Archive for the ‘Holidays’ Category

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Monday morning delight

July 22, 2024

For Pied-Piping Day — see my 7/23/13 posting “Pied-Piping Day”, on 7/22 as Ratcatcher’s Day (cue the Pied Piper of Hamelin), with a discussion of pied-piping in syntax — the wonderful French-English pun Philippe Philoppe:


(#1) Punnng on flip-flop ‘a light sandal, typically of plastic or rubber, with a thong between the big and second toe’ (of imitative origin) (NOAD) — currently being passed around on Facebook (I got it first from Susan Fischer yesterday)

As a jokey bonus, the image is a portrait of an actual Philippe — Philippe I, Duc d’Orléans [known as le Petit Monsieur or simply Monsieur] (from Wikipedia: (21 September 1640 – 9 June 1701) the younger son of King Louis XIII of France and Anne of Austria, and the younger brother of King Louis XIV) — as painted by Pierre Mignard (from Wikipedia: (17 November 1612 – 30 May 1695) … a French painter known for his religious and mythological scenes and portraits).

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Posted in Art, Compounds, French, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Syntax | Leave a Comment »

The coming duodecfest

July 15, 2024

Not pocalypse, but fest / A day on which I’m blest: September 6th is the coming AMZ duodecfest, the celebration of my 84th birthday, 84 being the 7th — and therefore lucky — duodecade (a duodecade is a dozen years, the duodecimal counterpart of the decade in the decimal system).  I’m posting now about my associations with 84, to get that stuff out of my head, so that 8 weeks from now I can just lie back and let the occasion wash over me.

So: first thing, my lucky duodecade. A notion that bubbled up from my mathematical past, along with things like triangular numbers, the Fibonacci sequence, repeating decimals, the infinity of primes, transfinite numbers, and all that good stuff.

Then, second thing, the 84 Lumber Company and the Pennsylvania town of Eighty Four, which leads me to the phallicity of lumber, logs, and planks; if there’s a phallus or phallic act somewhere in a topic, I’ll find it. (I continue to hope that someone has used 84 like 69, to name a sexual act — he 84ed like a crazed mink.)

Finally, Helene Hanff’s delightful 1970 book 84, Charing Cross Road, which takes me to life histories (in this case, of two people) and to rambles through books, both old friends and fresh discoveries (which is what those two people engage in, in transatlantic correspondence). Two more themes from my writing.

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Posted in Books, Holidays, Homosexuality, Mathematics, My life, Names, Phallicity, Placenames, Signs and symbols, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | 1 Comment »

St. Arnold’s Day

July 8, 2024

According to the calendar on my computer, today is St. Arnold’s Day, and it is — just not the St. Arnold (the patron saint of hop-pickers and brewers, born in Flanders, now Belgium, around 1040 and died there in 1087) I had in mind, whose feast day is August 14. An earlier version of the beery St. Arnold’s Wikipedia page had him confused with St. Arnold of Arnoldsweiler (a musician — harpist and singer — who served at the court of Charlemagne and died around 800), whose feast day is  in fact July 8 — though the current version of his Wikipedia page has a typo in which his feast day is listed as July 18.

But most of St. Arnold of Arnoldsweiler’s story seems to be florid invention, with only a few solid facts known about him, while St. Arnold (Lat. Arnoldus) or Arnoul of Soissons (in northwestern France), aka Arnold or Arnulf of Oudenburg (in Flanders), had a fairly well-documented life full of event and accomplishment, so today I’m going to write about him, again, anyway.

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Posted in Art, Holidays, Language and medicine, Language and religion, This blogging life | Leave a Comment »

Nice guy with an American flag beach ball

July 7, 2024

(Talk about men’s genitals, so not to everyone’s taste; it’s coming up fast, so if you want to avert your eyes, do it now)

For the 4th of July, welcoming us to the swimming pool, he’s projecting amiable niceness while exhibiting his attractive swimmer’s body, utterly naked, with that patriotic beach ball nestled against his thick pornstar penis. Which is amiably hanging straight down, as unobtrusively as possible for such a hefty professional tool, but still one of the focal points of the composition (alas, fuzzed out for WordPress modesty). He’s working his porn-actor skills to hawk Gay Room’s 4th of July 50%-off sale on their many videos. And he’s a sweet thing to see at the beginning of a hot summer day, even if it’s just in the day’s Hunt eZine mailing (for Falcon | NakedSword studios):

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Posted in Flags, Gay porn, Holidays, Language and the body, Toys | Leave a Comment »

The solemn duties of Independence Day Eve

July 3, 2024

What must be done on this day, according to an adaptation of the cover for Uncle Sam: Special Election Edition, about the DC Comics character Uncle Sam, who is himself a dark and hallucinatory version of the American icon:


(#1) As modern Santa Claus goes (on Christmas Eve), so goes this incarnation of Uncle Sam (on Independence Day Eve) — though this Uncle Sam looks like he’d much prefer blood and flesh to milk and cookies

(Passed on by Tim Evanson this morning.)

