Archive for the ‘Shoes’ Category

Je suis Monsieur Pantoufles

November 19, 2025

Today’s morning name (pure playfulness after a long night of uneasy sleep fragmented by joint pain): from the Cambridge French-English dictionary, the noun

pantoufle (fem.): slipper;  a loose, soft kind of shoe for wearing indoors


(#1) An array of pantoufles (from the Cambridge dictionary)

Considered as a nonsense word, it’s silly-sounding in French, or when borrowed into English as /pæntúfǝl/, which sounds like a cousin of kerfuffle.

But then the things it denotes are often indulgences — playfully pleasurable in design, material, or color (as in #1), so that the word comes with an air of the ridiculous, both in sound and in meaning.

An air that carries over to uses of pantoufle as a name. Two of which I now explore: an imaginary rabbit Pantoufle, from the world of fiction; and me as Monsieur Pantoufles, the woolly moccasins guy. (more…)

Slip into a plush penguin

November 26, 2024

From Chris Ambidge (one of the Wardens of the Spheniscid Zarchives) on Facebook this morning:


(#1) [CA > AZ:] Arnold! Have you considered … penguin slippers? Keeping Feathers McGraw underfoot might be the best way to make sure he doesn’t get into mischief

From the Coddies website:

Coddies® Wallace & Gromit Feathers McGraw slippers:

Silent but villainous, Feathers McGraw is the ultimate plush slipper icon!

Slip into the soft embrace of Wallace & Gromit’s Feathers McGraw himself with Coddies’ new plush slippers, designed to capture the essence of Aardman’s criminal mastermind. They fit like a glove – not unlike the red rubber glove perched atop Feathers’ head – a disguise so brilliant in its simplicity that it once outwitted Wallace and even the local law enforcement.

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A second look at a shirt-spreading Beau Butler

October 28, 2024

(Entertaining and enlightening, I hope, but definitely not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Yesterday, in my posting “Beau Butler’s shirt” (about shirt-lifting as sexual invitation, and gay porn actor Beau Butler as a practitioner), I ended with a photo of BB engaged instead in shirt-spreading (or -opening), to display his muscular torso (muscular but not ripped like a bodybuilder’s):


(#1) [from the caption there:] … a suave but intense BB

An unusual presentation for BB; he’s characteristically earthy, cheerily (even playfully) crude, brazenly shirtless, bearing with him an aura of powerful male sweat. But the guy in this photo is, as I said, suave — with styled hair (oh! much browner than in other photos, where it’s definitely black), elegant eyebrows, very light facial hair, and (another oh!) piercingly blue eyes. Meanwhile, the handsome light lavender shirt he’s spreading is much more stylish than the t-shirts BB wears when he’s not going shirtless. Even the shirt-spreading gesture is a smoother move, less overtly sexual, than the shirt-lifting of BB’s other photos in yesterday’s posting.

The anomalies pile up. Is this, then, actually BB, or is it a simulacrum of him, presumably AI-generated?

Almost surely a simulacrum, as I’ll argue in a bit. But first, one more (genuine) photo of BB — there are tons of them, mostly with him naked or minimally clothed, available in copies all over the net; most of them are clearly from studios he’s worked for — with him, wearing only boots and socks, doing a crude tush push, jokily advertising his availability as a really fine fuck.  Managing to be really goofy and really arousing at the same time. To compare with #1 above.

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Speeding into the 20th century

September 15, 2024

Encountered on Pinterest today, this cover of Collier’s magazine from 1/19/1907: an early J.C. Leyendecker work of gay soft porn in the style of classical sculpture (an art form that lets the artist get away with a lot), which is also a hymn to rapid transport in the early 20th century:


“The Speed God” posed with a stylized caduceus against a hot air balloon, while the messenger of the Roman gods poses his muscular body on the hood of an early automobile

And then there are Mercury’s truly fabulous winged sandals, which appear to be living creatures in their own right.

(JCL appears every so often on this blog — most recently in my 9/2 posting “Leyendecker Labor Day”.)

