Archive for the ‘Flags’ Category

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cogedores

August 10, 2022

(Warning: the posting quickly descends into various kinds of vulgar, unsavory slang.)

From Kyle Wohlmut (from Twitter) on Facebook this morning, with the comment “good morning fuckers’:


(#1) A set of three plastic kitchen scoops, in a package designed to hang on a supermarket display hook; note the notch at the top of the package, for slipping over the hook; the back of the package has the name of the item in four languages, from four countries, the countries identified by flags (in tiny, muddy, b&w images), and as you go down the list, the referents of the names — names evidently supplied by some translation software — drift rapidly away from a kitchen scoop and get raunchier and raunchier: ‘scraping, scratching’, figurative ‘son of a bitch’ (literally ‘son of a whore’), figurative ‘fucker’ (referring to a contemptible or stupid person; to any man, to a guy; or to some unspecified object)

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Posted in Flags, Italian, Metaphor, Portuguese, Slang, Spanish, Taboo language and slurs, Technology | 1 Comment »

Sisgender Night’s Dream

June 20, 2022

Start with the sexual-identity terms cis(gender) and trans(gender), which I looked at on this blog yesterday, and they’ll lead you to various forms of language play. If there’s a Transylvania — actually, there are several —  where is its counterpart Cisylvania? Is there a (punning) gender-identity term sisgender for sissies and fems?  And a Sis(s)ylvania for them to live in — perhaps the fairies’ wooded land (as in Midsummer Night’s Dream)?

It’s the curse of the associative mind. We all have them, but some of us have really big ones.

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Posted in Books, Effeminacy, Flags, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Identities, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Placenames, Puns | 4 Comments »

Flagging day

June 15, 2022

(Well yes, holiday time, but it quicky turns to man-on-man sex in street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

Yesterday, June 14th, was Flag Day in my country: “It commemorates the adoption of the flag of the United States on June 14, 1777, by resolution of the Second Continental Congress.” (from Wikipedia). I am not in the habit of flying the American flag, not out of a lack of love for the country, but out of a desire not to be seen as a yahoo flying the flag as an aggressive symbol of exclusion for those who aren’t “real Americans” — people of color, lgbt folk, liberals in coastal big cities, artists and scholars, and all the rest of us scum. If I flew an American flag yesterday, it would have had to be in conjunction with at least a Rainbow Pride Flag. But I don’t have the flagpoles, or any place to put them. I do have a rainbow flag draped over the fencing in my entryway, and that’s already up against the tolerance of the condo Homeowners Association. And I display the rainbow flag — and also the Swiss flag — on gym shorts and t-shirts.

I think of these displays on my body as flagging gay and flagging Swiss, with a use of the verb flag — to convey (in my rough definition) something like ‘(U.S. gay) display, on one’s body or in one’s attire, a symbol of identity or taste, with the intention of communicating those to potentially interested others’ — that appears not to be covered in standard general or slang dictionaries (up to and including OED2, though that’s in sore need of updating).

I think Flag Day should be left as it is, but today, June 15th, midway through Gay Pride Month, would be a good moment for (Gay) Flagging Day, using conventions that grew up in the mid-20th century.

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Posted in Clothing, Flags, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

Big queer cool noodles

June 11, 2022

In the bon appétit e-mail yesterday (6/10), Taiwanese noodles for Gay Pride Month. From the e-mail:


Big Queer Cold Noodles: These noodles have a special place in the heart and stomach of BA contributor Jessie YuChen, who styled the recipe after a beloved late-night dish from a hole-in-the-wall neighbor to Taipei’s only lesbian bar. It’s perfect for Pride parties all summer long.

A cold salad of (mostly) vegetables in rainbow flag colors, plus of course the cold noodles. Missing the color blue, which is not available in any common vegetable. Instead of yellow bell peppers or squash for yellow: beaten eggs cooked in sheets and then cut into strips. And with the six colors not quite in their canonical order red – orange – yellow – green – (blue) – purple; going clockwise from the red bell peppers, the orange carrots are out of order. But then why should a celebration of the gay and queer have to adhere to a normative ordering?

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Posted in Flags, Language and food, Rainbow, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

Flying the flag of my people

August 4, 2021

The foreshadowing, from my 7/31 posting “If you squint, you can see Switzerland”:

I have not celebrated Swiss National Day [August 1st] with any sort of Carnivalesque disorder, though I did decide to acquire a mid-sized Gay Pride flag to display at my condo, now that one of my neighbors in the complex has somehow surmounted the HOA ban on such displays with a big rainbow flag on a balcony and a Black Lives Matter sign on the street.

