In my 7/14 posting “Making a mango crazy in bed”, a surprising mishearing on my part. The speaker said:
What’s a bedroom move that makes a man go crazy?
But what I heard was:
What’s a bedroom move that makes a mango crazy?
The (sex-infused) mangos just dropped in from the sky, bafflingly, with no justification I could see. (Intended [mæn.go] and perceived [mæŋgo] are very close acoustically, but mango makes no sense in the context. )
Then on the 17th it was kapok. Maybe it’s a plant thing.
My life has recently been extraordinarily difficult and extravagantly painful, but at the moment my fingers are up to a small amount of typing, so here’s an odd mishearing to amuse you. This posting is way gay and attentive to male bodies, and there’s a photo (hunky rather than raunchy, but it does involve ostentatious shirtlessness featuring prominent six-packs), so it will not be to everyone’s taste.
In a Facebook short reel that came past me this morning — I’m in need of distractions from the pain — we see two gay guys (both hunks in swimsuits, though of two very different body types), with gay guy A interviewing gay guy B:
What’s a bedroom move that makes a man go crazy? Show me with your hands.
The scene:
(Men’s bodies and man-on-man sex, discussed bluntly, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
On Pinterest this morning, this painting by Polish queer artist Wojciech Woś (now working in Berlin):
From Benita Bendon Campbell back on 11/1, a joyous diversion from painful times (“Something funny, we need something funny”): Rowan Atkinson playing “distinguished British baritone” Robert Bennington singing the Ode to Joy … until things go awry and he has to improvise a German text to Beethoven’s soaring tune. You can watch the YouTube video here.
And now, much more detail, from the Classic FM site (“the most relaxing music”), “The time Rowan Atkinson ‘forgot’ the words to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in hilarious skit” by Maddy Shaw Roberts on 5/11/21:
The Ode’s progress (picture: YouTube)
… and boy-foot bear with teak of Chan … no, no, Kent McCord and the Nelsons’ Rick, that’s the ticket.
(Tales of male-male desire and sexual acts — so this posting will be edgy for some readers — but not particularly vivid tales, and the photos are there for faces and torsos, not genitals)
Rick and Kent, figures of attractive, desirable masculinity — the first from my teenage years (there was a lot I didn’t understand in the Rick, or teenage hard-on, years, during which Ricky got me off, a lot), the second from young adulthood (it was during the Kent years that I gained some self-knowledge and entered into serious, life-long relationships with other men; suddenly it was important that Kent was not only a really hot guy as Officer Jim Reed on Adam-12, but that he also presented himself as a sturdy, dependable and empathetic nice guy, so an eminently satisfactory object of adult lust). Note: I was perfectly aware that Rick and Kent were, by all accounts, uncomplicatedly straight (as it happens, they became buddies when they worked in tv together); what I had in my head were fantasy Rick and Kent, and their kisses were sweeter than wine.
Now I tell you that Rick, Kent, and I were / are all essentially the same age; Rick 4 months older than me, Kent 2 years younger. (Rick died in 1985, but Kent is still alive, and he’s a great-looking 82-year-old.)
And while they’re interesting as objects of desire (on tv and elsewhere, notably from the 1950s through the 1970s), they get a posting here because of a characteristic facial gesture that they share: the spread-lip smile, a feature of Rick and Kent that large numbers of straight women and gay men find powerfully attractive (and that, no doubt, makes many straight men envious).
A frequently experienced tv commercial in recent days, encountered at first only through the audio, which I heard to be for a local carpet company called, apparently, effing gee or effing G, involving the verb F or eff /ɛf/, an initialistic euphemism for fuck. Given my nature and my professional interest in taboo vocabulary, it would be fair to think of my perception as Freudian mishearing, of who knows what original. But, surely, a carpet company wouldn’t choose a name with fucking encoded in it, maybe playfully conveying that it was fucking good (though that would be a bold commercial move).
