalleled.
Having tackled the Christmas season as a whole, Sandra Boynton examines one specific day: on FB yesterday, with “A helpful tip on National Pfeffernüsse Day” (December 23rd):
(#1)
On peppernuts. And on the recipe register (here: Recipe Object Omission in roll thoroughly in confectioners’ sugar).
Another chapter in the delineation of regions (areas, territories) — there’s a Region-talk Page on this blog listing my postings on the topic — prompted by my coming across various sites referring to Switzerland as a central European country. I was puzzled: Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, maybe Austria, ok, but Switzerland? If Switzerland is in central Europe, what’s in western Europe?
The answer is: not much. France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, maybe Luxembourg. Having a coastline on the North Sea seems to be a necessary condition, but not a significant one: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden count as northern European (or Scandinavian), and Germany as central European. Whoa, Germany is in central Europe? What happened to the western European alliance, with the UK, France, and Germany as its major elements?
It’s a now-familiar story: different categories are delineated for different sociocultural — or other — purposes, with many transitional zones (lacking clear boundaries) and with political boundaries standing in, faute de mieux, for actual boundaries, though the categories cut across and subdivide political units.
The error, as reported in HuffPo (among many other news sources) on the 13th: by Jenna Amatulli,
New Zealand Newspaper [the Gisborne Herald] Flubs Stan Lee’s Obituary, Writes ‘Spike Lee Dies’
(#1)
Inadvertent errors in retrieving words are common, especially in speech. Some are primarily motivated on phonological grounds, some primarily on semantic grounds, but typically both effects are relevant (some details in a moment). Inadvertent errors in retrieving proper names are particularly common, because everyone experiences a monumental number of proper names, with new ones popping up on a daily basis. In this context, Spike Lee for Stan Lee would be an entirely unsurprising error in name retrieval.
In today’s comics feed, a One Big Happy that requires a double dose of pop-cultural moon knowledge to understand:
(#1)
A defiant gesture, a bit of lycanthropic folklore.
