Archive for the ‘Language and sports’ Category

Kinky Beavers and their kin

December 22, 2025

Today’s Zits comic strip sets up a baffling list of ridiculous and raunchy-sounding things Jeremy’s father wants for Christmas — a Wiggly Pickle! Kinky Beavers! — and resolves the puzzle in the final panel.


(#1) Fishing lures, kids, fishing lures; apparently all from the Reaction Innovations fishing lure supply company, and so known to a substantial number of fishing enthusiasts

I suspected what was going on when spinners and crickets turned up in the second panel. But it’s still a sweet set-up.

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Tomorrow x 4

November 21, 2025

Tomorrow is 11/22; on my calendar this brings up a set of two deeply discordant anniversaries and the birthday of an admirable colleague and friend. And this year 11/22 is the date of Stanford’s preeminent sporting event, to add a note of passionate silliness to the whole business.

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Capades on ice

September 28, 2025

From Benjamin Dreyer on Facebook yesterday:

It’s once again been brought to my attention that many people seem not to grasp that Ice Capades is a play on words and that they are not in fact capades on ice.

(I myself learned this at a rather advanced age, but: earlier than today.)

Well, Ice Capades originated as a play on words, but that doesn’t mean it still is (only) a play on words. History is not destiny. BD tells us, in fact, that many people — I would say almost all of us — don’t appreciate that it originated as a play on words. Which is to say that for all these people it is not a play on words, but an odd compound of ice and capades. Just as, for almost everyone these days, the name of SRI International (a Silicon Valley R&D nonprofit institute) is just a string of letter names, not an abbreviation for anything, despite the fact that the organization began its life as the Stanford Research Institute (I know this, but I’m a very old man, 6 years older than the Stanford Research Institute); SRI is now an orphan initialism.

So now, a lot of facts.

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Cheating at golf

August 5, 2025

Recent news: Our Overlord Grabpussy (POTUS 45 + 47) is suspected of cheating at golf. For instance, in the Guardian, the story “‘Dodgy looking’ clip of Tr**p playing golf in Scotland sparks cheating debate: Video appears to show aide dropping ball in favourable position, as golf fans say it is a bad look for the sport” by Steven Morris on 8/1/25.

This is in not even slightly news.

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Two footballs, passing in the night

July 30, 2025

Very briefly (it’s been a hellish day). In my comics feed for today, penultimate July, Mark Parisi’s off the mark cartoon of 7/16/25, in which an AmE football and a BrE football fail to hook up with a sportsball of their own kind — next to one another in a bar.

In the RomCom version, of course, they go on to find satisfaction in hooking up with (aka dating) one another, in the thrill of the new and different.

Otherwise, you see the pitfalls of dating through text only; if they communicated by voice, they’d get nationality information. (Though in the real world, a British football would know that such a brown sportsball was called a football in the US. Whether an American football could be depended upon to know that a soccer ball was called a football in the UK is not so clear to me.)

 

 

Leather jackets, jockstraps, boots, and d&a

May 30, 2025

(Entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest. Starting with the painting that set this posting off when it appeared in today’s Pinterest mailing for me. Which has a leather jacket, a jockstrap, boots, and an a in it; we’ll get to the d in the fourth and last painting in today’s series)

The painting is Man Wearing Leather Jacket (n.d.) by Bruce Sargeant, a prolific wildly homoerotic artist who is also entirely fictional (but died in 1938 in his timeline). Sargeant is the creation of Mark Beard — who is even more prolific, queer as fuck, plus he’s a real person (still living, now aged 69).

Pinterest has been offering me this painting every so often for a long time, but without any identification; today, I was finally intrigued enough by the tough and direct offer of the model’s muscular ass for sex to use Google Images to dig out the source. Who turned out to be an artist we’ve seen on this blog before, in my 7/18/23 posting “A homerotic painting by Bruce Sargeant” (the painting is Locker Room Scene — Charlie in Three States of Undress).

