Archive for the ‘Rainbow’ Category
August 26, 2025
From Steven Levine on 8/19, this image from a Facebook group on thrift store finds, about a rectangle of needlepoint (probably intended to be a wall hanging) depicting penguins marching from left to right, through a rainbow, each emerging from the other side with its body, inside and out, in one of the colors of the gay pride flag; the rainbow makes them gay:
(#1) Steven of course thought of me, but appreciated that this would not be the time to be giving me penguiniana, so contented himself with letting me enjoy the strange spectacle
I’d never seen anything quite like it. Marching penguins, yes, of course. Penguins in the colors of the gay pride flag, of course. I’ve posted both. But the preposterous fantasy of penguins getting gay-transmuted by passing through a rainbow, absolutely not. And then to realize it not in drawing, painting, or trick photography, but in the unpretentious craft medium of needlepoint, where we expect earnest images (stylized birds) and slogans (BLESS THIS HOME), well, that’s wonderfully goofy.
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Posted in Art, Color, Furnishings and tools, Gender and sexuality, Penguins, Rainbow, Rainbows | Leave a Comment »
July 7, 2025
The message from my fellow QUESTer — another Queer University Employee At Stanford — Ryan Tamares, on a postcard mailed to me on 6/19, in the middle of Pride Month:
Happy Pride !
Pride always ! !
— RESIST —
The holiday moment has passed, but now we’re in a world where we have to actively resist, on a daily basis, against the brownshirts and blackshirts serving our overlords. And join with the drag queens and thrown-away club kids who, in one of our foundation tales, fought back against the cops who came to ruin their lives, and ours.
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Posted in Art, Biology, Categorization and Labeling, Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language of sex, My life, Rainbow, Signs and symbols, Stanford, Trade names | Leave a Comment »
July 5, 2025
From yesterday (for me, a long 4th of July work day, 6 am to 6 pm) on my Facebook page (somewhat edited):
In going through stuff in my closets, I came across a t-shirt (one that fits me, so I put it on) that has a logo on the front: a (portrait) rectangle with horizontal stripes of the rainbow flag in it and the word IN in white letters superimposed on the rainbow stripes. The back of the shirt identifies it as from out@in, which is presumably some sort of gay organization, but I don’t recognize the name or remember how I came to have the shirt.
My attempts to search for the organization and the logo came to nought, as did my attempts to scan the t-shirt logo into my scanning printer, so I appealed to readers to supply me with information about the organization and with a copy of the logo. (Given the precarity of my current life, I did not take well to people who, instead of giving me the information I sought, explained to me how I should have done the searches.)
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Posted in Academic life, Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Logos, My life, Names, Rainbow, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
June 4, 2025
… and the season is Pride Month. Canadian Pride and Canadian pride from Chris Ambidge on Facebook on 6/1:
Oh look — Canada Post is issuing four commemorative stamps in honour of Pride Month. The theme is “Places of Pride / Lieux de la fierté”, and depict four places beloved of LGBTQ2S+ people in Canada, from Hanlan’s Point in Toronto to Club Carousel, Calgary’s first gay bar. I hadn’t seen these last time I was at the post office — I need to go buy me some stamps!
(#1) From the Canada Post website on 5/29:
We’re proud to announce our latest stamp series honouring sites across Canada that 2SLGBTQIA+ [2S is two-spirit, a First Nations term for a third gender] people fought to make their own – places of celebration and freedom to be fully oneself, and spaces that nurtured a sense of solidarity that became a catalyst for change. 🏳️🌈
The Places of Pride stamp series honours: Calgary’s first gay bar Club Carousel; Toronto’s Hanlan’s Point Beach; Montreal gay bar Truxx; 3rd North American Native Gay & Lesbian Gathering near Beausejour, Manitoba.
O Canada! … The True North strong and free! — we send Prideful huzzahs to you.
Things are different, stamp-wise, in my troubled country.
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Posted in Art, Canada, Gender and sexuality, Race and ethnicity, Rainbow | 2 Comments »
April 25, 2025
🐧 🐧 🐧 whoop whoop whoop it’s World Penguin Day, 4/25, and I have been pleasantly besieged with penguiniana from friends; as my contribution to the day, I offer a t-shirt with a double strength gayguin on it;
The bird’s coloration is rainbow-gay, and then it’s waving a rainbow flag as well
And then there’s the reductive mid portmanteau gayguin (gay + penguin), like liger, brunch, or smog — but with a whole word, rather than an initial word-part, as its first contributor (see my 4/22/25 posting “The tin portmantax man” on types of portmanteaus)
Today was supposed to be a rest day, in between a Thursday visit from my caregiver J (in which we got lots of housework done) and weekend work on a ton of blog stuff that has piled up dramatically. And a chance to tell you about the improvements in many small but significant aspects of my medical state, which my pedicurist and my caregiver (who observe me closely) have commented on with some amazement and delight. But all that was blanked out by endless hassles in trying to fix business stuff, by emergency academic matters, and by really foul weather (including a long spell of low barometric pressure that made it hard to use my hands at all).
