Archive for the ‘Holidays’ Category

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Mayday!

May 1, 2026

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate the month of May — Mayday celebrating labor, spring (new growth, rebirth, fertility), and romance, in a variety of ways (parades, dancing, maypoles, bonfires, public displays of affection)

From Hana Filip on Facebook this morning:

May 1: Workers’ Labo(u)r Day (international) and the day of (romantic) love celebration (a kind of Valentine Day on May 1 in the Czech Republic). Two seemingly incompatible ideas. Karel Čapek sees a connection between the two: “It is love that wreaked / inflicted on us life and all its travails … and so, dear friends, on Workers’ Labour Day we must talk about (romantic) love.”  [AZ: Čapek coined robot ‘humanoid machine’ from Czech robota ‘forced labor’]

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Posted in Abbreviation, Acronyms, Events and occasions, French, Holidays, Language and plants, Language of sex, Signs and symbols, Work | 3 Comments »

March 15th

March 15, 2026

Today: a significant day in my personal life for many years, and also a significant day in world history.

— March 15th was spring Removal Day — Higashi (East) removal — when (for about 10 years) Jacques and I left Palo Alto (after winter quarter at Stanford) to drive the 2650 miles east to Columbus OH (for spring quarter at Ohio State); the winter Removal Day — Nishi (West)  removal — in the opposite direction was December 15th

— March 15th is also the Ides of March, the day of Julius Caesar’s assassination in 44 B.C.E.

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Posted in Holidays, Language and food, Movies and tv, My life | 1 Comment »

Godzilla, enlightened and confused

December 17, 2025

Aric Olnes’s Godzilla countdown to Christmas on Facebook, #5 (10 days to go) on 12/15:

Fighting to extract himself from the lights? Showing off his Christmas style? Swatting at the lights like those airplanes that sometimes bedevil him? Or just confounded, as so many of us have been, by the strings of lights? Enraged, delighted, or baffled? It’s the Christmas mystery of Godzilla.

AO’s series began on 12/12 (with 14 days to go); see my posting “Godzilla Santa #1”, showing a wonderfully benevolent Godzilla in a Santa cap, starring in a fable in which he rescues Santa’s workshop from Shimo the ice monster. Other items in the series show us a more traditional Godzilla, devouring trains and devastating city skylines, but for Christmas.

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Posted in Art, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Monsters | Leave a Comment »

A Vermont portmanteau and a net-naive Santa

December 16, 2025

Two cartoons from the New Yorker issue of 12/15/25: Michael Maslin with a phrasal overlap portmanteau tribute to the state of Vermont (land of covered casseroles, for covered-dish socials, and rustic covered bridges); and Roz Chast, showing us Santa’s alarmed helpers when he can’t resist falling — once again — for clickbait.

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Posted in Holidays, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »

Godzilla Santa #1

December 12, 2025

Yesterday on Facebook, Aric Olnes embarked on “14 days / Countdown [to Christmas] with Godzilla” with this especially arresting image:


Godzilla, defender of Santa’s workshop

A search on this image got me to a reference to: A Daikaiju Christmas: Godzilla vs The Ice Monster (1969). Which seems not to be a real movie, but some sort of fan invention (complete with a plot description, in which Godzilla is defending Santa’s workshop against Shimo the ice monster). But no mention of the creator of the image.

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Posted in Holidays, Movies and tv | 2 Comments »

Today’s consumer quiz

December 11, 2025

According to the label on the can, it

contains product from [in alphabetical order] Bolivia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, U.S.A, Vietnam

It’s high in iron, vitamin E, niacin, magnesium, zinc, copper, and manganese; also in dietary fiber and saturated fat, but with no cholesterol. It has no salt, very low sugars, and a fair amount of (plant-based) protein. It’s crunchy.

What is it?

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Posted in Holidays, Language and food, My life | 2 Comments »

Dancing Santas

December 10, 2025

From Bob Eckstein’s The Bob substack on 1/7/23, this delightful troupe of dancing Santas, created for the monthly comedy newspaper the Funny Times to sell on t-shirts (this year’s offer came to me by e-mail yesterday:


(bob’s text) Funny Times is getting into the Holiday groove with my Dancing Santas. The perfect Secret Santa gift can be found here.

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Posted in Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

A Pickleball Christmas

December 8, 2025

A Pickleball Christmas: just one of the dozens of made-for-tv movies in the crop for this Christmas. I was dumbfounded when an ad for it came up repeatedly on the Lifetime network. What next?, I wondered, will there be A Grand Theft Auto Christmas, with prostitutes in place of Christmas elves? A Lego Christmas? A Stud Poker Christmas? A Stud Hustler Christmas? (gay porn flicks exist with this theme, but not, I think, with this title). Great filmic visas open up.

So: some details on A Pickleball Christmas. And then a few more notable titles from this years crop. And some reflections on Christmas movies

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Posted in Art, Holidays, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »

Suck my suffix!

December 6, 2025

(thoroughly raunchy Christmas porn, in verse of sorts; not for kids or the sexually modest)

Inspired by the appearance of gay porn actor Dean Young partnered with Joey Mills in Joey’s Surf Vacation (yesterday on this blog), I pulled out DY’s photos from the Christmas sextravaganza Cum All Ye Faithful (in which he’s a very naughty elf), and whipped out a few lines of raunchy verse (with a linguistic subtext for the academically inclined):

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Posted in Gay porn, Holidays, Inflection, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Phallicity, Poetry, Signs and symbols | 3 Comments »

What men actually want for Christmas

December 5, 2025

A short video that came by me this morning, with some guy’s idea (off the top of his head) of the top five things that men actually want for Christmas; you really don’t want to see the original source. The larger point is that such a list is a distillation of someone’s beliefs about what men are really like — or, more accurately, what real men, normative men, are like.

I would prefer to think of it as a list of things men might not have thought of themselves. So: not want they really want, but what they might like yet might not know about or have thought of getting for themselves. That makes more sense. Ranking the items makes no sense at all.

I am, of course, far off normative American masculinity, so recommendations for such a person pretty much just slide off me, as they do in the annual lists for Fathers Day.

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Posted in Gifts, Holidays, Masculinity | Leave a Comment »

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