In today’s comics feed, a One Big Happy that requires a double dose of pop-cultural moon knowledge to understand:
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A defiant gesture, a bit of lycanthropic folklore.
Archive for the ‘Categorization and Labeling’ Category
Arousing the beast
November 7, 2018The holidays of our lives
October 27, 2018(Near the end, there will be a hunky male model wearing nothing but a Halloween jockstrap. A warning in case you’d prefer to avoid a holiday men’s underwear discussion.)
Yesterday’s Zippy features a Dingburg-local idiomatic holiday:
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Of course, I immediately went to sources to discover what was celebrated on October 26th. Well, not only is October National Pumpkin Month, the 26th is the day specifically devoted to the fruit of Cucurbita pepo, this orange squash / gourd / melon / cucurbit: National Pumpkin Day. The day ushers in the Pumpkin Season, which is prefigured by a period in which pumpkin spice erupts as a ubiquitous descriptor of foods and much more (see my 10/20/17 posting “A processed food flavor”); which embraces a number of Halloween-specific cultural practices and symbols (jack-o-lanterns, dressing up in costumes, and trick-or-treating, plus witches and black cats as symbols — and orange and black as a decorative theme); and which is culinarily realized in pumpkin pie as a holiday food for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.
So pumpkin pie can last you from mid-October to early January. Meanwhile, some riffs on the cartoon and some on edible pumpkiniana.
Fruit bars
October 9, 2018No, no gay content, just food, not places, starting with (baked) lemon bars featured in the latest Pinterest mailing I got:
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With a brief digression to frozen fruit bars, this will take us to apricot bars (as baked by Monique Serpette Transue) and other cookie-like finger foods based on dried fruits (something of a challenge for taxonomists of food).
Nomenclature as destiny
October 9, 2018A Scott Hilburn cartoon from 4/24/18:
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As they are called, so shall they serve. So says the law.
Another ubertwink
October 5, 2018(Discussion of men’s bodies and mansex in very plain terms, photos of naked, though not quite X-rated, men, so not at all for kids or the sexually modest.)
Liam Riley, actually an ubertwink we’ve seen before, but now — to celebrate the completion of a “Twinks” Page on this blog (with links to postings on twink as a body type, a persona, and a sexual identity) — viewed in conjunction with his CockyBoys stable-mate Levi Karter.
Levi and Liam, Levis and lace, (more) butch and (more) femme, twink and near-twink (more muscles, swimmer body type). Both playful, affectionate, and (professionally) adorable. And competitors in the Ace Ass department.
For comparison: Levi left and Liam right:
Fruit cream tarts, one with pansy
September 14, 2018(Not suitable for Facebook, because double entendres and incidental naked men, but not actually X-rated. Mostly about food.)
Fruit cream tarts, one with pansy. Plus a little Echeveria plant. These are more birthday presents from the 6th, from Juan Gomez and the aging care company he works for (a big tart — not merely una tarta, but un tartone — plus the little succulent) and from Kim Darnell (a cute fruit cream tartlet with a pansy).
The penis art of David the Robot
August 26, 2018… plus — surprise! — reflections on occupational labels and on limericks.
(There will be discussions of male genitalia and mansex, but no X-rated images; these are isolated in an AZBlogX posting yesterday, “Dave the Robot takes pen in hand”. The posting below isn’t couched in street language, but it cites some street language, some of the limericks are dirty, and other parts of its content might be unsuitable for the sexually modest or for kids.)
The XBlog posting begins (#1 and #2 there) with a drawing — entitled “Bros” — of two naked men whose penises are embracing. Cropped here to show the sketchbook style (a kind of deliberate artlessness) of the drawing:
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Then on to the artist, who has achieved some sort of fame via raunchy sketches on Instagram featuring genitalia and bodily fluids.
“The hell is that guy doing?”: predator-truncated QuEx
August 23, 2018The word from predators, in this Jake Likes Onions cartoon (by Jake Thompson):
(#1) Title: “Maybe he’s running from the truth”
Predator 2 omits the what of what the hell (in a Wh, or constituent, question What is that guy doing? with the question word what emphatically extended by the expletive the hell).
About the syntax, and then about the strip and the artist…
Ruthie and the language of doughnuts
August 3, 2018The One Big Happy from July 5th, in which Ruthie and Joe get some dubious advice from their father:
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Their dad’s advice will no doubt warm the hearts of language teachers and multiculturalists, but it’s dubious as practical advice for everyday life.
Meanwhile, Ruthie wrestles with the question of how to get a language name from the noun doughnut / donut. Donuttish (with an all-purpose adjective-forming suffix, –ish) would certainly be possible, but, probably on the model of Dutch, Ruthie goes for Donutch, that is, Donut-ch (this is spoken, rather than written, by Ruthie, so it could have been spelled Donutsh, like Welsh).
(It tickles me to think of the language name as Dutchnut, a portmanteau of Dutch and doughnut. Or maybe that should be the name of the food.)
In any event, Ruthie has stumbled slant-wise onto the idea that doughnuts are of Dutch origin — an idea that confuses words and things, labels and the categories they label, but nevertheless incorporates a genuine bit of history.
Sticks and cubes
July 4, 2018It’s all about measuring butter. I said to Kim (who was preparing for a grocery run tomorrow) that I could use a stick of butter for cooking, and she was surprised: “I thought you’d say cube, not stick.” Me: “I don’t think I’ve ever said cube of butter in my life. It sounds weird to me.” So of course we went searching, and found considerable confusion.
Quite a few people asked what cubes of butter were; that means they’d somehow come in contact with the usage. They got two very confident, but very different, answers:
cube-1: a synonym of stick, where stick is as in this NOAD definition (essentialy the same as OED3’s):
noun stick: US a quarter-pound [4-oz.] rectangular block of butter or margarine.
cube-2: a quarter-stick of butter, hence (at least roughtly) a 1-oz. cube of butter
