Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm, with the POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) Edgar Allan Po’ Boy = Edgar Allan Poe (the American writer and poet) + po’ boy (the superb New Orleans submarine sandwich):
(#1) Edgar Allan Po’ Boy is a N1 + N2 compound N, understood as having the head, N2, semantically associated with the modifier, N1, by (the referent of) N2’s being named after (the referent of) N1 — parallel to the Woody Allen Sandwich (a tower of corned beef and pastrami) at NYC’s Carnegie Deli
(Plus the allusion to Poe’s poem The Raven — Quoth the raven, “Nevermore” — in Grimm’s, “I had it once, but… nevermore”.)
If you were a betting person, you would surely put some money on this MGG strip as not being the first to use this particular POP — of course, that would be fine, it’s all in how you develop the joke — and you would win.
Just on this blog, in Zippy postings from 2016 and a Rhymes With Orange posting in 2017.
Plus bonuses: a texty with a pun turning on the ambiguity of /póbòj/ as either po’ boy or Poe boy; and two cartoons turning on Edgar Allan Poe / Po’ Boy understood as a Source or Ingredient compound (parallel to shrimp po’ boy) — yes, Edgar Allan Poe in a po’ boy, in it, good enough to eat.
(There will, as the title tells you, be riffs on squat, well, on squat. Since I’m given to finding my material in louche and faggy places, there will be brief encounters with squat — short and thick, fireplug-like — male organs and with a squatting position for receptive anal intercourse. But no visible body parts.)
I glanced at today’s incoming e-mail, which included a mailing from the New York Times with a link to a story of theirs offering life advice:
(#1)
I found it remarkable that the paper was giving pointers on how to embark on living in uninhabited buildings without the legal right to do so. But then we live in precarious times, and millions are having trouble coping.
🐇 🐇 🐇 Despite yesterday’s incident of gun-jumping, premature social intercourse (“April is the most Abrahamic month”, here), this is the actual April 1st posting, and it’s drenched in cunicular sexiness — this month I really really really mean those rabbits — so it’s definitely out-of-bounds for kids and the sexually modest. I begin with two images — not in themselves salacious — and then get down and fluffy with a bit of amiably very dirty doggerel.
Some riffing on yesterday’s posting “Catchphrases for sale”, about this Zippy strip:
(#1) Offering fresh phrases — not already in circulation as catchphrases, sayings, proverbs, slogans, famous quotations, well-known names and titles, and the like — chosen at random
Zippy’s fresh phrases sound like catchphrases — roughly, free-standing expressions that you recognize as coming from a stock of quotations widely known in your culture, which then (if you wish) can be conventionally used to make some point — but are in fact novel. The things called catchphrases are then exquisitely embedded in particular cultures (note: “widely known in your culture” and also “can be conventionally used”).
Seizing a moment of pleasure in yesterday’s deeply despairing hours: the little bit that I can still manage by way of cooking, which is really just assembly and using kitchen appliances (a rice cooker, the microwave), in a conscious imitative realization of the delightful verse by Maurice Sendak, “Chicken Soup with Rice” (1962):
Whoopee once
Whoopee twice
Whoopee spicy beef and celery soup
With rice
A Vicki Sawyer greeting card (on Sawyer’s animal art, see my 2/5/22 posting “The groundhog and the scallion”) from Ann Burlingham, Troublemaker (that’s what it says on her business card) — written on the 20th, postmarked in Pittsburgh on the 22nd, arrived in Palo Alto on the 26th — with a reproduction of Sawyer’s composition “Garden Prince”:
(#1) The Garden Prince wears a crown of carrots and a royal neckchain of peapods, which together serve both as symbols of his authority and as indicators of his tastes in food (also note the conventional simile like peas and carrots ‘getting along well together, being compatible’)
In #1, Ann “saw something akin to a Renaissance portrait. Crossed with Watership Down?” YES!
(for 2/14/22, VDay, but more significantly, Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky’s birthday)
Swooping overhead, clever pterodactyls (EDZ’s totem animals) shriek in delight! For it is EDZ’s Heinz Birthday:
(Heinz used to evoke steak sauce and the like, but for some time now it has come to call up warm thoughts of John Kerry for me)
Your 50th birthday (which came for EDZ a little while ago) is your Gold Birthday. And your 57th is your Heinz Birthday. Whoopee! (In fact “Whoopee once / Whoopee twice / Whoopee chicken soup / With rice!”, as EDZ’s godmother wrote to her this morning.)
(Note the title. Stud hustling and men tricking with men, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
The Daily Jocks ad in my e-mail on 2/7 reproduces the archetypical cruise pose, deployed in both hustling (for sale) and tricking, or hooking up (for play), by men for men:
(#1) [ad copy:]
NEW: UTILITY SHORTS
BE READY FOR ANYTHING
Everyday practicality with weekend style, your new favourite shorts have arrived at DailyJocks.
(About male-male sex in street language, definitely not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
Unearthed this morning — amidst piles of note pages with material for, I estimate, about 500 blog postings, on the same page from my little bedroom notepad as “I ween”, which (thanks to my 4/24/21 posting “I ween”) I’ve been able to date to mid-April 2021 — this bit of alliterative doggerel:
(#1) The pedication poem
(Perhaps unconsciously inspired by the American “dirty” folksong” “Violate Me in Violet Time (In the vilest way you know)” — No. 235 in Vance Randolph’s Roll Me in Your Arms: “Unprintable” Ozark Folksongs and Folklore (Univ. of Arkansas Press, 1992).)
(Jam-packed with male bodies and man-man sex discussed in street language — admittedly, along with a lot of other stuff, but there’s no denying the high raunch content — so not even remotely suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
2/2/22 Happy Twoday! The Groundhog Day that won’t come again for a century. This morning the groundhog emerged from its burrow and was immediately devoured by a day-old tiger, who growled lewdly, “Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side”, while some colored girls sang about kissing the cross.