I’ll look at that first, to establish an important characteristic of Sargeant’s work: it might drip homoeros, but it’s also intended as commentary on art-historical genres, styles, and themes (in Locker Room’s case, with a bow to Marcel Duchamp’s studies of bodies in motion). Then I’ll move to four closely related paintings, transportations of the classic male nude study to the subterranean world of man-on-man sex, in this case leathermen offering or soliciting dick or ass (in popular art, the standard sexual display of women for a male audience being t&a, tits and ass; of men for a male audience, d&a, dick and ass).

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Instruments of death

May 23, 2025

Today’s Bizarro brings us the percussion section of a marching band, a section composed entirely of Grim Reapers — yes, Reaper percussion, portmanteaued to Reapercussion:


Wayno’s title: “Halftime Dirge” — since they’re marching on a (US) football field (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

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Morning Italian jobs

May 20, 2025

(This will, somewhat surprisingly, eventually veer into men’s bodies and some man-on-man sex, recounted in street language, so it’s not for kids or the sexually modest; I’m sorry, but not even the best of Verdi opera and Italian tennis can quite counterbalance naked guys going at it with one another)

Today’s morning names were Rigoletto and Sinner, and for a change I knew exactly why they were in my head: Rigoletto is the name of an opera by Verdi (from which the magnificent quartet Bella figli dell’amore was playing on my music feed during my 2 am whizz break); and Sinner is the surname of someone who turns out to be an astoundingly famous Italian tennis player but was known to me only from a Sergio Scalise Facebook posting yesterday in which this Sinner was identified as a great champion who does commercials for De Cecco, Lavazza, and La Roche — I am, famously, deeply ignorant of sports; and also, despite Sergio’s occasional attempts at educating me, neglectfully ignorant of matters social, cultural, and political in today’s Italy (I’m not merely not au courant, but actually inert). This is Jannik Sinner; I had never laid eyes on him until this morning (I’ve been entertained by a recent Lavazza commercial, but it’s one for the American audience and doesn’t have Jannik Sinner in it). I go on at such length about JS because my readers from or connected to Italy will find it impossible to believe that I had no idea who Sinner — that athletic and cultural phenom — is.

Now, the coming program: about Rigoletto, briefly; about Jannik Sinner, at greater length, with a note about Lavazza coffee commercials; a side note about Google searches; and then a raunchy digression on the Italian jobs of the title.

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“a home run is a high fly that goes out of the park”

May 13, 2025

The first thing you need to know about this sentence from Baseball English —

a home run is a high fly that goes out of the park

is that I said it. If you know me at all well, you know that I am deeply, fabulously ignorant of sports — because I am deeply, fabulously uninterested in sports. And yet I uttered this Baseball English sentence, and I understood that it was, in fact, a pretty good definition of the technical term of baseball home run, and I was stunned. This stuff has seeped into my very being.

But why, you ask was I, of all people, defining home run. In fact, I was defining it for someone who turns out to be a genuine baseball fan, someone who knows tons of stuff about the game. But, alas, all in Baseball Spanish, which, despite the fact that the game is called beisbol (a transparent borrowing from English) in it, has an almost entirely home-made vocabulary, so that Baseball English might as well be Quechua or Mixtec.

Ok, you persist in asking, why was I trying to talk about baseball at all, never mind the English vs. Spanish thing.

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Afflicted with aphids

April 20, 2025

[4/25 disclaimer. In the constant upheavals of my life and the world around me, I’m now just picking random stuff to post about, from the 60 or 70 items in my ever-expanding queue — whatever catches my fancy at the moment. Don’t try to make sense of it as a whole.]

Regularly playing on MSNBC, the tv commercial “No Time to Wait”, featuring an earnest and friendly Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (now 78 years old) telling us

I have AFib (/éfɪb/ atrial fibrillation, the irregular heart rhythm)

which I heard as

I have aphids /éfɪdz/

(You can watch the commercial here.)


A screen shot from the commercial; Kareem is holding a basketball just in case you’ve forgotten who he is

It’s immensely pleasing to me that he’s still alive and is doing good things.

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