29 September: penultimate September, and also Michaelmas (the Feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael; the Feast of the Archangels; or the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels). Brief notes about the day; and then, in the midst of very difficult times (during which I am failing at almost everything, and in great pain), a report on some moments of pleasure that help to get me from day to day.
Archive for the ‘Signs and symbols’ Category
September 29th
September 29, 2025A seminar on raunchy play
September 23, 2025(entertaining, but totally not for kids or the sexually modest)
The seminar was called to order on 9/21 on Facebook by Michael Thomas, who introduced the key background element, the internet fridge. The participants were three gay men, long-time friends (our shared backgrounds and the relaxed, playful atmosphere are important here): speakers Michael Thomas and me, with Michael’s husband Aric Olnes in a non-speaking role. From the transcript (somewhat edited):
— MT: We [MT and AO] hooked our fridge up to the internet the other day. Here’s a question for the ages: do fridges watch porn while the doors are shut?
— AZ: But of course. And then they fall asleep and dream of abusing electric sheep. And you thought that was condensation on the fridge walls, didn’t you?
— MT > AZ: fridge spunk. just scrape it off for your coffee in the morning.
— AZ > MT: Absolutely. The best jizz there is.
There’s an enormous amount of stuff packed into this — some from the widespread sexual culture of modern America or from popular culture but also some from gay male sexual culture. I will now do some unpacking.
Orange roses
September 7, 2025Sharon Gray of Bay Area Geriatric Care turned up yesterday with a surprise present for my 85th birthday: a big vase of orange roses (on the pinkish or peach side of the color), because those were the really big and beautiful roses she could find on the spur of the moment, without assigning any meaning to the color (though I’m a Princeton A.B., rah rah orange and black and all that), and indeed not knowing what the particular variety was named (you wouldn’t believe how many rose-growing companies there are in the world and what an encyclopedia of names they have registered for orange cultivars). Now located right in my line of sight as I type at my worktable:
Roses of the Orange 85th; for roses, orange seems to be the color of joy, enthusiasm, and desire, and that does feel like a good fit for me
Now, how the color orange came to be associated with Princeton is a remarkably tangled tale involving the Holy Roman Empire (the tale begins in 1163), the French region of Provence (the town of Orange), the Rheinland-Palatinate region of Germany (the town of Nassau), the Netherlands, and of course William-and-Mary, rulers of Great Britain and Ireland. Quite remarkably, oranges the fruit and the color orange have nothing to do with all this, or at least didn’t until Princeton (founded in 1746) adopted orange and black as the official colors for academic gowns in 1896, which is virtually yesterday in this context (I mean, my father and mother were born in 1914). What the story does have to do with is mostly the astounding rapacity of the great bulk of the ruling classes. I will attempt to fill in some of the details in a forthcoming posting, but today I just want to enjoy those roses.
I’m Chiquito Quesito …
September 2, 2025I’m Chiquito Quesito, and I’m here to say,
Cheese dip has to be made the Arkansas way
The jingle to go along with native Arksansan Bill Halstead’s reproducing (on 8/31) this silly dip pun he found on Facebook (from who knows what source):
(#1) The signage is for a dip in NOAD‘s sense 3a, wilfully misunderstood as about sense 2:noun dip: … 2 a thick sauce in which pieces of food are dunked before eating: tasty garlic dip. 3 [a] a brief downward slope followed by an upward one: the road’s precipitous dips and turns. [b] an act of sinking or dropping briefly before rising again: a dip in the share price.
And queso is short for chile con queso (‘chili with cheese’), which Wikipedia identifies as:
an appetizer or side dish of melted cheese and chili peppers, typically served in Tex-Mex restaurants as a dip for tortilla chips.
Now three further explorations: about dip signage; about dipspreads and dips in general, and varieties of queso in particular; and then some Facebook exchanges with Bill Halstead about cheese dip as a significant item in Arkansas’s food culture.
