Yesterday in Stephan Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine:
A Stephan Pastis specialty, the formula pun — or setup / payoff pun — joke (with a final panel in which the character Rat threatens the cartoonist (as a cartoon character) with violence for committing a preposterous pun
Two things then: The joke form, and Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young”.
(entertaining, but totally not for kids or the sexually modest)
The seminar was called to order on 9/21 on Facebook by Michael Thomas, who introduced the key background element, the internet fridge. The participants were three gay men, long-time friends (our shared backgrounds and the relaxed, playful atmosphere are important here): speakers Michael Thomas and me, with Michael’s husband Aric Olnes in a non-speaking role. From the transcript (somewhat edited):
— MT: We [MT and AO] hooked our fridge up to the internet the other day. Here’s a question for the ages: do fridges watch porn while the doors are shut?
— AZ: But of course. And then they fall asleep and dream of abusing electric sheep. And you thought that was condensation on the fridge walls, didn’t you?
— MT > AZ: fridge spunk. just scrape it off for your coffee in the morning.
— AZ > MT: Absolutely. The best jizz there is.
There’s an enormous amount of stuff packed into this — some from the widespread sexual culture of modern America or from popular culture but also some from gay male sexual culture. I will now do some unpacking.
(Plain talk about male bodies and man-on-man sex, so not for kids or the sexually modest — though raunchification is pretty much the apex of funny for early-teen boys)
☹️ 😢 😡 sad weeping furious on the anniversary of 9/11/01 , also on the day after the assassination of Charley-Horst Kirk-Wessel, occasions whose stench can only be properly countered by the celebration of small everyday human experiences that bring moments of delight, joy, and pleasurable physicality — not to take us away from the wreckage falling around us, but to assert and nourish what’s best in us, and not in any grand gesture or powerful speech, but in simple, everyday, silly, and earthy acts. Kharkiv Opera, but on a more intimate scale. Darwin had considerable reverence for the earthworm and its doings; let’s look to Darwin.
Two Facebook exchanges from yesterday, in which I write innocent comments (boldfaced below) that can, if you have the mind for it, be raunchified — understood as a raunchy double entendre:
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to bring September in (also to bring in the first fall month in the northern hemisphere) and, this year, to celebrate (US) Labor Day (recognizing the union movement and honoring workers) — so that I bring you (cartoon) rabbits in hard hats:
(#1) Lola and Bugs Bunny, in an HBO Max series from 2023, Bugs Bunny Builders: Hard Hat Time
Which takes me to September cartoons from the New Yorker, beginning with a scene-setting item from 2022:
(Towards the end, some coarse sexual slang referring to fellatio, which some readers will want to avoid)
After years of service on my bed, the delightful images quilt was sent off on Saturday for dry-cleaning and some stitching repair, and I got to contemplate the other three t-shirt quilts, which had been quietly stored away on a closet shelf that was inaccessible to me, but had been brought down to my level as part of the great project of dispossession. I decided that all four (made by friends as a gift to me) would have to move with me — a triumph of sentiment over practicality — and picked the queer quilt, the really in-your-face one, as its replacement on my bed.
Now, more of the story, with pictures.
The song, from the 1975 musical Chicago, which has been in my head constantly the past couple of days, thanks to my coming across a vein of brief retro-choreography performances of it by the dance pair Twinsauce. Just delightful, even more so when you see them doing their shtick (infused with energy and enthusiasm) in a wild variety of settings (and in an assortment of costumes): for example, in a pouring rainstorm in NYC (video here), on the snowy sidewalks of Chicago (video here), in a shoe store (with beautiful wood flooring) (video here), and in a cobblestoned passageway, as Rat and Mouse (video here).
(#1) Rat and Mouse hoofing “All That Jazz”; great fun
In human beings, the mouth is the only bodypart that comes equipped with teeth. Well, there are fables of the fearsome vagina dentata and even — top men, beware! — of the occasional anus dentatus. Now the wonderful world of prehistoric nature brings us a penis dentatus. Or so we learn from the latest WIRED.
From WIRED Science, “An Ancient Penis Worm With Rings of Sharp Teeth Has Been Discovered in the Grand Canyon: The 500-million-year-old fossil, containing a species named in honor of the krayt dragons in Star Wars, is a much larger ancestor of phallic marine worms that can be found on the seabed today” by Marta Abba on 8/19/25:
Penis worms are marine creatures with a distinctly phallic appearance. There are more than 20 known species living across the world’s oceans today, as well as a number of extinct ones, like this new discovery. The researcher who made the find was searching for fossils in the Grand Canyon and named the species Kraytdraco spectatus in honor of the huge burrowing krayt dragons that appear in the Star Wars universe. Details of the discovery were published in the journal Science Advances.
(Not lox and Gilbert & Sullivan, though that’s a charming idea for a matinee; I’d prefer to think of lx (linguistics) and g&s (gender and sexuality studies) as two gay linguists, Lex and Gus, who go together like, oh, politics and poker (from Act I of the 1959 Broadway musical Fiorello!) — or, more relevantly, like mind and body)
A non-academic friend, new to my net presence, wondered what the things I said my blog is mostly about — lx and g&s — have to do with one another. My immediate, overly glib, reply:
Nothing intrinsic, but they happen to come together in me, along with gardening, Sacred Harp singing, an interest in food and cooking, Mozart and Haydn, and more. Various accidents of history and outgrowths of different parts of my make-up.
Strictly true, but in fact my postings about lx tend to have a lot of g&s content, and my postings about g&s very often end up illustrating points of lx. And sometimes they meld together — as in my recent (from 7/26/25) posting “F-lexicography”, on the semantics of the sexual verb fuck.
So now a quick visit to Lex and Gus’s world, just picking out things from here and there in work by me and my colleagues. Not a systematic survey, just the odd snapshots.
(all about the F-word and its uses, so obviously not for kids or the sexually modest)
Another posting that’s been hanging around for months. I argue that the OED treatment of the semantics of the sexual verb fuck is unsatisfactory, not compatible with the actual usage of English speakers for a long time now — apparently because earlier lexicographers, embracing normative views of sexual behavior, posited a single sense of sexual fuck, centrally denoting an agentive act of penis-in-vagina intercourse but with a large penumbra of vagueness, embracing many other sorts of sexual encounters. Then this inadequate treatment was adopted without comment or critique in Jesse Sheidlower’s The F Word. So that essentially all the authoritative literature on sexual fuck gets things wrong. I will explain; there will be no pictures.
