đ đ when I began this posting, it was penultimate November, and this year also Black Friday, when the anticipation of Christmas becomes a constant, unremitting dinging, accompanied by exhortations to SHOP NOW; I held to my long-standing practice of not leaving the house on Black Friday for any purpose other than retrieving my mail from the mailboxes in the condo parking lot
Meanwhile:
(#1)
A tale of the jim-jams, the most acute form of the jams (joint and muscle afflictions), a story that began on Friday 11/22 with the jams, reached utter jim-jam misery on Monday 11/25, and then slowly moderated since then; but also a tale of plans gone utterly awry (lyrics above from “Walk on the wild guardsman side”)
The Wayno Bizarro for today, 11/28, is an exercise in cartoon understanding:
(#1) Wayno’s title: “Horrifyingly Tasty”; I would have suggested the more bloodthirsty “Eat Your Gods” (if youâre puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon â Wayno says there are 3 in this strip â see this Page)
But it’s all totally baffling unless you recognize the references to Charles Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts; you really have to know about Linus and the Great Pumpkin. (Meanwhile, your appreciation of the strip will be enriched if you know that today is US Thanksgiving, a harvest festival for which the traditional foods include pumpkin pie for dessert.)
And while we’re talking festivals, the cartoon is a festival of ambiguities in English, structural and lexical.
(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 WoŠ(now working in Berlin):
(There will be mentions — in vernacular but not actually vulgar terms — of male-male sexual practices that some will find icky, so this posting will not be to everyone’s taste; and it might stretch some kids’ horizons a bit, so a gentle warning)
From back on 10/30, e-mail from Gadi Niram, with a video gift for me, saying: I found this video (and the young man in it) to be quite a pleasant diversion:
(#1) Screen shot from the video, which you can view here
A shirtless young man in ripped denim shorts playing the 3rd movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata (Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27 No.2) on a fancy grand piano (with a mirrored fallboard, as in the finest piano lounges). alongside the pool at at what looks like a tropical oceanside resort. (For a bit of extra sexiness, those shorts are down far enough in the back to expose the waistband of his black Calvins; here the girls and the gay boys swoon.)
The 11/12 Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange strip takes us to the Merriam-Webster company gym, where the lexicographers get defined:
(#1) It’s pun day at the definition factory, with bodybuilders’ definition punning on lexicographers’ definition
Confronted with a pun strip, I’ll usually go on to cite definitions from NOAD (or similar sources) for the punning expression and its model, and I’ll do a version of that here, getting at the expression well-defined by starting from the verb define, going on to the adjective defined (modified by the degree adverbial well ‘thoroughly’ in well-defined), and then steaming on to the noun definition and the conceptually related verbs cut and shred.
But what I find on this little trip has nothing at all from the vocabulary of bodybuilding. Not in NOAD, where I start (because I can access this dictionary on my computer with a few keystrokes); not in the OED (no surprise; its on-line version for this vocabulary is still antique); not — oh wonderful irony — in the on-line Merriam-Webster; not in AHD5; and not (to my astonishment) in GDoS. So for the bodybuilding vocabulary, I’ve cobbled together definitions from various bodybuilding sources. But apparently bodybuilding is so esoteric a world that its vocabulary has not yet reached mainstream lexicography. (A surprise to me. I’m not part of the bodybuilding world, but I have, yes, bodybuilder friends, also friends who are into bodybuilding competitions, and friends who have a taste for bodybuilders; and meanwhile, the gay male world and the world of physique magazines have long been intertwined, so I’m familiar with the bodybuilding world.)
đ Â đ Â đ Â three tigers for ultimate October, aka Halloween; by the pricking of my fingers, something wicked this way lingers
Specifically, my fingers pricked out the name Anold for Arnold a little while ago, as they do with regrettable regularity (Gorgo finger not work right), but this time it was in a link on Facebook to this blog, so not self-correcting. But George V. Reilly caught the error and pointed it out to me, so that I could fix it. And then today, I had an inspiration, which I posted as a response (somewhat revised here) to George:
— AMZ > GVR:Â It has occurred to me to take up Anold the anold as another identity. The anold is a brightly colored arboreal lizard — a type of anole — in its rare and precious Swiss variant. Characterized by its curiosity (in several senses — “Look, Bruce, what a curious lizard!”) and its remarkable, um, snout.
This is the anold’s organ sometimes known jocularly as a Swiss nose. All noses are phallic, but some are considerably more phallic than others. (A lexical note on the noun snout, from NOAD: ‘the projecting nose and mouth of an animal, especially a mammal’.)
Meanwhile, while noses and snouts are phallic symbols, lizards (and dinosaurs and dragons) as wholes are much more impressively so. From GDoS on the noun lizard:
7 (Aus./US) the penis [1st cite 1969], with phrases meaning ‘to urinate’: bleed / drain / flog / squeeze the lizard; and phrases meaning ‘to masturbate’: bleed / gallop / pet the lizard and choke / stroke / whip one’s lizard
So now we’re deep into phallicity. Well, it’s my blog. Phallicity happens.
A fallout from my 10/17 posting “An underwater Psychiatrist cartoon” (“all about the noun favorite: an implicit superlative, denoting a top-ranking element in some comparison set”), this e-mail from my old friend Benita Bendon Campbell this morning:
the word favoris in French, as you probably know, means ‘sideburns’ and I canât imagine why
Bonnie, who’s had a long career as a teacher of French, tends to assume that my command of that language is vastly greater than it actually is — a kindly person would say that my knowledge of French is spotty — but in this case, yes, I had a dim recollection of this odd fact, mostly because favoris ‘sideburns’ got borrowed into (British) English, where it enjoyed a brief fashion in the 19th century. Summarized from OED (1972) under the noun favourite, with a colorful cite from Benjamin Disraeli (the British novelist and Prime Minister):
noun favori ‘sideburn’ (usually in plural); 3 19th-century British examples (Disraeli from 1831: His beard, his mustachios, his whiskers, his favoris.) Etymology: a borrowing from French.
So it’s into French that we must go.