Cartoons for 9/1/25
September 1, 2025🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to bring September in (also to bring in the first fall month in the northern hemisphere) and, this year, to celebrate (US) Labor Day (recognizing the union movement and honoring workers) — so that I bring you (cartoon) rabbits in hard hats:
(#1) Lola and Bugs Bunny, in an HBO Max series from 2023, Bugs Bunny Builders: Hard Hat Time
Which takes me to September cartoons from the New Yorker, beginning with a scene-setting item from 2022:
Gay banter: great big green beans
August 31, 2025🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate August, also (US) 🔧 Labor Sunday 🔨 (everything — September, Labor Day, even World War II, 86 years ago in Poland — breaks tomorrow); meanwhile, it’s all gay banter about green beans, a little festival of G+B
Aric Olnes, on Facebook with his daily alphabetic horticultural message for 8/27 (on these messages, see my 8/17 posting “Miss Marple, with murder on Michaelmas”), a biliteral delight, in G+B:
graceful bushy Green Beans grow briskly generously bequeathing grand bounty
A long, thin object — like a green bean / string bean — can symbolize a tall, thin person (a skinny person); or someone’s long, thin legs; or of course a long penis — so as an enthusiastic phallophiliac, I went with the penises in my response:
— AZ> AO: Those are mighty long beans you got there, pardner!
This is gay banter (itself a G+B expression); AO and I are old friends, both gay, and can exchange personally-directed lubricious remarks that turn on the shared assumption that gay men fantasize about big dicks (whatever their own penises are like and whatever sorts of penises they favor in actual man-on-man sex) and the shared belief that such fantasies are both powerful and ridiculous. This is an instance of banter without an edge, serving to express what we share — also what sets us apart from most people around us — and to reinforce the bond of our friendship. But banter between men, and more specifically between gay men, comes in many forms, ranging from a light touch with just a bit of an edge, to teasing and to more aggressive kidding. What’s going on depends on who’s doing the bantering, to whom, and in what circumstances. So I’ll have some words about that.
And then some appreciation for AO’s ingenuity in constructing his alphabetic titles, in this case for G+B expressions about the seedpods of Phaseolus vulgaris, the common bean. To which I will contribute a long playful list of G+B expressions for anyone who’d like to riff further on green beans / string beans / snap beans. (more…)
Events of the day
August 30, 2025🪛🔧🔨 penultimate August and (US) Labor Saturday; looking ahead, I see that Labor Day in 1940 was 9/2, but I wasn’t born until 9/6, so that was a long labor; meanwhile, from Benita Bendon Campbell today, an early birthday greeting to me:
The mammoth, the orchid, and the penguin, the emblems of my land, a BBC confection celebrating (as Bonnie observed) a friendship going back about 66 years
Meanwhile, these are birthday days for survivors from those days: Ellen Sulkis James (also going back ca. 66 years, to the Reading Eagle newspaper), who is 85 today; BBC (from Princeton), who is 89 tomorrow; and then, eventually, me.
Into the world of toothed bodyparts
August 19, 2025In human beings, the mouth is the only bodypart that comes equipped with teeth. Well, there are fables of the fearsome vagina dentata and even — top men, beware! — of the occasional anus dentatus. Now the wonderful world of prehistoric nature brings us a penis dentatus. Or so we learn from the latest WIRED.
From WIRED Science, “An Ancient Penis Worm With Rings of Sharp Teeth Has Been Discovered in the Grand Canyon: The 500-million-year-old fossil, containing a species named in honor of the krayt dragons in Star Wars, is a much larger ancestor of phallic marine worms that can be found on the seabed today” by Marta Abba on 8/19/25:
Penis worms are marine creatures with a distinctly phallic appearance. There are more than 20 known species living across the world’s oceans today, as well as a number of extinct ones, like this new discovery. The researcher who made the find was searching for fossils in the Grand Canyon and named the species Kraytdraco spectatus in honor of the huge burrowing krayt dragons that appear in the Star Wars universe. Details of the discovery were published in the journal Science Advances.
Miss Marple, with murder on Michaelmas
August 17, 2025On Facebook yesterday, Aric Olnes, with a floral message brought to us by the letter M (he does a daily alphabetic floral message):
(1) Aric: Matchlessly magniloquent Michaelmas modifies miserable moping motivating meliorative mindfulness
Tim Evanson then messed around with it in a minor way:
Miss Marple is always admiring the Michaelmas daisies just before a murder, it seems
