Archive for the ‘Movies and tv’ Category
December 12, 2025
Yesterday on Facebook, Aric Olnes embarked on “14 days / Countdown [to Christmas] with Godzilla” with this especially arresting image:
Godzilla, defender of Santa’s workshop
A search on this image got me to a reference to: A Daikaiju Christmas: Godzilla vs The Ice Monster (1969). Which seems not to be a real movie, but some sort of fan invention (complete with a plot description, in which Godzilla is defending Santa’s workshop against Shimo the ice monster). But no mention of the creator of the image.
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Posted in Holidays, Movies and tv | 2 Comments »
December 8, 2025
A Pickleball Christmas: just one of the dozens of made-for-tv movies in the crop for this Christmas. I was dumbfounded when an ad for it came up repeatedly on the Lifetime network. What next?, I wondered, will there be A Grand Theft Auto Christmas, with prostitutes in place of Christmas elves? A Lego Christmas? A Stud Poker Christmas? A Stud Hustler Christmas? (gay porn flicks exist with this theme, but not, I think, with this title). Great filmic visas open up.
So: some details on A Pickleball Christmas. And then a few more notable titles from this years crop. And some reflections on Christmas movies
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Posted in Art, Holidays, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »
December 6, 2025
(thoroughly raunchy Christmas porn, in verse of sorts; not for kids or the sexually modest)
Inspired by the appearance of gay porn actor Dean Young partnered with Joey Mills in Joey’s Surf Vacation (yesterday on this blog), I pulled out DY’s photos from the Christmas sextravaganza Cum All Ye Faithful (in which he’s a very naughty elf), and whipped out a few lines of raunchy verse (with a linguistic subtext for the academically inclined):
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Posted in Gay porn, Holidays, Inflection, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Phallicity, Poetry, Signs and symbols | 3 Comments »
December 6, 2025
My morning name for 11/28: The Nairobi Trio (TNT). An instant trip back to my teenage years, the 1950s, when my friends and I were wildly entertained by Ernie Kovacs’s TNT skits on television. Today I’ll give you something like the basic facts about TNT (which involves three people in gorilla suits moving in sync with the tune “Solfeggio”) and its creator. But then I’ll ask the question: why is TNT funny? And eventually the question: why does TNT make many people feel uneasy? (One writer has declared it to be “incredibly controversial” and “completely unacceptable by today’s standards”.)
On this last question, I’ll look ahead and suggest that the twinges would vanish if the skit were called, say, “The Solfeggio Players” — no Nairobi reference — and the gorilla suits were replaced by, say, chicken suits or frog suits. Observations that take us into facts about Africa and gorillas, tons of beliefs and attitudes from common culture, assorted tropes from popular culture, and written and filmed works of imaginative fiction (King Kong! Tarzan!). I’m not sure I can do justice to all of this, but I’ll try to at least skim the surface. Just not today.
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Posted in Humor, Jokes, Language and animals, Movies and tv, Music | Leave a Comment »
December 5, 2025
(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.
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Posted in Gay porn, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »
December 1, 2025
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate the month of December and to begin a new work week
Another lesson from a visit a little while back from an old friend and colleague in linguistics in which three meals (deliveries from local restaurants) were a stand-out feature. I quietly insisted on doing the ordering, so as to offer my guest an array of pleasant surprises. I have since realized that what I was doing was displaying an ability of social value; in earlier years, I would have cooked the meals (I was genuinely good at that), but I’m long past being able to cook, and now (for complex reasons) I’m also unable to take guests out to dinner — but I can still play the role of host, by foraging takeout skillfully.
In a similar vein, though I can’t cook, I can produce new meals in my kitchen, using takeout, household staples, and a microwave [I realize this sounds like the description of a MacGyver episode, with our hero, oh, escaping from a prison using only leftover lasagna, plastic cutlery, and a thimble]; I can still play the role of cook, through my skill at assembling new dishes. As a boast: I Am the Great Assembler. (Totally over-the-top theme music here: Freddy Mercury singing “The Great Pretender”, in this YouTube video.)
