Archive for the ‘Furnishings and tools’ Category

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The passing domestic scene: waterfalls

October 18, 2025

The second installment on recent events in my life (yesterday’s posting “The passing domestic scene: biopsies”, covering 10/2 to the present, was the first).

Today’s story begins on the morning of 10/7. I was intently focused on a cute posting about a Bizarro cartoon — “The flannel frontier”, finally posted on 10/9 — when I became peripherally conscious of the sound of running water. Really loud running water. Had I left a faucet running?

I looked up from my keyboard, to witness waterfalls streaming from the ceiling in four places, drenching everything below them, pooling on the carpeting in the living room and surging in a wave into the little hallway to the bathroom.

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Posted in Clothing, Family life, Furnishings and tools, Language and the body, My life | 1 Comment »

Cellarettes and cabinet drinks

October 9, 2025

Adventures in furniture inspired by a Benjamin Dreyer posting on Facebook yesterday:

Goshamighty, I completely forgot to mention, when I posted my Old Acquaintance piece a few hours ago, that in commencing this morning to read John Van Druten’s 1942 The Damask Cheek (co-written with one Lloyd Morris), I learned a new word! It’s cellarette: “a movable cabinet or container, often made of wood, designed to store and secure alcoholic beverages.”

If there’s a more perfect word to turn up in a play set in “The library of MRS. RANDALL’s house in the East Sixties, New York. December 1909,” [the  setting of The Damask Cheek] I can’t think of it.

BD locates the sociocultural milieu of the item (and then its name as well) as privileged urban upper class — traditional, elegant, and elite — and we will see that his classdar is first-rate.

I then broke in with the news that I have one of these things, a very nice one, of Danish design, made of teak, on wheels, with a durable bar top, in two parts that slide open to reveal the storage spaces within (there will be photos). I am neither elegant nor elite — I have several good points, but they are not these — but this clever and handsome object suits me (and it was mine and Jacques’s, and before that mine and Ann’s, so it comes with with waves of sweet memory; I will soon pass it on to my grand-child Opal).

But first, the cellaret / cellarette. The object and the name.

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Posted in Furnishings and tools, Language and food, Language play, Music, My life, Plays, Social class | Leave a Comment »

The Venus bear trap

September 26, 2025

In today’s Bizarro cartoon, a hybrid portmanteau, a portmanteau name for one kind of hybrid referent, a referent with an assortment of features drawn from the referents of the contributing expressions; think of triceradoodle (referring to a hybrid of a triceratops and a poodle cross) = triceratops + doodle ‘a poodle cross’ (to be illustrated below):


(#1) Venus flytrap + bear trap = Venus bear trap: the appearance of a giant Venus flytrap leaf, with the bait of a foothold bear trap (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

To come: details about the two contributing referents, the Venus flytrap and the (foothold) bear trap; then a factor that makes this portmanteau especially rich and satisfying, in contrast to the less complex (but far more preposterous) triceradoodle.

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Posted in Furnishings and tools, Language and animals, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »

The rainbow made us gay, the penguins say

August 26, 2025

From Steven Levine on 8/19, this image from a Facebook group on thrift store finds, about a rectangle of needlepoint (probably intended to be a wall hanging) depicting penguins marching from left to right, through a rainbow, each emerging from the other side with its body, inside and out, in one of the colors of the gay pride flag; the rainbow makes them gay:


(#1) Steven of course thought of me, but appreciated that this would not be the time to be giving me penguiniana, so contented himself with letting me enjoy the strange spectacle

I’d never seen anything quite like it. Marching penguins, yes, of course. Penguins in the colors of the gay pride flag, of course. I’ve posted both. But the preposterous fantasy of penguins getting gay-transmuted by passing through a rainbow, absolutely not. And then to realize it not in drawing, painting, or trick photography, but in the unpretentious craft medium of needlepoint, where we expect earnest images (stylized birds) and slogans (BLESS THIS HOME), well, that’s wonderfully goofy.

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Posted in Art, Color, Furnishings and tools, Gender and sexuality, Penguins, Rainbow, Rainbows | Leave a Comment »

I’m happy that you quilted me

August 25, 2025

(Towards the end, some coarse sexual slang referring to fellatio, which some readers will want to avoid)

After years of service on my bed, the delightful images quilt was sent off on Saturday for dry-cleaning and some stitching repair, and I got to contemplate the other three t-shirt quilts, which had been quietly stored away on a closet shelf that was inaccessible to me, but had been brought down to my level as part of the great project of dispossession. I decided that all four (made by friends as a gift to me) would have to move with me — a triumph of sentiment over practicality — and picked the queer quilt, the really in-your-face one, as its replacement on my bed.