My intention was realized yesterday, with the arrival of this excellent 2×3 ft product of the U.S. Flag Factory:


(#1) (photos, at dawn today, by Kim Darnell)

Just the size I wanted, to fit this particular space. Hanging from a nail once used for Christmas wreaths, when those were one of the few allowable public displays in the complex. The flag’s on the gate to my front patio (you can see the light from my workspace, through the window), along the short entryway to my condo from the street. So it is indeed a public display, visibly celebrating gayness to anyone who walks by on the street.

(I wonder if it’s too generically celebratory, like the rainbow flag that the local Pizzeria Delfina flies above its door — and unlike the rainbow flags flown by some local churches, which are signs of sanctuary and care. Maybe I should get a plaque made for the door: GAY INSIDE. I wonder if I could get a welcome mat made with that on it.)

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Posted in Flags, My life, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

Is that an American flag in your crotch?

February 6, 2021

(Fit young men wearing nothing but scraps of the American flag pattern, so not for those who are modest about displays of the male body or offended by casual disregard for the flag, but there’s nothing actually raunchy here.)

In the great avalanche of underwear ads that’s been rolling over my Facebook — wretched excess, even for someone with my tastes — there came, this morning, this arresting JockStraps.com ad offering a JOR US flag bikini jockstrap (which looks like a (mini-)brief from the front) — plus one of the model’s armpits):

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Posted in Flags, Holidays, Underwear | 1 Comment »

It started with a kiss

January 24, 2021

(Six male-male kisses, of different sorts and with different sociocultural meanings, plus a general suffusion of homoerotic content and undercurrents throughout, so this posting is not to everyone’s taste — but there’s nothing raunchy enough to make it plainly unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

It started with a kiss in a poster (from Hana Filip on Facebook, long ago — 2/23/19) apparently signifying the union of the Soviet Army and Navy, but it turns out to be sheer invention, the work of the artist Igor Baskakov, whose specialties include a very uneasy blend of official Communism and high-commercial capitalism:


(#1) The caption: ‘Support/Strengthen the union of the Army and Navy’

Three things about this poster. First, it alludes to (as Hana put it) the fraternal socialist kiss trope, the most (in)famous of which is the kiss between Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev and East German leader Erich Honecker (1979):

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Posted in Art, Flags, Gender and sexuality, Linguists, Movies and tv, Signs and symbols | 1 Comment »

Gay couple in Pouchland

July 20, 2020

… with vivid pops of genital color in their underwear, plus waistbands that celebrate peace and freedom, also exhibiting sharply differentiated roles in their relationship. Lots of stuff packed into just one Daily Jocks ad (for the Modus Vivendi Peace line of underwear) from 7/15. There will be plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex, so this posting is not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.

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Posted in Facial expression, Flags, Gay porn, Gayland, Phallicity, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

Boy oh Boyu!

January 9, 2020

David Bowie seems to have a considerable following in Russia, to judge from the Pinterest materials about him, for instance this album:


(#1) Дэвид Боуи: David Bowie in Cyrillic transiteration

Боуи gets the [wi] of Bowie just right, but to Latin-alphabet-oriented eyes that уи looks like YU [ju], so Боуи looks like Boyu: Boy oh Boyu!

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Posted in Art, Flags, Music, Phallicity, Pop culture, Russian, Writing systems | 2 Comments »

4th of July displays

July 6, 2019

(Much about men’s bodies and mansex, in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest; also about military displays for Independence Day, but that comes after the raunchy stuff — Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.)

So we have the 4th of July as a celebration of commercial mansex (every holday is a sales opportunity): selling premium men’s underwear by hawking men’s bodies; and offering gay porn sales, usually with a holiday-themed image (naked bodies wrapped in the flag are a conventional presentation, but there are many other possibilities). From this year’s rich crop of ads, I’ve chosen one of each type: a holiday ad for DJX homowear in the Trough line; and an ad for the political-satire gayporn film Cauke for President from TitanMen.

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Posted in Facial expressions, Flags, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, History, Holidays, Language and politics, Phonology, Poetry, Signs and symbols, Underwear | 2 Comments »

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