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Posted in Language and food, Language play, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Pop culture, Puns | Leave a Comment »
November 29, 2025
It’s penultimate November and the day after Black Friday, and the leftovers from Thanksgiving — my leftovers, being quirkily Korean, are surely not much like yours, but I have them and they are wonderful — will live again in other meals for several more days. And familiar old tv shows will be re-run as a background of pleasant memories.
Today’s re-runs are from the early days of the American police-procedural tv series NCIS. This morning, in the S4 E1 program “Shalom” (from 9/19/06), came a moment described in the episode summary as:
Tony remarks that Sacks is a self-centered, egotistical jackhole
You don’t need to know who Tony and Sacks are, because my interest in the summary is entirely in its notable final word, boldfaced above. A way of calling someone a jackass and an asshole without using a dirty word. The ass is silent. Twice. Only the respectable remnants of the insults are left over.
Now, jackhole isn’t a fresh discovery, even on this blog — though 2006 is 10 years earlier than the cite that set off an earlier posting of mine, “jockhole”, from 9/28/16 (which makes today’s posting “jockhole 2”). Return with me now to that posting.
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Posted in Holidays, Insults, Lexicography, Movies and tv, Portmanteaus, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
November 21, 2025
(#1) Alfred Tennyson,”The Lady of Shalott” (1832)
A Joe Dator cartoon in the latest (11/24/25) print issue of the New Yorker poses the question, “What if Humpty Dumpty had survived his fall?”
Humpty Dumpty is an egg. An egg contains a developing chicken embryo. The embryo will eventually mature, crack through the egg, and emerge as a chick. (There is even theme music for this scenario, Mussorgsky’s “Ballad of the Unhatched Chicks / the Chicks in their Shells”, from “Pictures at an Exhibition”.)
JD shows the first moment of emergence, the chick’s head bursting through the chest of a dismayed Humpty Dumpty, who is toppling backwards in his chair — a scene that will be viscerally painful for modern audiences familiar with the 1979 movie Alien, with its famously grotesque Chestbuster scene, but will in any case evoke a fatal heart attack :
(#2) Humpty Dumpty and his female companion at table, when the mortal wound opens up; it will crack him from side to side
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Posted in Comic conventions, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Language and medicine, Linguistics in the comics, Monsters, Movies and tv, Music, Poetry | 5 Comments »
November 19, 2025
Today’s morning name (pure playfulness after a long night of uneasy sleep fragmented by joint pain): from the Cambridge French-English dictionary, the noun
pantoufle (fem.): slipper; a loose, soft kind of shoe for wearing indoors
(#1) An array of pantoufles (from the Cambridge dictionary)
Considered as a nonsense word, it’s silly-sounding in French, or when borrowed into English as /pæntúfǝl/, which sounds like a cousin of kerfuffle.
But then the things it denotes are often indulgences — playfully pleasurable in design, material, or color (as in #1), so that the word comes with an air of the ridiculous, both in sound and in meaning.
An air that carries over to uses of pantoufle as a name. Two of which I now explore: an imaginary rabbit Pantoufle, from the world of fiction; and me as Monsieur Pantoufles, the woolly moccasins guy. (more…)
Posted in Books, Clothing, French, Morning names, Movies and tv, Names, Shoes, Silliness | Leave a Comment »
October 9, 2025
The 10/7 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, posted here because it’s sweetly bizarre (true to the strip’s title), multifariously playful, cleverly goofy. Something to enjoy for a moment in the midst of terrible times.
(#1) It’s all about the original Star Trek tv series (if you have somehow missed learning about the show, the cartoon will be incomprehensible to you); the top-level joke is in the title: the flannel frontier, a silly pun on the final frontier — but there’s a lot more (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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Posted in Clothing, Comic conventions, Gender and sexuality, Jokes, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Movies and tv, My life, Puns, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »
