(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:
(#1)
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.
Available in a number of designs on the net:
(#1)
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s “Ambiguity” entry (edited by Adam Sennet, first published 5/16/11, last substantive revision 2/8/16):
Fun fact: the word ‘ambiguous’, at least according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is ambiguous between two main types of meaning: uncertainty or dubiousness on the one hand and a sign bearing multiple meanings on the other. I mention this merely to disambiguate what this entry is about, which concerns a word or phrase enjoying multiple meanings.
In the technical literature on these things, the first notion is known as (among other things) vagueness, while the second is known as (linguistic) ambiguity. Ouch.
Today’s One Big Happy, with a now-classic mishearing:
(#1) the sky’s heard as this guy’s
In my 5/30/12 posting “Annals of mishearing”, discussion of the sky misheard as this guy, on several occasions.
(Men’s bodies, mansex, and sexual fetishes. Not for kids or the sexually modest.)
… given to exposing his ass, interracial mansex, and golden showers. Not your Irish uncle’s saint.
Intro illustration from Chris Ambidge on Facebook (ultimate source not known):
(#1) Shamrock butts on parade
(The young men appear to be wearing thongs, so that they are not strictly speaking exposing themselves.)
Then, more startlingly, the TitanMen sale for St. Patrick’s Day weekend, showing a black man rimming a white man (sale promo code KISSME). Why?
And finally, in the sextoy section of the TitanMen site, a full-scale replica of an erect penis that pisses on command. In chocolate (black), but also vanilla (white) and caramel (brown). Kinky.
Two from the January 29th New Yorker, a recent Bizarro, and yesterday’s Rhymes With Orange, all requiring considerable background knowledge to understand:
Yesterday’s posting “Rice pudding in the land of quilted steel” focused on diner rice pudding, but the Wikipedia article covers quite a large territory, including rice puddings in different cultures around the world and rice pudding in popular culture. On the latter front, there’s a humorous poem “Rice Pudding” by A.A. Milne (of Winnie the Pooh fame) that Benita Bendon Campbell has reminded me of. The poem takes off from the Anglo-American tradition of rice pudding as plain food for children or invalids — and shows young Mary Jane’s rebellion against the tradition: “She won’t eat her dinner – rice pudding again”.
Came up in a Facebook discussion involving Ann Burlingham and Aric Olnes, the catchphrase in this bit of digital art by Methune Hively:
off like a herd of turtles, referring to a very slow start or to slow progress after an auspicious start – based on the horse-racing announcer’s They’re OFF!, plus the legendary slowness of turtles, with the rhyming play thrown in.
Today’s Zippy lumbers through some plays on bear, in a bear chair:
(#1) The bear figure as both comforting and threatening
Bear chairs, gay bears, flags, and more.