Now, more of the story, with pictures.

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Posted in Art, Clothing, Furnishings and tools, Language of sex, Language play, Music, My life, Parody, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Words and things in the dining room

August 23, 2025

An object unearthed in my household investigations for dispossession: a woven wool rectangle, two-sided, showing a stylized blooming plant, and relatively small (10×19″, not counting its fringes) —


(#1) What I think of as the recto side

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Design, Fabrics, Furnishings and tools | 1 Comment »

The watch and the microscope

August 14, 2025

Two  items of memorabilia unearthed in the back of a drawer in one of the three desks I am, very slowly and painfully, clearing out and consolidating into one small one. Behind each is a touching bit of personal history and a larger lesson from sociocultural history (mostly from the early 20th-century United States, but also from Switzerland). The neutral descriptions of these two objects, devoid of both historical context and personal and sociocultural meanings:

the watch: a men’s pocket watch

the microscope: a 20X pocket microscope

A joint photo of these memorabilia:


(#1) The watch and the microscope

Historical context: the watch is from 1944 or 1945, in any case from my grandfather Melchior Arnold Zwicky’s (1879-1965) retirement from the Textile Machine Works in Wyomissing PA, and it came to me in his 1965 will; the microscope came to me by mail order from the Edmund Scientific Company (in Barrington NJ) in about 1950.

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Posted in Furnishings and tools, My life | 2 Comments »

The pencilguin

August 10, 2025

Today’s Rhymes With Orange strip (by Hilary B. Price) turns on reanalysis + analogical coining, yielding a kind of pun that looks like a deliberate eggcorn — embodied in that rare and elusive creature, the pencilguin, cousin to the penguin, but very much resembling a pencil, specifically a Dixon Ticonderoga (maybe even with the HB medium soft (#2) lead American children tend to favor):


(#1) The pen of penguin is probably Welsh pen ‘head’ (the bodypart), but suppose we (mis)take it to be English pen ‘instrument for writing or drawing with ink’, a reanalysis encouraged by penguins having black bodies as dark as ink; then we can venture to create the analogical name pencilguin, for a penguin-like creature having a pencil-like body rather than a pen-like one

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Posted in Eggcorns, Furnishings and tools, Linguistics in the comics, Penguins | Leave a Comment »

Appliances in therapy

May 7, 2025

Today’s Bizarro is a Psychiatrist cartoon done with common kitchen appliances: a tea kettle and a coffee percolator sit on a couch in couples therapy, with a toaster therapist:


(#1) Wayno’s title, “Mutual Irritation Society”, takes appliancehood for granted and focuses on the relationship issues (the annoying noises the two partners make); if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page

The cartoon identifies the percolator as male (presumably on the basis of its phallicity); if we stick to symbolic values, then the mammillary kettle is female (though it could be that the kettle is a pocket bear — a smaller, more compact man-oriented man who’s burly and hairy; the world of gender and sexuality is huge and diverse, full of surprises).

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Posted in Comic conventions, Furnishings and tools, Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Mammillarity, Phallicity | 1 Comment »

Opening cans and jars

May 6, 2025

(I was hoping to get one little posting done, a tiny thing I started working on yesterday morning, just to show that I could finish something, however trivial, before tackling the mountain of more ambitious postings sitting in my queue; and to then be able to get out in an anomalously hot and beautiful day, maybe take my walker around the block. And then, roughly every 30 minutes, something new came in to take me away from my minuscule task, some of it alarming and disastrous, but all requiring my attention. At the very end of the day (having left the house only to get my mail) I finished the playful “Sol is secretly queer”.

By then, I had another, even more minuscule, task to do today. And it’s been like a replay of yesterday. While I was describing yesterday to my caregiver, a pair of contractors — surprise! — appeared, seeking the water shutoff valve for my condo and the one above it, so that they could get on with repair work in the condo above me. Half an hour of complex negotiations followed, then my water was off for several hours while workmen trooped in and out. While this was going on, I was obliged to do complicated advance sign-ins on-line for upcoming medical appointments. And now I return to my bit of domestic trivia.

I have not wept. I have not raged. I am, inexplicably, in a good frame of mind (and my vital signs are wonderful). I created an excellent soup for lunch out of random leftovers. I haven’t been able to work my weekly shower into the schedule (well, there was the 7 am grocery delivery, not expected until 10), but what the hell, there’s always tomorrow. I am wearing my FAGGOT t-shirt; I am faggot, hear me roar. I will, somehow, be able to do this.)

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Posted in Furnishings and tools, Linguists, My life | Leave a Comment »

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