Noted on a sign in Dan Gordon’s in Palo Alto yesterday — a place that specializes in barbequed meat, especially brisket and pulled pork. Meanwhile, I like pig butts and I cannot lie, with its double entendre play on butt, has apparently achieved meme status; it’s now available in many forms, including t-shirts from several suppliers:
(#1)
Yesterday, a posting on the story of a joke (Not Lady: Wife, NL:W for short) whose canonical form is
A: Who was that lady I saw you with last night?
B: That was no lady; that was my wife.
The vector for the spread of the joke seems to have been the vaudeville team Weber & Fields, who allegedly used it in their stage routines over a century ago. But I found no first-hand reports, so I appealed to the hounds of ADS-L for attestations. This netted a clear occurrence from 1859, but embedded in a long and complex back story (though again with the stage German accent of W&F). And an earlier British antecedent.
Then Larry Horn chimed in with some astute observations on the semantics and pragmatics of NL:W.
All will be reproduced here.
The lead-in tag to my recent posting on marmots:
That’s no beaver, that’s my marmot!
A take-off on a punchline to a vaudeville joke from long ago, a line that’s been played with many thousands of times in the last century. The No Lady: Wife (NL:W) formula, in two common instantiations in a two-man exchange:
1 A: Who was that lady I saw you with last night?
B: She was no lady. She was my wife.2 A: Who was that lady I saw you with last night?
B: That was no lady; that was my wife.
Restrain the impulse to reply “Gilroy was here” (I’ll get to that below); the title is an echo of my 7/7/15 posting “Where is Ojai?”, which was about whether the city of Ojai, in Ventura County CA, is in California’s Central Coast region or in in the South Coast region (along with Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties).
Just so for Gilroy, a city in (far southern) Santa Clara county: is it in the Central Coast region, or in the Bay Area region on the northern California coast?
Ojai and the rest of Ventura County are in a cultural liminal zone, between central and south; and Gilroy and neighboring Santa Cruz county are in a cultural liminal zone, between central (with small cities, picturesque open spaces, and extensive rural or semi-rural areas) and Bay Area (mostly dense urban and surburban settlement).
I stumbled onto the Gilroy question through food, specifically through Original California Style Hot Pepper Sauce, made in Gilroy (but encountered on a table at the Peninsula Fountain Grill, here in Palo Alto), whose makers advertise:
Pepper Plant Pepper Sauce was developed by a lover of spicy peppers who wanted to enjoy their unique taste year round. Pepper Plant quickly became a favorite of the California Central Coast.
The Pepper Plant folks seem pretty clear that they’re on the Central Coast (along with Watsonville, Salinas, Monterey, and Carmel) — at the northern tip of the region, granted, but in it.
In the August 28th New Yorker‘s “Goings On About Town” section, announcing the end of this year’s HVSF season:
Beautiful natural vistas, drama, and history come together at Boscobel House and Gardens, home of the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, about ninety minutes north of the city. Exciting unplanned confluences, such as a convoy of helicopters flying over “Macbeth,” occur regularly [thus making a virtue out of inconvenience]. “A Week of Revolution” (Aug. 27-Sept. 4) will include reënactments, picnics, hikes, and a staging of Richard Nelson’s play “The General from America,” about Benedict Arnold, who tried to hand his command of West Point — visible across the river — over to the British.
An intriguing program, but what caught my eye was the name Boscobel for the house and estate. Long familiar to me, but seen in a new light after two Bosco postings on this blog: from the 20th, on Bosco chocolate syrup and the 25th, on Don Bosco (St. Giovanni / John Bosco).
Eventually this will lead us to Miltonian bosky dells and dogs named Bosco (one of whom got elected mayor of Sunol CA some years ago).
Underwear ads again (from today’s Daily Jocks sale), with captions from me. Men’s bodies, mansex allusions, not for everyone.
(#1) Sweat with me, baby
Solid Chet the gym jock
Sweats hard
Lick the salt he’ll
Towel you off
(#2) Lowriders on the storm
Lean Bo the surf jock
Goes low pull him
Lower use your
Teeth those trunks are
Made for cruising
Sweaty Chet and lowball Bo.
Yes, genitals on your nails (Lat. unguis (Nom.), unguinis (Gen.) ‘fingernail’). Not for kids or the sexually modest.
From Katie Schmitz a few days back, a link to “This Vagina Nail Art Is Perfect For When The Patriarchy’s Got You Down” on the Femalista site on 8/19/17:
Protests against pre-shredded cheese in today’s Bizarro:
(#1)
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
A punning play on the political slogan Make America Great Again.
Note red baseball caps on several of the protesters.
(References to mansex in public places in the second part of this posting, so that section is not for kids or the sexually modest.)
The July 24th issue of the New Yorker, p. 9, with announcements of two art shows in NYC, one (still life photographs of food by Sandy Skoglund) involving an old artistic acquaintance of mine, one (a group show with two paintings by Lucas Michael) including an artist unfamiliar to me, but LM’s theme of glory holes at an LA sex club caught my eye.
Also no blue jays, but the three-NP version has the best music.
This is mostly about pests and my life, but there’s language and music in there too. Also a pro wrestler performing angry rejection:
(#1) Daniel Bryan of WWE’s SmackDown show
I’ll start with my pests (in more or less chronological order) and go on to uses of negation.