Despite my not being able to get around to doing any of the things I’d planned for the day, I found pleasure in other, unexpected activities. Apparently, unreasonable equanimity in the face of unpleasantness goes along with the mysterious improvements in my physical state (J thinks that the attitude shift caused the physical improvements, and he might be right). But now I really have to get dinner and go to bed. See you tomorrow.
Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, My life, Penguins, Portmanteaus, Rainbow | 1 Comment »
August 8, 2024
An alert yesterday from Ernesto Cuba about the Homosaurus project: an LGBT thesaurus, with a portmanteau name
homosaurus = homo(sexual) + thesaurus — thesaurus from Ancient Greek, meaning ‘treasure, storehouse’
and a logo featuring a mascot apatosaurus (aka brontosaurus):
(#1) The Homosaurus mascot is a huge but herbivorous (hence unthreatening, user-friendly) dinosaur, and it comes with an accompanying Pride rainbow
— all these creatures with names incorporating the formative saur(us) (ultimately from Greek again, and meaning ‘lizard, reptile’ ), utterly unrelated to thesaurus but irresistible as a source of verbal and visual play, as in #1.
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Posted in Homosexuality, Language and animals, Logos, Mascots, Portmanteaus, Rainbow, Resources | 1 Comment »
July 25, 2024
Nelson Minar writing on Facebook on 7/19 alludes to the controversial oysters vs. snails bath scene in the 1960 movie Spartacus:
Facebook has now figured out that I prefer snails to oysters so it is serving me ads featuring improbable men’s butts instead of improbable women’s butts. It hasn’t figured me out on the daddy / twink axis yet though.
I was derailed for a moment by a vision of a rock band called Improbable Butts. And, entertained by NM’s report that he’s a snail guy, derailed for a longer period by this vision of a notably phallic rainbow snail:
(#1) From the Craiyon site, an AI image generated from the prompt “A whimsical rainbow-colored snail with a trail of sparkling slime”
But now to Spartacus, after which I can return to snails as food and the verb eat.
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Phallicity, Rainbow, Vaginality | 1 Comment »
July 13, 2024
A surprise from my tiny family this morning, as my grandchild Opal presented me with two gifts: the children’s picture book The Pengrooms by Paul Castle (Paul Castle Studio, 2022), together with an adorable plushie toy of Pringle the Pengroom — Pringle, who is grooms with Finn (both sporting rainbow bow ties, in case you missed the same-sex theme). The cover of the book, showing the couple atop a wedding cake, with the publisher’s blurb:
(#1) Follow Pringle and Finn, two penguins with big hearts, as they deliver wedding cakes to their friends in the animal kingdom. Each cake tells a story, and each [same-sex] wedding offers a challenge that Pringle and Finn must face together. The Pengrooms is an enduring tale about love, diversity, and the importance of working as a team.
Pringle is larger than Finn — couples differ in many ways — but they’re equal partners as a team. The Pringle plushie:
(#2) Pringle, with a really big bow tie
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Posted in Books, Effeminacy, Gay voice, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and animals, Language and food, Penguins, Rainbow, Social interactions, Sociocultural Roles, Toys | Leave a Comment »
June 18, 2024
(Tasteless and obscene, in two languages, so not to everyone’s taste)
(#1) A rainbow raised fist, representing proud defiance; image from Redbubble, by designer MAS-S (in Berlin, Germany)
And now the frocio ‘queer, homo, faggot, fairy, queen’ mock-Pope intoning benedico questa frociata ‘I bless this faggotry’ (more literally, ‘this faggoting’) at the 6/15 Pride celebration in Rome, where t-shirts proclaimed “There is never too much frociaggine” — never too much faggotry — as participants enthusiastically embraced every vulgar insult they know (but especially frociaggine), turning them into proud badges of identity and defiance, raising the rainbow fist:
(#2) (photo from the National Catholic Reporter on 6/16/24)
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Posted in Derivation, Etymology, Homosexuality, Italian, Language and religion, Language and sexuality, Morphology, Playful morphology, Rainbow, Signs and symbols, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | 1 Comment »
June 14, 2024
First, it’s Pride month, so that runs through the 14th through 16th (today through Sunday), the days I’m focused on in this posting. Then: today is Flag Day; tomorrow is what I have wryly proposed as Flagging Day (for displaying your identities and tastes); and Sunday is five special days in one: three date-specific occasions, plus two floating-date events (some of these five are of personal significance to me, others of broader interest).
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Posted in Flags, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language of sex, Masculinity, My life, Rainbow, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
