A comic gem from the very first episode (“Give Me a Ring Sometime”) of the American tv show Cheers (S1 E1 9/30/82). An exchange (call it the D&C exchange) between the character Diane — at this point, merely a patron sitting in the bar Cheers — and Coach, the bartender on duty:
Diane to Coach: Excuse me. Where is your bathroom?
Coach in response : Uh, next to my bedroom.
The character Coach turns out to be empathetic and warm-hearted, but regrettably slow and defective at calculating people’s intentions in speaking as they do. In this brief exchange with Diane, Coach is faced with several linked tasks in understanding deictic elements: the locative deixis in where, the person deixis in your.
Ads for the Boy Smells company have been popping up with some regularity in my Facebook feed — no doubt because I posted a while back on some fragrances for men, one of the two scented product lines the company offers, the other being candles. A third line is underwear, all of it explicitly labeled by the company, “This comes unscented”, but in an ad for Boy Smells products, it’s hard not to think of pungent teenager skivvies. Some ads combine the boy image of actor Tommy Dorfman with an Extra Vert Candle. Ad copy:
Discover the intimate world of Boy Smells with unique candles, fragrances & underwear. 10% of Proceeds From The Pride Collection Will Be Donated to Support the Trevor Project [providing suicide prevention efforts among LGBT+ youth].
(#1) The boyish Tommy Dorfman, something of a queer, and genderqueer, icon — attired in jade
(#2) French vert ‘green’ (suggesting the green herb tones in the scent) + extravert / extrovert ‘an outgoing, expressive person’
The One Big Happy cartoon from 5/21, in which the word tenor (which is apparently unfamiliar to Ruthie) leads Ruthie to a word with a similar pronunciation, whose meaning she knows (at least approximately) — tenure:
(#1) I got tenure at Ohio State in 1970, but the singing boyfriend didn’t come along until years later
That’s an error taking us from tenor to tenure. Meanwhile, on the comedy stage, a pun takes us from tenner to tenor.
About a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro from 5/29, which turns on the title phrase pandering to the bass being understood as a pun:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)
We are to understand pandering to the bass as a pun on pandering to the base (which has become a stock expression in political contexts), and, given the image and text of the cartoon, as involving bass (/bes/ rather than /bæs/) ‘someone who plays the bass guitar in a rock band’ (rather than in one of 7 or 8 other possible senses).
(Much about men’s bodies and sex between men, in plain language, with photos, so not at all for kids or the sexually modest.)
The fox in question is Sean Ford, a model and gay porn actor and observer of the worlds of homosexuality, sex work, love between men, and identities and personas. The friends are Angel Rivera, his partner in a scene (both sweet and hot) in the recent porn flick Lips Together; and Peter Berlin, a famous object of gay sexual fantasy in classic porn and the fox’s partner in a 2020 Interview magazine piece on performing gay sex.
It started with a 5/27 e-mail ad (from Game Link Gay, for a Memorial Day sale) featuring shots from videos on sale, including a Rivera Fucks Ford shot (from the CockyBoys 2020 DVD Lips Together, Six Feet Apart) that is notable for both the men’s facial expressions and their position in the sexual act (both recurrent topics on this blog).
In this posting: on the shot, the facial expressions, the sex position, the video and the two actors. Then in a second installment, to come: on an interview with Ford, on eroticism, intimacy, and love. And on an interview with Ford and Berlin, on jealousy and monogamy, and on aspects of working in the gay porn business: managing a porn persona, getting work, continuing in the business, earning enough to live on (all aspects of the business I’ve touched on in postings on the blog).
To start things off, the shot cropped to isolate the men’s facial expressions:
(#1) An Ecstatic face on Ford (on the right), intense focus on Ford’s face by Rivera (on the left) — a version of a Good Buddy face
My 5/29 posting “The hairy and the smooth” is about (among other things) a story from the biblical book of Genesis, about two fraternal twins, Esau the hairy brother and Jacob the smooth one — Esau also known as Edom, Jacob as Israel. Edom is the Semitic version of the name, Latinized as Idumea / Idumaea. Both Edom and Idumea gave their names to the lands of their descendants. From Wikipedia as quoted in my 5/29 posting:
Edom and Idumea are two related but distinct terms which are both related to a historically-contiguous population but two separate, if adjacent, territories which were occupied by the Edomites / Idumeans in different periods of their history.
My 5/29 discussion then turned to the shapenote song Edom. It turns out that the Sacred Harp has not only Edom (SH200), but also Idumea (SH47b), both song names from the placenames. Edom is joyous, but Idumea is something altogether different: by turns, powerful, moving, dark, mournful, literally apocalyptic, and shivery, a package that has has made it a great favorite of folk singers. Music from the Denson Sacred Harp (1991 revision):
(#1) SH47t Primrose and SH47b Idumea — both from the early flowering of shapenote music in the South in the early 9th century, both on salvation and resurrection, in Primrose (in A major) merely joyous; in Idumea (in A minor), triumphant, as part of the Apocalypse — texts from two amazingly prolific writers of hymn texts, Isaac Watts in Primrose, Charles Wesley in Idumea
For Penguin Appreciation Day yesterday (4/25), the Half Moon Bay company (a UK firm offering themed merchandise: “Home to TV, Film and Popular Culture fans”) exhorted:
(#1) The Feathers bottle, a metal water bottle modeled on the felonious penguin character Feathers McGraw from the Wallace and Gromit animated movie The Wrong Trousers
In today’s (4/25) Zippy strip, our Pinhead — no podophile ‘foot fetishist’ — instead celebrates the linguistic formative pod — as a word, in one of its many meanings (here, its ‘small building’ sense); as part of a fixed expression pod people (using pod referring to a plant part); and as piece of the word podcast (where it’s a piece of the proper name iPod, and that takes it back to a functional unit on an aircraft or spacecraft):
(#1) There’s more, lots more, but the pods here are all trace back.in metaphorical flourishes, to the plant parts
Three more cartoons from the Glen Baxter collection Almost Completely Baxter, all having to do with language in one way or another: the study of vowels as religious observance in the abbey of the fabled town of Brocklehampton; the tragedy of empty speech balloons; and smoke signals pressed into service to spread higher literary culture.
Well, yes, it’s a big thing, or will be if it works, but the story here is about a proposal to revive — de-extinct seems to be the technical term — the woolly mammoth, à la Jurassic Park.
Dinosaurs, no; see the scientist in this wry cartoon by Tom Gauld (originally from New Scientist, then reprinted in You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack and in Department of Mind-Blowing Theories):
(#1)
But woolly mammoths, sort of and maybe. And on that there’s recent news from Harvard (where is Tom Lehrer when we need him?).
