Musings on three things — Nairobi, gorillas, and gorilla suts — en soi (as “just stuff:”) vs. those things serving as symbols, with various values / evoked associations, which are typically conventional: cultural meanings. With specific reference to these three things in the 1950s Ernie Kovacs comedy sketch The Nairobi Trio.
Archive for the ‘It’s Just Stuff’ Category
Nairobi, gorillas. and gorilla suits
December 9, 2025Eric Swalwell and his facial scruff
November 14, 2025The US congressman, in today’s news because his pointed criticisms of Our Overlord Grabpussy have netted him a retributive charge of mortgage fraud, but I was about to post about him as an exemplar of liberal political critique (along with, among others, Rachel Maddow, Pete Buttigieg, and Joyce Vance) and also of nice-guy masculinity (masculinity being one of my perennial topics), with a note on a presentation of himself that employs both informal dress and facial scruff — the latter being a conventional advertisement of masculinity and toughness.
Gay banter: great big green beans
August 31, 2025đ  đ  đ tiger tiger tiger for ultimate August, also (US) đ§ Labor Sunday đ¨ (everything — September, Labor Day, even World War II, 86 years ago in Poland — breaks tomorrow); meanwhile, it’s all gay banter about green beans, a little festival of G+B
Aric Olnes, on Facebook with his daily alphabetic horticultural message for 8/27 (on these messages, see my 8/17 posting “Miss Marple, with murder on Michaelmas”), a biliteral delight, in G+B:
graceful bushy Green Beans grow briskly generously bequeathing grand bounty
A long, thin object — like a green bean / string bean — can symbolize a tall, thin person (a skinny person); or someone’s long, thin legs; or of course a long penis — so as an enthusiastic phallophiliac, I went with the penises in my response:
— AZ> AO: Those are mighty long beans you got there, pardner!
This is gay banter (itself a G+B expression); AO and I are old friends, both gay, and can exchange personally-directed lubricious remarks that turn on the shared assumption that gay men fantasize about big dicks (whatever their own penises are like and whatever sorts of penises they favor in actual man-on-man sex) and the shared belief that such fantasies are both powerful and ridiculous. This is an instance of banter without an edge, serving to express what we share — also what sets us apart from most people around us — and to reinforce the bond of our friendship. But banter between men, and more specifically between gay men, comes in many forms, ranging from a light touch with just a bit of an edge, to teasing and to more aggressive kidding. What’s going on depends on who’s doing the bantering, to whom, and in what circumstances. So I’ll have some words about that.
And then some appreciation for AO’s ingenuity in constructing his alphabetic titles, in this case for G+B expressions about the seedpods of Phaseolus vulgaris, the common bean. To which I will contribute a long playful list of G+B expressions for anyone who’d like to riff  further on green beans / string beans / snap beans. (more…)
Idiom come to life
October 12, 2024A cartoon by Suerynn Lee in the New Yorker issue of 10/14/24:
(#1) We’re … we’re … like two peas in a pod!
Those peas really know their idioms.
When X means yes
October 9, 2024… in one sense / use of yes: ‘yes, I select this one’. Which came up yesterday as I was ordering an Original Italian Sub from the Jersey Mike’s Subs in Mountain View CA, just south of Palo Alto (they’re a huge national chain, offering a wide range of submarine sandwiches that are, in my experience, excellent examples of their kind — and Grubhub delivers from them); it turns out that their on-line menu software involves this positive selection-X, which took me a moment to get used to, especially since I’d posted not long ago on associations of the letter X, which included the X of NO — of prohibitions, bans, and denials — but not the X of YES. Well, X is a symbol, it’s just stuff (as I say) and can accumulate any number of uses, even ones that look contradictory.
The Jersey Mike X is the X of election ballots: an alternative to a check-mark â or a plus-sign + in a box or circle (or to filling in an oval) to indicate selecting an item.  In a use that was initially confusing to me, since the JM X is in contrast with the JM +, which turns out to convey something like ‘this is one of the available choices’; I eventually figured out how JM deploys X and + through a certain amount of trial-and-error fiddling with the menus. Yes, I’ll illustrate all of this in a little while.
But first, one more groaner penguin-pun joke, on the occasion of my consuming, at lunch today, the last of my birthday McVitie’s Penguin bars.
Cu, Co, Ni, & Zn!
July 9, 2024Yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, set at a rock concert and turning on a straightforward pun heavy metals on the model heavy metal (band):
(#1) Cu on drums, Co on (electric) guitar, Ni on vocals, Zn on acoustic guitar. But then there are all the devilish details, in the text and the images (if youâre puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon â Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip â see this Page)
The details are devilish because there are so many of them, involving choices made by Wayno in putting the cartoon together: the name of the concert venue;Â the size of the band; the name of the band; the physical appearance of the band members, their clothing, and their instruments; and their stances and gestures in the performance depicted here. Some of these choices were conscious choices by Wayno, but most just flowed from his pen, as it were, governed (if governed at all) by unconscious crafting of the material.
