A follow-up to yesterday’s posting “Certified queer”, a riff on a t-shirt that I posted about in 2022; the message on it is the playful 100% Certified Queer, and it has the the label QUEER in it.
Today’s posting focuses on four tees recently acquired or on their way to me soon: three with labels on them — GAY, PANSY, FAIRY — and one with gorgeous pansy flowers, the label being merely implicit. The gang of four.
The first of two postings about message-bearing t-shirts. This one is a riff on a tee that I posted about in 2022; its message is the playful 100% Certified Queer, and the label QUEER in it turns out to be a many-layered thing.
The posting to come later focuses on four tees recently acquired or on their way to me soon: three with labels on them — GAY, FAIRY, PANSY — and one with gorgeous pansy flowers, the label being merely implicit.
(Crude, but not actually X-rated; but the title is HOT PANTS HOMO, so it won’t be to everyone’s taste)
From Chris Ambidge on the Facebook group soc-motss on 8/10:
[CA:] I must have done something wrong — I’ve never seen a book like this on a bookstore shelf. Maybe I didn’t have enough Ovaltine™?
CA alludes to vintage ads for Ovaltine, notable (these days) for their use of the adjective gay ‘light-hearted, carefree’, e.g. “To Wake Up GAY in the Morning! Just Try this at Bedtime Tonight!” (see my 7/20/17 posting “Ovaltine mornings”).
After many grueling hours, I now have my books and DVDs sorted into (admittedly eccentric) categories on the bookshelves, in the various places the movers put the shelves. This task creates a series of insoluble puzzles in categorization, which I have been inclined to solve in an assortment of ad hoc ways.
There’s one giant category of linguistic structure, covering phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, arranged (in a desperate faute de mieux move) alphabetically by author — which is truly not useful, but resists breakup because so many of my interests cut across subareas. Similarly for a giant agglomeration of public-intellectual books, many (but not all) touching on matters of language; this is where you’ll find Geoff Nunberg, Arika Okrent, Steve Pinker, and Ben Yagoda.
Then there are more specialized topic collections: your library probably doesn’t have a subcollection on male prostitution or comics studies, but mine does. I’ve done less breaking down of the DVDs, because there aren’t a great many of them, but that has led to some surprising neighbors — as with the sequence of Marx Brothers movies, then My Neighbor Totoro, and then The Night of the Hunter.
But at least if it’s survived to get here, it’s on the shelves. Somewhere.
In my posting yesterday (3/26), “A fortuitous cold soup” Safeway’s house-brand tomato bisque combined with plenty of chopped clams (and some sriracha sauce for spiciness), served unheated (eventually, actually chilled): a (cold) clam-tomato bisque. With a bow to the movie The Wizard of Oz: tomatoes and spices and clams, oh my!
Which I will build up to by starting with bisques, and then running through
tomato juice, tomato soup, tomato bisque
clam juice, clam soup, clam bisque
and going on, at the urging of Tim Evanson on Facebook, to another meeting of clam with tomato, the commercial product Clamato, created as the basis for cocktails.
Let’s dive right in, to a back-and-forth on Facebook yesterday between Gadi Niram and me:
— GN: Pick a color from 1 to 10. [AZ thinks: obviously, lavender 7 — something that’s both a color and also a number from 1 to 10]
— AZ [actual reply]: parsley [something from yet a third, hitherto unmentioned, category, herbs] … alternatively: Benjamin Harrison [US Presidents] [separately, continuing the Still Another Category theme, Sophie Silberpup suggested: antelope, in the animals category]
[now breaking out into the form of three-part solutions to the mystery in the board game Clue] titanium, in 753 BC, with a ball-peen hammer [titanium, located in 753 BC, killed the victim using a ball-peen hammer]
— GN: You crack me up, dude!
— AZ: Three more shots [each a triple: responsible person or thing, location in space or time, instrument or accompaniment], dude, and then I rest.
Minerva, in Flagstaff, with a night-blooming cereus … a jackalope, in Ursa Major, with John Waters … the ulna, in Narnia, with Moomins
I note that the responses seem to be crystallizing, developing some internal organization, over time. Starting to approach poetry, rather than pleasurable nonsense.
Not that there’s anything wrong with pleasurable nonsense.
This Chris Hallbeck cartoon came by me on Facebook this morning — a strip packed with matters of science (paleontology, specifically), lexicography and usage (the senses of the noun dinosaur, and the contexts in which they’re used), and pragmatics (the way in which the noun is used in interactions, especially in language about language; in the enforcement of language norms; and, oh alas, in the relevance of things said to the interests of those participating in the speech context):
A Maximumble cartoon from 5/24/14, whose humor turns crucially on the pragmatic foolishness of the (now deceased) professor (in the face of a ravening monster, he stops to insist, irrelevantly in the context, that his companion must use the proper terminology, while the companion flees to safety); and which is based on the usage of the noun dinosaur — for a member of a clade of prehistoric reptiles bearing the zoological taxonomical label Dinosauria; versus, in non-technical American usage, for any dinosaurid creature, resembling the prototypical dinosaurs (many people have seen a family resemblance)
I’m Chiquito Quesito, and I’m here to say,
Cheese dip has to be made the Arkansas way
The jingle to go along with native Arksansan Bill Halstead’s reproducing (on 8/31) this silly dip pun he found on Facebook (from who knows what source):
(#1) The signage is for a dip in NOAD‘s sense 3a, wilfully misunderstood as about sense 2:noun dip: … 2 a thick sauce in which pieces of food are dunked before eating: tasty garlic dip. 3 [a] a brief downward slope followed by an upward one: the road’s precipitous dips and turns. [b] an act of sinking or dropping briefly before rising again: a dip in the share price.
And queso is short for chile con queso (‘chili with cheese’), which Wikipedia identifies as:
an appetizer or side dish of melted cheese and chili peppers, typically served in Tex-Mex restaurants as a dip for tortilla chips.
Now three further explorations: about dip signage; about dipspreads and dips in general, and varieties of queso in particular; and then some Facebook exchanges with Bill Halstead about cheese dip as a significant item in Arkansas’s food culture.
