My right hip joint is now a metallic wonder, a titanium replacement in 2012 for the joint nature gave me, which had excruciatingly degenerated from osteoarthritis. I love the name titanium: it trips off the tongue, and as a proud gay man and an enthusiast of MND (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) in several of its incarnations, I choose to understand the name as a reference to Titania, Queen of the Fairies — silly faggot, titanium is for ur-deities.
Now to unpack all of this.
Having just done two little postings on brief subjects this morning, I’m now going to wade into a few somewhat meatier subjects that have the potential to explode into larger matters of some weight.
The first of these came to me in tv commercials for the Liberty Mutual insurance company, featuring a Struggling Actor character — all of which delighted me and made me laugh out loud. One of my favorites, “Biberty Bungle” (the one with the bubbles), you can view here.
A note on my 7/14/26 posting “Raunch dressing”, on a Facebook pitch for Creed Fragrance that came by me on 7/12:
Aventus by Creed. Bright fruits and smoky woods, crafted into an unmistakable signature
Which led to some notes on smoky tones in fragrances. And then took me to this bit of fancy writing from the Creed Boutique site:
Aventus is bold, confident and timeless. Uniting fresh Calabrian bergamot, smoky birch and an iconic pineapple accord, this is a fragrance that leaves its mark.
BBP, for short, I guess.
(the third mishearing takes us, in street language, into fellatio-land, a place not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
Recently logged, three mishearings of televised reels, two from commercials, one from a joke reel on Facebook, all easily verifiable as to what was said (vs. what I heard when I wasn’t looking at the tv, so didn’t get visual information about the text):
I’m not sure which substance offering body pain relief item 1 came from, but the expression is common in ads of many kinds; Muddy Mat commercials (item 2), for easily washable doormats (especially valuable if you have dogs tracking in mud and dirt), are all over the place; item 3, with BJs (referring to food from a restaurant chain, ostentatiously playing on an abbreviation for fellations), comes from a joke Facebook reel about giving BJs to homeless people, which you can watch here
All three mishearings are surprising if you’re watching the reels they come from; it’s crucial that I was looking away from the tv when I heard paint instead of pain and money instead of muddy and DJs (disc jockeys) inead of BJs (blow jobs) — because in all three cases, the intended words appear on-screen.
But still, but still… all three are preposterous; who needs relief from body paint, a mat for the money the dog tracks in, or disk jockeys to give to homeless people? And worse: the first two items came from commercials I had heard a number of times before, with no mishearing.
And then once I had that first mishearing, it was inclined to be sticky: on later repetitions, even looking at the screen, my mind very briefly dredged up the mishearing, triggering a startled moment during which I corrected course. A kind of information-retrieval earworm, very annoying. I have no explanation for this effect, and suspect that most people have experienced nothing of the sort, but there it is.
Today’s (4/14) Zippy strip has our Pinhead in conversation with a giant cement duck:
(#1) An anatine day in Southampton
(hard-core man-on-man sex action, so totally not for kids or the sexually modest)
Yesterday, in my posting “Surfing like bunnies”:
In this morning’s crop of gay porn ads, in a TitanMen store mailer, the charmingly titled (and apparently single-entendre) Joey’s Surf Vacation, with a dvd cover featuring a porn actor new to me, the boyish twink Joey Mills (paired with a familiar muscle twink, Dean Young, in a scene I’ll write about in a later posting).
— with the cover of the 2024 dvd (released 9/24/24) from MEN.com, showing Joey Mills with a third actor from the video, Troy Daniels.
This is that later posting.
From the annals of eccentric wine naming, the remarkable
Vampire® Coffin & Cape Red Wine Trilogy
from Vampire Vineyards.
[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.
From Joe Transue on Facebook on 2/12, as a comment on my 2/11 posting “On the faux-Hopper watch”, about Waiting for the train (an image that was merely inspired by Edward Hopper (1892-1967), not actually by him):
(#1) JT reported that this image came up on his feed out of nowhere, with the label: Edward Hopper. Locomotive 1944; there’s a lot to be said here, but one thing is absolutely clear: it is not a painting by Hopper; there are excellent catalogs of Hopper’s paintings, and neither this image (or anything like it) or this title (or anything like it) appears in the catalogs — but then it turns out that Hopper spent years (resentfully) churning out illustrations, for magazines and for advertisements, just to pay his bills, and these haven’t been catalogued, so who knows?
More things that are absolutely clear: that this image was in fact used in an ad (in Life magazine) in 1944, for ALCO (the American Locomotive Company); that the locomotive in the ad is an ALCO DL-109 diesel engine built between late 1939 and the spring of 1944; and that this ad appeared at a time when Hopper had been recognized as a major figure in American art and was in the midst of one of his most productive periods (in the 1930s and early 1940s, he painted New York Movie (1939), Girlie Show (1941), Nighthawks (1942), Hotel Lobby (1943), and Morning in a City (1944), among others), and cannot imaginably have been resorting to commercial illustration to pay his bills in 1944.
So where does #1 come from?
