It’s Labor Day weekend in my country — unofficially serving also as the end of summer — and we are supposed to be celebrating ordinary working people (OWP). Eventually, I’ll grind into the tangled mass of sociocultural attitudes and practices clustered around the concept of OWP in America, but today I’m starting with the small and personal.
Archive for the ‘Language and religion’ Category
Labor Day 2026 #1
September 5, 2026The cleansing elves of the night
September 3, 2026(fecal matters in street talk; you might find it offensive)
Previously on this blog, in my 9/1 posting “Send in the rabbits”:
Made it back to my apartment, at which point the enema kicked in and I pretty much exploded with shit, everywhere, in piles. Vast amounts of cleaning up to do, and I still have to get someone in to scrub my workroom carpeting, which is beyond my (dis)abilities.
Fresh beginnings, rebirth, resurrection
August 27, 2026Some weeks back, in midsummer, I sat at my worktable as night drew to an end, when sunrise broke out magnificently in my window wall (see photo #1 in my 8/25 posting “Where I live”) and filled me with joy at the gift of a new day. Also triggering an avalanche of musical associations — conveying fresh beginnings (as here), or rebirth (both of them in Schubert lieder, to come below), or (as in Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, also to come below), resurrection. (There’s more, lots more; I’ll list only a tiny sampling, from the odd trio of Haydn, Grieg, and Grofé — ok, Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, they’re not))
silentio
August 19, 2026Latin silentio ‘in silence’. Where I live now (also vivide ‘vividly, vigorously’, but that’s a topic for another posting). I’ve had profound laryngitis (probably a concomitant of cryptosporidiosus, which I’m otherwise holding at bay), occasionally moderating a bit so I can have actual conversations. But mostly I’m a whisperer, and the people on the reception desk at my facility have begun to ask me to write things down instead of whispering unintelligibly to them.
Flamin’ Hot Cheetos Corn Dogs
August 5, 2026Sing out, Louise! Flamin’ Hot Cheetos Corn Dogs, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos Corn Dogs; it’s a mantra, in trochaic (Strong + Weak feet) tetrameter (4 feet per line ) —
Strong Weak . Strong Rest | Strong Weak . Strong Weak
(There’s a Page on this blog about my postings on chants, cheers, mantras, and onomatomania)
But it’s all about the food, and that’s appropriate for August in the US; it’s a variant of the American State Fair staple, the corn dog. From NOAD on the basic object:
compound noun corn dog: North American English a hot dog covered in cornmeal batter, fried, and served on a stick.
And then the corn-puff variant, which popped up on my Facebook page yesterday:
We believe
June 30, 2026🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger to bring June to a close, anticipating the hot summer rabbits of July
In the days of the Arnold and Isaac Seminars on Belief that have animated my Ramona St. condo in recent months — Isaac’s a deeply pious fundamentalist Fijian Christian and I’m an amiable non-believer, with an excellent early life in mainstream, socially progressive American Lutheran and Episcopal churches — every so often we hit a note that resonates deeply for both of us. In my 6/24 posting “Jesus pyjamas, and a sweatshirt”, we discovered that we both found the parable of the lost sheep (told in the gospels of both Matthew and Luke) particularly moving.
A bit before this, I astounded Isaac by being able to (still) reel off great chunks of the Nicene Creed from memory, but broke up at one point in an excess of emotion over two words. And discovered that Isaac thought those two words were in fact the point of the creed, a distillation of transcendent faith in unseen marvels. Underlined in the extract below (there are variations in the text, so this might not be exactly as you remember it; and remember that this is a translation into English):
Going down on Rosh Hashanah
June 26, 2026(fellatial fun — and disrespectful of religion as well — so not for kids or the sexually modest)
Yesterday on the Facebook group soc-motss (for same-sex-inclined folk and their friends), Ellen Evans forwarded a 6/24 FB posting from Derekh Baruch Von Geiger on Facebook:
The ultimate source for this image is not identified; it could just be an invention, but it looks like a Christian church service borrowing from Jewish practices, in particular what’s customarily translated into English as the blowing of the shofar
Jesus pyjamas, and a sweatshirt
June 24, 2026From Toni Borowsky (in Australia) on Facebook on 6/24:
Jesus PYJAMAS!
Ffs I am seeing ads for Jesus pyjamas. 😳
(AuE / BrE spelling PYJAMAS, AmE PAJAMAS)
Three plants
May 6, 2026Three plants — all old favorites of mine — that have recently caught my helper Isaac’s attention on our walks around downtown Palo Alto: two because of their striking foliage and flowers, one because its multitude of yellow flowers seem to thrive everywhere, even in the most unlikely wastelands. Then the first two have remarkable — and, alas, similar — names: acanthus, agapanthus. While all three have odd common names: bear’s breeches / britches, lily of the Nile (not a lily, and from South Africa, far from the Nile), daylily (again, not a lily — and why day?).
Funeral flowers for Mr. Shimmer
May 2, 2026In this cartoon from the latest (5/4/26) New Yorker, Ms. Duck and Ms. Rabbit mourn their versatile paramour, Mr. Shimmer the duck-rabbit (or rabbit-duck); see my 8/24/25 posting “Shimmer is both a floor wax AND a dessert topping”, and reflect on versatile gay men, who are bottoms or tops, depending on how you approach them:
(#1) The widows weep for their bi-stable beloved; meanwhile, the famous illusion that lies at the very center of their world turns out to be a lifelong preoccupation of the cartoonist