The next time I heard the ad, I understood the company name to be effigy, which is at least an English word (and not a swear), but baffling as a company name. Significantly, having heard the name originally as beginning with /ɛf/, that perception persisted.
Next time around, I shifted my perception to something more likely, in which /ɛf/ is in fact a letter name: FnG, that is F&G. This would be a common pattern in company names; a sampling of F&R companies:
F&R Auto Repair (Woodland CA), F&R Auto Sales (Hialeah FL), F&R Towing (San Jose CA), F&R Engineering (Roanoke VA), F&R American Fine Fragrance (Winston Salem NC)
Finally, I looked at the screen, and saw that the company’s name was indeed initialistic, but was S&R, not F&R. /f/ and /s/ are minimally distinct acoustically, so are often confused in perception. My initial perception was skewed towards /f/ because of my bias towards fucking — and so towards fucking and effing — and once established that perception persisted, despite repetitions of /s/.
Today’s Dan Piraro Bizarro, in three panels: an odd title panel that seems to be mostly about phallicity in the mythic Old West, and two Toto / Tonto confusion panels: the Lone Ranger and Toto (with a glancing allusion to Little Orphan Annie); and Dorothy and Tonto — to which I’ve added a Gershwin song in my title for this posting — to make a rich stew of American pop culture, covering the comics, jokes, movies, radio, tv, and popular music:
(#1) It’s a Sunday panel, so it’s by DP, not Wayno, and it’s a horizontal strip rather than a vertical one-panel gag (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page)
I’ll look at things panel by panel, then comment on my title for this posting — but first I’ll point out that
— the second panel, set in the desert of the mythic Old West, is from the Lone Ranger world, but with the dog Toto (intruding from the Wizard of Oz world) in place of the faithful Indian companion Tonto (Toto in effect punning on Tonto)
— while the third panel, with Dorothy confronting the Wicked Witch of the West (accompanied by one of her evil flying monkeys) on the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City of Oz, is from the Wizard of Oz world, but with Tonto (intruding from the Lone Ranger world) in place of Toto (Tonto in effect punning on Toto)
Here I’m carrying over my analysis, in yesterday’s posting “Harry’s scaffolding”, of one type of absurdist cartoon as involving an anchor world and an intrusive world; the second panel of #1 stands on its own as one such absurdist cartoon, and the third is another. The special delight of these panels is that the two absurdist cartoons are converses, conceptual mirror images of one another.
… in Stanford linguistics — the announcement:
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to announce a dissertation oral presentation on 6/12/24:
Indexing Respectability by Zion Mengesha
Committee: Penny Eckert (co-chair), Rob Podesva (co-chair), Jonathan Rosa, John Rickford, Paula Moya (university chair)
An old One Big Happy strip, recently up in my comics feed, has Ruthie once again coping with vocabulary unfamiliar to her:
Cirque du Soleil (presumably pronounced in English, as if it were Sirk do sew-lay), obstetrician, and false alarm (which Ruthie takes to be circus ole, lobstertrician, and fossil arm, respectively). These are three different cases, as I’ll explain below.
But then — knowing that in the world around her, different people have different pronunciations for expressions — she takes her mother’s intended corrections of her creative misinterpretations to be just repetitions of them (“Mom always repeats the stuff I say”), but with a pronunciation alternative to hers. Attempted corrections of kids often run aground in similar ways.
As a temporary diversion from some truly awful times in my life (which I will eventually post about), two reprised One Big Happy strips recently in my comics feed, in which Ruthie struggles to interpret language unfamiliar to her.
The strips.
(#1) The Iddle-Do Rule; which should lead us to reflect some on the distinction between circumstances in which “good enough for some purpose” — it’ll do — is the appropriate goal (the general case for most aspects of everyday social life) and the special cases in which a perfect performance is called for
(#2) Not Zarella cheese (with Not Zoball soup as a bonus); I note that Zarella is a fairly common Italian surname, which Ruthie (who is of Italian descent) might well be familiar with, so that a cheese named after a Zarella wouldn’t be at all surprising