My task here is to catalog what I think are some of the most notable of the choices Wayno made. Unfortunately, the more I look at the cartoon, the more I see; there seems to be no end of details to note. So I’ll start by listing some things that came to me just moments ago, in the writing up of this posting, then go on to a more systematic discussion.
Seasonal unicorns
December 14, 2023… decked out in red and green, in lovely Christmas smocks; also throughly wired and wielding gear, both vintage (what appears to be a record player) and modern (iStuff), along with Christmas gift boxes:
(#1) A delightful card from Dean and Tim Allemang; on the back it has the Walgreens logo:
(#2) So it’s a Walgreens card, but after much searching on 12/11, I couldn’t find it anywhere on their site (they are demons about their photo cards, but hopeless about everything else)
Then on 12/12, Erick Barros labored on my behalf to find any trace of the card on the net, with no success at all.
Meanwhile, I wrote Dean to applaud the card and report on our fruitless searches, asking if he knew anything about the artist or the composition. And got a surprising answer.
Underwear wolves
November 28, 2023And now for something completely different. On 10/31 it was densely nerdy marveling at the words calceology, telamon, and hallux — I should probably have issued a technical-linguistics warning on that one — but today it’s underwear models (in a Daily Jocks e-mail ad from 9/26) wearing minimal tighty-whities that display the carnal attractions of their bodies, fore and aft, in intimate detail, hot stuff definitely calling for a male-sex-content warning. And then there are racy bonuses: the male couple in the ad is interracial, and the one presenting as a receptive / bottom is celebrated as an equal partner to the one presenting as an insertive / top.
Just to remind you: these are photos of male models playing characters in a sexual story (loosely playing with the image of a wolf pack) for a receptive audience, a story that’s intended to be at least sexually pleasing — or, better,  actually arousing — to this audience and thereby to sell more of the company’s wares (DJ is an Australian company, here selling items from The Pack underwear company, distributed by Dragon Label Limited in Hong Kong). I’ve given these characters Italian names: Nero ‘black’ (note: in Italian, Nero is pronounced roughly like English neigh-roe) for the black receptive partner (who brings his tight muscular buttocks and its anal prize to the encounter, plus a focused and open facial expression) and Lupo ‘wolf’ for the white insertive partner (who brings his crotch and its genital prizes to the encounter, plus a decidedly feral facial expression, at least in the first of three photos).
The peapod pendant
August 5, 2023Georgia Morgan (now retired from linguistics in Brattleboro VT, where she creates and sells amazing jewelry) on Facebook on 8/3:
— GM: I will be at the Brattleboro Area Farmers’ Market this Saturday in the Rosie’s Wonders booth. Bringing these, and lots more …
(#1) Including this peapod pendant
— AZ: Love the peapod. I would wear that (except that I can no longer manage any kind of jewelry with my poor disabled hands)
— GM > AZ: If you ever want one, I do make pendants with an adjustable sliding closure that just go on over your head
— AZ > GM: Georgia, if you can do that for the peapod, I want one.
And it has been done. Georgia is working on the pendant; the check is in the mail. It’s my birthday present to myself; I have a prime birthday, my 83rd (I still can’t quite believe that I have somehow managed to live this long) in a month from now, 9/6.
I am a good Boy for you, Daddy
July 4, 2022(Men’s sexual bodies and man-on-man sex discussed in street language, so not appropriate for kids or the sexually modest)
Gay Pornlandia celebrates the American commercial holiday Fathers / Father’s / Fathers’ Day with annual sales on wares explicitly featuring Boys and their Daddies, or gay male roles and relationships in that sociosexual neighborhood (running the scale from temperamentally contrasted boyfriends to subs / slaves / boys vs. doms / masters / sirs in BDSM practices).
From my 6/21/15 posting “My hard-on belongs to daddy, for Fathers Day (which always comes in the middle of Gay Pride Month), on daddy – boy films (taking off from the 2011 Catalina flick Daddy It Hurts!):
(#1) Spencer Reed as a muscle-hunk daddy — and calliphallic top — and Cole Harvey as a twinkish boy — and callipygian bottom (naughty bits cropped for WordPress modesty)
In this world boy and daddy name “types”, personas, or social roles — and also relationships; these can be more or less conventionalized or ritualized and so framed as identities (in which case the talk will be about a Boy and his Daddy)