Archive for the ‘Signs and symbols’ Category
March 17, 2026
In yesterday’s posting “The breakfast walk”, one notable feature of that walk was what is now the elegant Nobu Hotel Epiphany, which preserves (from the earlier Casa Olga hotel) the 6-story-tall mosaic mural of El Palo Alto, the coast redwood tree for which the city of Palo Alto is named:
(#1) The Casa Olga mural
(#2) The mural on the much-expanded Nobu Hotel Epihany
I remind you that this is a short distance from my house, but has just become part of the urban landscape, taken for granted — as indeed we take for granted the many actual coast redwoods growing companionably on our streets (reaching straight into the sky, towering over a hundred feet, easily hundreds of years old). (There’s one such tree only about 50 feet from my front door.)
And I remind you that the tree in #1 and #2 is not an abstract or imagined coast redwood, but a specific Sequoia sempervirens — El Palo Alto — that grows in a little urban forest park, alongside the railroad tracks (originally Southern Pacific, now Caltrain) at the border between Palo Alto (in Santa Clara County) and Menlo Park (in San Mateo County), only abut 7 blocks from my house.
(more…)
Posted in Etymology, Language and plants, Logos, Mascots, Names, Palo Alto, Signs and symbols, Spanish, Stanford | Leave a Comment »
December 10, 2025
From Bob Eckstein’s The Bob substack on 1/7/23, this delightful troupe of dancing Santas, created for the monthly comedy newspaper the Funny Times to sell on t-shirts (this year’s offer came to me by e-mail yesterday:
(bob’s text) Funny Times is getting into the Holiday groove with my Dancing Santas. The perfect Secret Santa gift can be found here.
(more…)
Posted in Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
December 6, 2025
(thoroughly raunchy Christmas porn, in verse of sorts; not for kids or the sexually modest)
Inspired by the appearance of gay porn actor Dean Young partnered with Joey Mills in Joey’s Surf Vacation (yesterday on this blog), I pulled out DY’s photos from the Christmas sextravaganza Cum All Ye Faithful (in which he’s a very naughty elf), and whipped out a few lines of raunchy verse (with a linguistic subtext for the academically inclined):
(more…)
Posted in Gay porn, Holidays, Inflection, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Phallicity, Poetry, Signs and symbols | 3 Comments »
December 2, 2025
… And glory shone all around
So I sang this afternoon, immersed in the joy of the Christmas season, weeping with pleasure at being able to sing again (and exercise my lungs; my singing is supposed to be both pleasurable and therapeutic), after many weeks of being laid low. And so I write about the hymn tune Sherburne paired with the text of the Christmas carol “While shepherds watched their flocks”, from which comes the angel descending in a shimmer of glory.
Not what I intended to post about today — but the Ernie Kovacs Nairobi Trio comic routine has turned out to be vastly more complex than I originally thought, so I’m going for the fire-bright Christmas angel. Stay tuned for something later about three people in gorilla suits.
(more…)
Posted in Holidays, Language and medicine, Language and religion, Music, My life, Poetic form, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
November 12, 2025
Yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro shows us a budding balloon artist at the very beginning of his career, where he creates the simplest of balloon animals, before advancing to the balloon dog:
(#1) The raw material of balloon sculpture is cylindrical balloons, which can then be twisted and tied together; this trainee has the cylindrical balloons, but as yet has had no practice in manipulating them, so he offers for sale the unprocessed balloons, which the buyer just has to imagine as different roughly cylindrical animals — here an earthworm, here a snake, here (where we break up in laughter) a lowly nematode (most nematodes are tiny, less than 2.5 mm long) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
(more…)
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Signs and symbols, Toys and games | Leave a Comment »
October 28, 2025
From Ed Battistella on Facebook on 10/25, this remarkable Halloween display in a corner lot in Ashland OR not far from EB’s house:
(#1) A solid-dark figure of dread — not jolly fun, not even edgy fun — and mortal decay (remnants of its clothes are falling away from the black skeleton), with none of the conventional features of skeletal Halloween memento mori (no white skull or face, but charcoal black; no stylized scythe, but a peasant’s scythe in black, with a rough wooden handle and a crudely hand-tempered blade), posing unsteadily amongst the detritus of material destruction, even the skull of a baby
The dark lord of death, the Grim Reaper, in autumnal haze, mid-day, on an ordinary suburban street, stalking the home of Southern Oregon University (where EB hangs out), the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Lithia Park, and strikingly liberal politics.
(more…)
Posted in Costumes, Holidays, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Signs and symbols | 1 Comment »
September 29, 2025
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.
(more…)
Posted in Events and occasions, Holidays, Language and religion, Music, My life, Signs and symbols, Singing | Leave a Comment »
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.
(more…)
Posted in Books, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Pop culture, Porn, Rhyme, Signs and symbols, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | 3 Comments »
