(Warning: very plain talk about man-man sex; no X-rated images, but several right on the line.)
The immediate impulse for this posting is the death of three very popular, hunky pornstars in the last year (each with his own sad story), which has led me to think about the term sex worker (as applied to men) and its penumbra of reference to men who make a living from their bodies. And about the challenges of a life in porn.
The tree, not the cocktail. And then not a tree in the genus Mimosa, but one in the genus Albizia, specifically Albizia julibrissin, a specimen of which grows right outside my bedroom window — and is now getting into a stage at which it’s blooming quite prettily, but also dropping junk (leaflets and flowers at the moment, seed pods soon to come) all over the place. A mixed blessing.
Among the cards in the SexDeck —
(“Has Missionary become monotonous? Is Doggie getting dull? Tonight, skip the same-old-same-old and give Leg Wrap. Easy Rider, or the Sun Worshiper a try.”)
The names are mostly inventive, definitely non-standard, but every so often you come across a technical term from the world of sex research. So it was with card #16, depicting the reverse CAT, where CAT is glossed as Coital Alignment Technique.
On a postcard in the Beautiful Farmyard set (“100 gorgeous portraits of chickens, cows, ducks, owls, pigeons, pigs, rabbits, sheep & tractors”), a Suffolk sheep, identified as “the leading terminal sire breed in the UK”. Terminal sire is obviously a technical term in animal breeding, but its meaning wasn’t obvious to me. Turns out that the breeding practice in question comes in two steps, and a Suffolk ram plays a crucial role in the second, terminal, step.
Back in May there came botanical evidence that we were moving from spring into summer. In places with cold winters, it became possible to plant nasturtium seeds, because those places were moving past their last frost date. Meanwhile, here in Palo Alto, my geranium plants (in containers on my patios), which went through the winter as foliage plants, broke into bloom (as the cymbidium orchids moved into summer dormancy).
I’ve referred to these summer plants by their common names — as nasturtiums and geraniums — but their genus names are, respectively, Tropaeolum and Pelargonium. And to make things more confusing, there are genera (of different plants) Nasturtium (to which watercress belongs) and Geranium (the cranesbills).
In the previous installment, “Gay greens: the big two”, I looked at arugula (UK rocket) and radicchio, with an excursion into chicories — especially (curly) endive and Belgian endive — and an appendix on cruciferous vegetables. Now on to a wider set of greens.
From the NYT on the 18th, in Kathryn Shattuck’s “For Ranchers, an Uncommon Quest for Grass-Fed Beef” (on-line head: “Where Corn Is King, a New Regard for Grass-Fed Beef”):
[Prescott Frost] put down roots on 7,000 acres in what he calls the Napa Valley of ranchland [the Sandhills of Nebraska], home to more than 700 species of native grasses and forbs: bluestem, buffalo, reed canary, brome — the salad bar on which grass-fed beef is raised.
Native grasses wouldn’t puzzle readers, but forbs is a technical term from botany that will be unfamiliar to many. What’s it doing in this story?
Today’s Scenes From a Multiverse:
In everyday dealings, we tend to judge the stages of life by physical and behavioral signs, and the categorization is somewhat fuzzy, but for legal and administrative purposes, crisp categorizations are necessary, and chronological age provides the basis for them — however irrational it might seem to label someone as a child one day and an adult the next.
In this case, Jon Rosenberg is remarking not only on that irrationality, but also (as his comments on the strip make clear) on the bizarreness of treating gay adults (however adult is defined) as unsafe or untrustworthy in a way that gay kids are not. (I note further that the onset of puberty comes well before the age of 18.)
In my Columbus OH household, the residents had a name for a particular category of foodstuffs, especially as salad ingredients: gay greens, taking in, for instance: arugula (or rocket), radicchio, watercress, mâche (or corn salad), fennel, (curly) endive, Belgian endive, flat (or Italian) parsley, and basil (especially the fancy varieties). (Sprouts of all kinds are hippie greens.) The association with queers comes primarily from these being fashionable foodstuffs, connected in many people’s minds with fancy cooking, adventurous dining, and foodie enthusiasm — activities that are also associated with gay men. Plus the widespread attitude that green salads are “unmanly” food: Real Men eat red meat, not green salads.
(The association of these foodstuffs with queers will no doubt come as a surprise to many Italian-Americans, not to mention actual Italians, who are accustomed to them as everyday ingredients.)
Today I’ll look at the Big Two of the gay greens, arugula and radicchio (noting that I am very fond of them both).
Posting about flowering pear trees reminded me of some complexities in the classification of fruits. Putting aside the well-known divergence between the use of the word fruit in botany and its use in cooking and dining contexts, I’ll look at some more specific cases, in particular stone fruit(s). Again, there’s a divergence between the technical terminology of botany and ordinary language — a result of botanists having taken over ordinary vocabulary and employed it as technical vocabulary in specialized senses.