#4 in my “Squid Pro Quo” posting is from Marcus Connor’s Brainless Tales, a new webcomic for me, but one largely devoted to language play. And immediately I came across this cartoon, with a portmanteau noun denoting a hybrid, doubly phallic, foodstuff:
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baniener = banana + wiener, denoting a decidedly louche anthromorphized banana-wiener. Hey, baby, wanna dance?
As the run-up to the American holiday Memorial Day continues (only 9 days to picnic time), Pinterest has responded with a board of playful things you can do with hot dogs — sometimes moderating their potential as phallic symbols, sometimes accentuating it. Five examples follow.
Anticipating Memorial Day (May 29th this year), Pinterest has provided a big Hot Dog board. Memorial Day is a US holiday honoring Americans who died while serving in the armed forces, but it has also come to be the unofficial beginning of the summer vacation season and so the occasion for patriotic picnics (like the Fourth of July, but usually without fireworks or marching bands): hot dogs, hamburgers, mayonnaise salads (especially potato salad), watermelon, and so on.
Now, hot dogs are natural phallic symbols, more potent in a bun, and even more potent with the tip of the hot dog protruding from the bun, simulating a glans penis.
As a bonus, one Memorial Day picnic site suggests fruit skewers for the holiday — just the thing for Queer Memorial Day, with rainbow fruit in Pride Flag order and bright strawberry dickheads.
(Plain talk about men’s bodies and sexual practices, so use your judgment.)
Thanks to Greg Parkinson for a link to this John Crisvitello t-shirt:
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The slogan is a send-up of the odious BROS BEFORE HOS, preserving only the rhyming, the street language, and a message about balancing allegiances. My reading of the slogan is that it calls for gay men to generally value bonds to other gay men — fags stand with fags — over the sorts of allegiances expressed in flags: nationality, regional identity, religion, race and ethnicity, political affiliation, etc.
Something I’m moderately sure of is that May is National, maybe International, Masturbation Month. All ny sources seem to agree on that. From the current version of Wikipedia:
The first National Masturbation Day was observed May 14, 1995, after sex-positive retailer Good Vibrations declared the day in honor of Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, who was fired in 1994 by President Bill Clinton for suggesting masturbation be part of the sex education curriculum for students.
International Masturbation Day has since been expanded to include the entire month of May as International Masturbation Month
(Note both vaginal and phallic symbols.)
Already there’s a question: why May 14th, back in 1995? Then things get quickly complex: an earlier version of the Wikipedia article, which I posted about here in 2013, identified Masturbation Day as May 7th (a date apparently selected by Good Vibrations in 1999) in the US, May 28th in some other countries. (Other US sources say May 28th is Masturbation Day.) Meanwhile, the current Wikipedia article says with great assurance that Masturbation Day is July 21st. The Wikipedia sources are in no way authoritative: they just assert dates. Thanks to the earlier Wikipedia article, I have May 7th on my calendar as National Masturbation Day, but now I’m all at sea. The 7th, the 14th, the 28th, or July 21st? And why? Why, in fact, May for the Month?
(There will be references to sexual bodies, both male and female, and to mansex. Admittedly, in the context of art/sculpture and novels, but still… )
Saint Phalle — St. Phallus (with phalle as an alternative to phallus) — would appear to be a reference to, say, Jean Genet as a celebrant of phallic masculinity (though there are other candidates for sainthood in this department), but it is in fact my morning name today, referring to the artist Niki de Saint Phalle. She has been the subject of one previous posting here — from 2/18/15, “Saint Phalle phallic philately”, at first about her condom paintings, then more generally about her as an artist — but now her name has been called to my mind by two recent postings: from 4/24 “A mini-phal” (on mini-phal ‘miniature Phalaenopsis’) and from 4/25 “You can call me Al” (with a note on mini phal ‘miniature phallus’).
To come: more on Genet (and Sartre’s book Saint Genet); on Niki de Saint Phalle and her name; and on de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely as artists, separately and together.
Yesterday, a posting on a mini-phal /mIni fæl/, a miniature Phalaenopsis (orchid). Which moved me to investigate names of the form /mIni Cæl/, for various consonants C: existing names and ones you can invent, using a /Cæl/ that’s an existing word (pal, gal), a clipping (phal for Phalaenopsis, Cal for California), a nickname (Cal for Calvin, Sal for Sally, Salvatore, or Salvador), or an acronym (HAL for hook and line, HAL for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer).
What follows is a mere sampling of such cases, not intended to be exhaustive.
From Chris Hansen on Facebook, a late entry in this year’s Easter Peepstakes: a model who dreamt he played with yellow Peeps in his Aronik swimwear:
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About the company, its products, its models, its symbol, and its name
(A posting on the compound rest stop is inevitably going to take us into the world of mansex, so this posting will, eventually, be way out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest.)
The morning name on the 19th, which led me immediately to other rest compounds: rest area and restroom.
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There are the signs. What do we expect at the places the signs direct us to?
