Archive for the ‘Movies and tv’ Category
May 20, 2019
(Warning: It ends with indirect allusion to mansex and with two shirtless actors, arms around each other’s shoulders, showing their stuff in their underwear.)
A recent posting in the My Home is California group on Facebook:
(a) I dreamed of photographing a sliced strawberry …, thinking it was a fruit. It is actually more closely related to a rose.
To which I now respond, first:
(b) I dreamed of photographing a sliced potato, thinking it was a vegetable. It is actually more closely related to a petunia.
And, second:
(c) I dreamed of photographing James Franco, thinking he was a fruit. He is actually more closely related to a piece of meat.
(more…)
Posted in Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and plants, Movies and tv, Shirtlessness | Leave a Comment »
May 18, 2019
(OPAs, for short.) The contrast is to inconspicuously playful allusions, what I’ve called Easter egg quotations on this blog. With three OPAs from the 4/20/19 Economist, illustrating three levels of closeness between the content of the OPA and the topic of the article: no substantive relationship between the two (the Nock, Nock case), tangential relationship (the Sunset brouhaha case), and tight relationship (the defecate in the woods case).
The three cases also illustrate three degrees of paronomasia: the Nock, Nock case involves a (phonologically) perfect pun; the Sunset brouhaha case an imperfect pun; and the defecate in the woods case no pun at all, but whole-word substitutions.
I’ll start in the middle, with Sunset brouhaha. But first, some background. Which will incorporate flaming saganaki; be prepared.
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Posted in Acronyms, Ambiguity, Idioms, Implicature, Jokes, Language and animals, Language and food, Language play, Metaphor, Metonymy, Movies and tv, Names, Pragmatics, Puns, Quotation, Sarcasm and irony, Semantics, Speech acts | Leave a Comment »
May 7, 2019
(Consider the topic before reading on.)
That would be National Masturbation Day, May 7th, today — launching National Masturbation Month, lusty May:
(#1) From my 5/4/18 posting “Then, if ever, come lusty days”
(#2) “Black Solo” (from the Porn for Women TV site), cropped
Specifically, self-lust, self-pleasure. A regular topic on this blog — write about what you know, they say, and I’ve been practicing this one for about 67 years — also an occasional hook for movie comedy.
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Posted in Language of sex, Movies and tv, Shirtlessness | 2 Comments »
May 4, 2019
Found on Pinterest, this photo from the Vintage Dancer site’s posting “Vintage Hiking and Camping Clothes – 1910 to 1950”:
(#1)
[blog caption] Around 1900, tweed and plaid prints were symbolic with sportswear for the upper classes. Here both suits and knickers were options for hiking and gardening? (watering can?)
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Posted in Clothing, Movies and tv, Silliness | 1 Comment »
May 2, 2019
My 4/22/19 posting “The Easter egg in the salt mine” took off from this archive photo used in an Economist article:
(#1)
The article tells us nothing about the provenance of the photo or about the scene represented in it, though in the context of the article, we’re invited to suppose that the photo shows us the retrieval of Raubkunst, art seized by the Nazis from Jewish families during World War II. From which we guess that the soldier is an American G.I., the time is 1945, and the locale is one of the Nazi storage places for stolen art, perhaps even one of the celebrated salt mines used for this purpose. (All of this is assumption and guesswork, not a single actual fact in the pack.)
The painting in the photograph is in the courtly style of the 18th century — I speculated on what the scene might be — but not one famous enough to be identified through various sorts of searches.
Then in a comment, John Baker came to the rescue, enabling me to make substantial advances: the painting is a Fragonard (apparently a minor one) — as it turned out, one recovered by Americans in a gigantic hoard of Raubkunst in Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria (the fantasy castle Ludwig II built for Richard Wagner).
(more…)
Posted in Art, Movies and tv, Photography | 1 Comment »
May 1, 2019
(Several kinds of silliness, some music, and some food, but also very plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex — in the woods! — so not at all for kids or the sexually modest.)
Recently posted on Facebook, this mock vintage food ad:
(#1) [The AZ jingle for Pocket Weenies:] Here we come a-frankerin’ a-frankerin’ a-frankerin’ / Among the leaves so green
No one will be watching us / Why don’t we do it in the woods?
(more…)
Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and plants, Language and the body, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Music, Parody, Phallicity, Signs and symbols, Slurs | Leave a Comment »
April 30, 2019
The One Big Happy from 4/3, recently in my comics feed: the tough neighborhood kid James and his sledgehammer:
(#1)
What I hear in the first panel is an echo of a quotation with an ax, not a sledgehammer:
‘Where’s Papa going with that axe?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
One of the great first lines in English literature, just grips you right off, does E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web.
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Posted in Books, Linguistics in the comics, Memory, Metaphor, Movies and tv, My life, Phallicity, Quotation, Signs and symbols, Verbing | 4 Comments »
April 27, 2019
(Mesh Man in his underwear, leading us in many directions, but with plenty of sexual content — not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
From the 12th: Mesh Man returns to the Daily Jocks underverse, flogging their fabulous Varsity Mesh Shorts, flaunting his famous receptive organ — he’s all man and a foot deep — kneeling with feeling in #1 and flashing a finger gun to his fans in #2:
(#1) Party shorts! (see the ad below) — I go down on one knee to go down on my guy
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Posted in Ambiguity, Art, Clichés, Compounds, Gesture, Idioms, Language and religion, Language and sports, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Music, Parody, Phallicity, Photography, Signs and symbols, Underwear | 10 Comments »
April 24, 2019
From Jeff Bowles on Facebook on the 12th, this Magritte-based composition:
(#1)
Apparently a Magrittean disavowal (there’s a Page on such disavowals here), playing on Magritte’s wry late 1920s painting La Trahison des images (The Betrayal / Treachery of Images) — which shows a pipe, with the painting labeling itself Ceci n’est pas une pipe ‘This is not a pipe’. Here we get Louis Flint Ceci, on the left, objecting in astonishment that what’s on the right is not (a) Ceci; instead, it’s (a) Davisson.
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Posted in Art, Books, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Movies and tv, Music, Paradoxes, Poetic form, Poetry, Semantics, Writers | 5 Comments »
April 20, 2019
Yesterday’s Zippy takes us to Littleton (NH, not the more famous CO — or, for that matter, IL, IA, KY, ME, MA, NC, or WV), where our Pinhead falls into an identity crisis:
(#1)
Everybody, including the counterman, is Zippy, or at least a Zippy. And the strip begins with a stretch that is both two panels, each with a Zippy in it, and one full-diner-view panel, with two Zippys in it. We’re in the nightmare world of clones — who am I?
Then there’s the observation in the last panel: No one brings small problems into a diner. Certainly, an interpretation of what happened in the strip before this, though as that it’s crucially ambiguous. But maybe also a moral that we should take away from those events, a piece of advice about what we should or should not do.
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Posted in Diners, Identities, Movies and tv, Music, Pragmatics, Semantics, Snowclones | Leave a Comment »