 

 

Meat shoes

July 19, 2024

From Ruth Lawrence on Facebook yesterday, a version of these meat-shoe photos, which had come to her on the net (the way things are customarily passed around, without sourcing):


(#1) The meat shoes

But since what #1 depicts is clearly the (most entertaining) referent of the POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau)

beef Wellington boots = beef Wellington (the food preparation) + Wellington boots (the footwear), referring to (simulacra of) Wellington boots fashioned from beef Wellington

I could quickly track them down to a source —

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Three shoeshis

January 6, 2024

Yesterday, in my posting “Today’s food punmanteau”, about this composition:

(#1)

The memic shoeshi is a work of art, made (mostly) from food; it is neither edible nor wearable — though it could be deconstructed, and some of its materials eaten.

In other occurrences, shoeshi is in fact food — edible sushi in the shape of a shoe.

In still others, shoeshi is in fact footgear — footwear in the shape of sushi.

And that’s what’s up f6r Epiphany: 👑 👑 👑 the three shoeshis — the art (above), the food, and the footwear.

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Today’s food punmanteau

January 5, 2024

(Today has been difficult, so this is the best I can do in the way of posting — opening up a topic for further postings, soon to come.)

It starts with this memic shoeshi image I encountered today on Facebook, passed on through various friends and acquaintances, as these things are. A truly wonderful composition:


The memic shoeshi; shoeshi here is a punmanteau: a pun and a portmanteau

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Fur stoles, furry boots, and f*cking like minks

November 26, 2023

(Note this posting’s title — it’s totally not for kids or the sexually modest)

It’s all about fucking in fur: two scenes from the MEN.com gay porn flick Norse Fuckers in which men mate wildly and promiscuously, like the proverbial fur-bearing carnivores, while wearing fluffy fur stoles (which they discard as impediments when they dig into their pronging) and delightful furry boots (which stay on, even while the men, otherwise stark naked, are fucking their mates).

There will be pictures.

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Against the chill of winter

November 11, 2023

It’s suddenly wintry-cold here: night-time lows in the low 40s F, day-time highs only flirting with 70 F, and then just briefly for a moment in the afternoon. It’s time to sleep warm — break out the quilts — and dress warm — it’s flannel-shirt weather — and abandon going barefoot, in favor of (if you are me) savoring the warmth of shearling-lined moccasins (which are also kind to my huge and painful bunions). Yes, there will be pictures.

But I will be brief. Like my previous two postings, this is a Posting Through Pain; the middle finger on my right hand is no longer visibly inflamed, but the first joint is still hugely swollen and painful — and, now, so are almost all of the joints on both of my hands, so typing is harrowing, and I can manage only brief bursts of writing at the keyboard.

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Three words to marvel at

November 1, 2023

🐇 🐇 🐇 trois lapins to inaugurate November, the final month of autumn or spring (depending on which hemisphere you’re in), and celebrate the Day of the Dead. A day on which we’ll enjoy three English words that have entertained posters on Facebook (from now on, FB) recently: calceology ‘the study of footwear’; telamon ‘male figure used as an architectural pillar’; and hallux ‘the first and largest toe (on a human foot)’.

At this point, you might admit that these terms are English words but, quite rightly, object that it would be bizarre to talk about expressions that almost no speakers of English know or use as words of English. Certainly, if I asked you whether English has a word for the study of footwear, you’re almost surely going to say no, because part of our everyday understanding of word of English is that such an expression has some currency, and hardly any speakers of English know or use the expression calceology.

On discovering the technical term calceology, then, you might be willing to say that the term is an English word, or maybe even a word in English, but still balk at saying it’s a word of English. It should by now be clear that we’re dealing with distinct concepts here, and grappling, awkwardly, with putting labels on them. At least one fresh label is called for. I’ll hold off on choosing a label to cover the territory that includes words of English until after I’ve looked at three other characteristics of CTH — calceology, telamon, and hallux — separate from their lacking currency.

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