(a posting that clearly will not to be to everyone’s taste)
From the Titan Men Store (an adjunct to the gay porn studio), among a huge variety of silicone sex toys currently on sale, this cute little item:
Archive for the ‘Play’ Category
On the sex toy watch
March 22, 2026Eggcorns, innocent and deliberate
August 26, 2025From a reader on 8/24:
Are you involved in collecting eggcorns? In case you are, I thought you might be interested in a potential one that I’ve encountered “in the wild” (i.e., a Reddit post). This person wrote jig solve puzzles instead of jigsaw puzzles:
I should have been diagnosed [with ADHD] as a child but it was the early 90s in a poor rural area. Special ed at my school didn’t diagnose me with anything specific … they just told my mom I needed to spend time doing jig solve puzzles. So, I forced my way through. (Reddit posting)
My response:
I certainly have been involved in collecting eggcorns. But there are only so many balls you can juggle at one time, and I am now a old man with not a lot of time left, so I’ve been pretty much out of the eggcorn business. But you will be pleased to hear that jigsaw > jig solve isn’t in the eggcorn database and hasn’t come up in the eggcorn forum, so I might post on it.
And now I am.
Tell a joke, go to jail
January 18, 2025In the 1/17 Zippy strip, Z confronts a pair of clay wraiths, lifeless in body and dead in soul, and tries desperately to interject fun — levity — into the conversation; to counterpose silliness, play, and sheer joy against the dead weight of the world’s pain, suffering, and injustice; to plead for humanity over humorlessness; to advocate for delight, even in the smallest everyday things:
In English, Belgium is a funny word, odd, darkly edgy, and absurd all at once; Lewis Carroll picked the name boojum for his ridiculously dangerous creature in The Hunting of the Snark to capture this strange blend of resonances.
Penguins at play
October 10, 2024Max Vasilatos had warned me they were coming, but I didn’t know when. But today was their day, and they were a cheering relief from the deep dysfunction that a week of extravagant heat has visited upon me: from the Play Visions company in Woodlinville WA (but, yes, made in China), the Club Earth Penguin Parade — 6 nesting penguins (the biggest only 5 inches tall, so they fit in easily with almost any home decor):
(#1) An ad display of Les Six Antarctiques; can you tell which of the six is the Swiss penguin (known professionally as Arthur Honegger)? What gives him away as a Swissie and not a Frenchie like all the others?
Frivolity is a stern taskmaster
June 17, 2024The oxymoron-flavored punchline of today’s Zippy strip:
(#1) “Frivolity is a stern taskmaster”: it had the feel of a play on some existing quotation, so I searched on “stern taskmaster” — only to discover that frivolity is a stern taskmaster is indeed a famous quotation, widely attributed (without specific source) to … Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead!
At first, I hoped that one of the trackers of quotation sources — especially the Quote Investigator – would have taken this one on, but no luck there, so it was on to a long and tedious search through the Zippy archives. From which I emerged with an apparent winner, in a 2008 strip (though there was a 2003 strip with Jack Kerouac is a stern taskmaster in it; and a 2023 strip entitled “Stern Taskmaster” — both of which I’ll show you).
Then some investigation of stern taskmaster, which turns out to be a common collocation, one of the big three Adj collocations with the N taskmaster: hard, tough, and stern. Not (yet) fixed expressions — catchphrases, slogans, or even idioms — but something more than the fresh combinations of Adj and N into nominal phrases, approaching stock expressions.
Love and intrigue in the palace of cards
January 13, 2024Encountered this morning on Pinterest, this remarkable artwork: a playing card showing the jack of hearts in the arms of the king of spades and holding hands with him:
(#1) A same-sex encounter in the palace of cards, the work of Iranian-born Mahdieh Farhadkiaei; according to the site of the publisher of this playing-card art, Black Dragon Press (“a family-run print publisher based in London, UK”), she’s “an illustrator and concept artist working in advertising and fashion”
MF’s first set of these cards shows same-sex romantic pairings (both female and male), mixed-sex romantic pairings, and scenes of palace intrigue, all involving the characters on the three face cards (king, queen, and jack), as well as some solo portraits; we can only hope that more depictions of palace life are on the way.
In the menswear ROJ
May 15, 2022As in yesterday’s posting “Romper buddies”, about an ad for Romperjacks: not RAJ the land of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Andhra Pradesh, but ROJ the land of rompers, overalls, and jumpsuits. With a photo gallery. To whet your interest, two Romperjacks items:
(#1) The floridly beautiful Jungle Print romper
(#2) The elegant White Chateaux romper
Adventures in a balloon
January 2, 2022In today’s (1/2/22) Bizarro, the Old Balloon Peddler hawks his wares in the park:
(#1) And thought balloons too! Take a word or thought ride in one of these sturdy inflatable delights (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)The Magical Adventure Balloon Ride
— a private basket adventure exclusively for thrill seekersHe gives the kids free samples
Because he knows full well
That today’s young innocent faces
Will be tomorrow’s clientele
bunny ears
May 21, 2018It started with a candid photo of people at a social gathering, with one person making a V hand gesture behind the head of the person next to them, much as in this photo of pro tennis players:
(#1) Swiss jock jokery: Stan Wawrinka doing the ‘bunny ears’ gesture behind Roger Federer
Bunny-earing someone is a prank (NOAD on the noun prank: ‘a practical joke or mischievous act’), pranks being a very culture-specific form of play + humor that deserve analytic attention that I’m not able to provide, but will just take as a cultural given here.
To come: a bit of the history of bunny-earing; senses of the expression bunny ears (illustrating (mostly metaphorical) sense developments in many directions); and uses of the V hand gesture (illustrating symbolic functions of many different kinds; the gesture itself is “just stuff”, without intrinsic meaning, which can be exploited for many different symbolic purposes). The act, the meanings of the linguistic expression for the act, the cultural significances (or “social meanings”) of the act.