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Posted in Books, Holidays, Language and politics, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Pop culture, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

The exile

July 1, 2024

🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the month of July (and recognize, with a flourish of maple leaves, Canada Day), with American Independence Day about to be upon us — plenty of local fireworks on Saturday night, more to come; and it’s time to contemplate my annual celebratory (kosher) hot dog

Meanwhile, Hana Filip posted, on Facebook yesterday , this enigmatic photo —  Napoli 1979, by Josef Koudelka — without explanation or other comment:


(#1) A young woman sunbathing, face down, on a Naples seawall while reading from a book

Which I turned into an exploration of Koudelka’s life and work. My response:

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Posted in Art, History, Holidays, Photography | Leave a Comment »

It’s that day again

June 30, 2024

June 30th, specifically. It also happens that there are Pride celebrations lots of places, including San Francisco,  but such events have long been out of my grasp, and being trapped in my house on an unmanageably hot day, facing a pile of vexing mail, has sent me into an emotional tailspin. I know from experience that if I ride this out, things will seem better tomorrow, but for the moment, I can’t cope. So I’ll just re-post the core of my June 30th posting from two years ago — “Ultimate Queen Day”, from 6/30/22:

🐆 🐆 🐆. (That’s a ritual tiger-tiger-tiger for the last day of the month …) Today is Ultimate June, the final day of a month packed with occasions of considerable emotional content, also (etymologically) a month dedicated to the Roman goddess Juno: queen of the gods (in fact, also called in Latin Regina ‘queen’), counterpart to Greek Hera; protector of women and motherhood; also embracing warlike features of Greek Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war (the deities of classic times were marvels of intersectionality, as we would now put it), and oh yes, wife of Jupiter, the counterpart to Greek Zeus.

So I am suggesting that 6/30 be recognized as Ultimate Queen Day, especially celebrating men who are flamboyant (in any way) and those who are effeminate (in their presentation of themselves). Stereotypically, these two bundles of characteristics are manifested together, in the cultural type the queen (not to be confused with royalty, with the drag queen, with X queen used to label tastes or preferences of many kinds — imagine a white-cross queen, a man who prefers Swiss men as sexual partners, or a fan of Swiss things — or with various other uses of /kwin/).

You could think of UQD as F-Gay Day, with F for fem / femmy / femboy, flaming / flamer, flagrant, faggy / fag / faggot / fag-ass, fairy / fairy-boy, fuckboy / fucktoy / fuckhole, and all that good stuff.

 

 

Posted in Effeminacy, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and the body, Language of sex, My life, Myths | Leave a Comment »

The Princeton rub tool

June 14, 2024

(Even choosing my words carefully, a fair amount of this posting is going to be inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest; you’ll see why in a couple of seconds)

Two themes for today: tools, and their masculinity; and male-male frottage, especially one variant of the Princeton rub. Somewhat astoundingly, these two themes intersect in what I think of as the Princeton rub tool: a dual masturbation sleeve, a device to facilitate two guys getting off together face to face.

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Posted in Design, Furnishings and tools, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Logos, Masculinity, My life, Phallicity, Princeton | Leave a Comment »

Mid-June: holidays and occasions

June 14, 2024

First, it’s Pride month, so that runs through the 14th through 16th (today through Sunday), the days I’m focused on in this posting. Then: today is Flag Day; tomorrow is what I have wryly proposed as Flagging Day (for displaying your identities and tastes); and Sunday is five special days in one: three date-specific occasions, plus two floating-date events (some of these five are of personal significance to me, others of broader interest).

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Posted in Flags, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language of sex, Masculinity, My life, Rainbow, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

A custom-made eggcup

May 4, 2024

Today’s holiday news: today is (at least) three holidays, one deadly serious, two entertaining. I will discourse later about Four Dead in Ohio Day (remembering the 1970 Kent State shootings), Star Wars Day, and (in the US, where May 4th is 5/4) Dave Brubeck Day (for the 5/4 time signature in music). (Oh, there’s also a very local holiday, the Palo Alto May Fête, lightly connected to Cinco de Mayo, which is tomorrow — but the fête is always on a Saturday.)

But first, the actual topic for today: a custom-made eggcup.

The eggcup, 3D-printed in purple and pink plastic, was given to me last Saturday by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, who recognized that I could use a lightweight, nearly unbreakable replacement for the white porcelain eggcups and demitasse cups that I’ve using for my five daily dosages of medications (an hour before breakfast, with breakfast, with lunch, with dinner, at bedtime) — the porcelain resources I’ve gradually been destroying, smashing by accident because they’re too heavy and slippery for my disabled hands. EDZ’s intention is that there should be more, enough that I can retire the remaining porcelain cups. No more little shards of glass on the kitchen floor.

A photo (inexpertly achieved with my new little camera) of the 3D printing and the porcelain alternatives:


In the front, the 3D delight, looking very purple in the photo; then, on the left, a demitasse cup, and on the right, a conventional eggcup

Two more 3D eggcups have (just) now appeared. Two to go.

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Posted in Art, Furnishings and tools, Holidays, Movies and tv, Music, Puns, Technology | 5 Comments »

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