(Queer linguistic playfulness, but with plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex, so probably not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
From the latest avalanche of comments spam on my blog this morning (thousands a day at the moment, traceable to Russia, though knowing a bit about the source is not at all useful), what happens when programs randomly paste together personal names, family names, and small chunks of text all assembled from truly gigantic databases: sometimes you get goofy gay porn scenarios.
So it was that my morning was improved by the appearance in this gigantic spam queue of the obviously massively queer Amado Spears, the bearer of a wonderfully two-barreled porn name, with the following eccentric message from him about his racy adventures with his husband and a phallic friend:
My husband and i have been absolutely fulfilled when Peter managed to finish up his investigations from the precious recommendations he had from your own weblog.
The name of a business establishment in this cartoon by Adam Douglas Thompson in the January 13th New Yorker:
A wry, and potentially ominous, play on the central ambiguity in the noun nail; and implicitly a reflection on how business establishments are named: what products or services are provided at a place called NAILS?
Recently posted on Facebook, this melding of the traditions of Judaism with the traditions of Jedi-ism for the holiday season, in French:
(#1) ‘May the light be with you’: the Jedi Master Yoda wields a lightsword menorah for Hanukkah (Fr. Hanoucca) — Happy Hanukkah! (Joyeuse fête de Hanoucca!)
A generic penguin ban sign (sold on Amazon, a CD Visionary no-penguins button):
(#1) What’s banned? Spheniscid birds. Why? Who knows. (They smell. They steal fish. They get underfoot. Whatever.)
and a ban — in a list of prohibitions against public vice or indecency — on the door of Loretta’s Authentic Pralines on N. Rampart St. in New Orleans (photo from the TripAdvisor South Africa site):
(#2) What’s banned? Who knows. Why? Because they’re a vice (like drinking or smoking) or are indecent (like profanity or nudity), presumably the latter.
The grim tale of the shoe elves who got wasted on ale and were baked into a bro pie by the evil shoemaker’s wife — I embroider a bit here — as condensed by Wayno and Piraro in their 11/7 Bizarro strip:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page. Two of these, the Pie of Opportunity and the Lost Loafer, figure in the actual content of the cartoon and will be duly attended to in a moment.)
The Bizarro Bros have folded a fair number of things into this cartoon, starting with the bro mindset and the slang nouns dude and bro, going on to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, in particular the tale of the elves and the shoemaker, and incorporating shoes from both Grimm and Bizarro, plus Greek pie, and I don’t mean spanakopita.
A Mick Stevens Caveman cartoon in the 9/30/19 New Yorker (about to arrive in the mail), memorializing a signal moment in the cartoon Stone Age:
(#1) The weaponization of sarcasm in prehistoric times
The later history of weaponized sarcasm is vast, but certainly reaches one of its high points in 1970 in the career of British gangster Doug Piranha. During a period of perhaps 70 years sarcasm has spread to become, in the view of some cultural critics, absolutely pervasive in modern society, at least in the Anglophone world.
Meanwhile, the idea that elements of culture can be weaponized — used like bludgeons not just against individuals, but also to aggressively serve social or political purposes — has recently become fashionable.
(And then, of course, there’s the question of the semantic work that the derivational suffix –ize does in converting various groups of lexical items to verbs (as in N weapon > V weaponize).)
My 7/22 posting “Oh that’s good” looked at Archie Campbell’s That’s Good / That’s Bad joke routine from the tv show Hee Haw. Now Tim Evanson points out a somewhat later appearance of the routine, in an episode of The Simpsons.
(#1) From “Treehouse of Horror III”, The Simpsons S4 E5 (first aired 10/29/92)
(Regularly skirting or confronting sexual matters, so perhaps not to everyone’s taste.)
Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro takes us back to the Garden of Eden:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
The bit of formulaic language for this situation is a catchphrase, a slogan with near-proverbial status (YDK, for short):
YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE IT’S BEEN
The leaves are conventionally associated with modesty, through their having been used to cover the nakedness of Adam and Eve in the Garden — a use that then associates the leaves with the genitals, from which the psychological contamination spreads to the entire plant, including the fruits. You don’t know where that fig has been.
All this, and more, in two recent One Big Happy cartoons, from 7/2 (I broke a finger — the determiner cartoon) and 7/4 (Where was the Declaration of Independence signed? — the locative cartoon). Both featuring Ruthie’s brother Joe. I’ll start with the locatives.
