Archive for the ‘Smell’ Category
March 16, 2025
This is a third Kharkiv Opera posting, about a pleasant, playful, joyous event staged in the face of terrible times. Previously on this blog:
— on 3/9, “The dandelion caper”, about the enjoyment of the plants and flowers around us
— on 3/11, “Music of the night, about the enjoyment of music
Today, it’s about the enjoyment of food, in particular a 2/17 soup* I contrived from things I happened to have in the house — leftovers from a Chinese food delivery; some leftover crunchy salad greens; rice sticks (maifun), which are staple household supplies in my kitchen cupboard; beef broth in a carton, ditto; and some fine chili power that I got as a gift a while back. The result was fabulous, and there was enough for three meals. Amazing Wok duet mushroom beef, Taylor Farms Mediterranean crunch salad, Dynasty rice vermicelli, and Penzey’s medium hot chili powder: I salute you.
[*The mills of the mammoth grind exceedingly slowly.]
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Posted in Chinese, Language and food, My life, Names, Photography, Smell, Taste | Leave a Comment »
September 10, 2024
White Party: my name for the white-flower bouquet that León Hernández Alvarez gave me last Thursday for my birthday, which I trimmed and rearranged yesterday. It sits on my worktable, giving me great pleasure.
White roses are symbols of purity — sorry, not my game at all — and loyalty, which I think suits me pretty well. But then the shock yesterday when I saw that the white rose was actually a very pale pink (symbolizing gentleness, sweetness, and of course femininity, so also — yay for the boys with pretty pink pom-poms — gayness).
The name alludes to the White Party in Palm Springs (this year it was March 29-31), the circuit party that bills itself as “the largest gay dance festival in the world” (there are of course other White Parties elsewhere around the world; there’s some discussion of circuit parties — and for a bonus, shapenote singing — in my 6/22/10 posting “Rivers of Babylon”). Never felt bold enough or hot enough to go to one, and now both my dancing days and my traveling days are long over. But the name comes with sexy vibes, so I’m going with it.
But now about the flowers.
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Posted in Color, Gender and sexuality, Language and plants, Music, Signs and symbols, Smell | 2 Comments »
August 19, 2023
(It’s Tom of Finland, with man-on-man sex, and — not shown, but plainly inferrable — penises of monumental size, all discussed in street language, so massively not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
Well, that’s the straightforward reading of the page for August in my 2023 Tom of Finland calendar. And certainly White Guy is sliding his absurdly thick cock deeply into Black Guy’s ass, but a look at BG’s posture and facial expression suggests that if he had enough control of himself to speak, he’d be proclaiming something like “Damn, that’s fiiiine!”
So maybe WG is doing BG, and enjoying it, but he’s not fucking BG harshly and pitilessly, like an eagle taking a rabbit. Maybe he’s mostly doing it for BG, giving BG the fuck that he wants, even serving him, out of brotherly affection. Doing him a solid.
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Posted in Art, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Male art, Masculinity, Phallicity, Pornography, Smell | Leave a Comment »
August 9, 2023
(Intimate talk about male bodies, mostly mine, in plain terms, though not so racy as to ban kids — but I will freely use the vernacular noun and verb piss, nouns dick and balls. In any case, some people will find the topic of crotch odor unsavory.)
I’d hoped to be able to post about meat dreams and crotch pong on the same day — just for the sound of the two off-color compounds together, but meat dreams took a lot longer than I’d expected (I somehow ended up in the 16th century), so crotch pong had to wait a day. So it goes.
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Posted in Alliteration, Assonance, Clothing, Compounds, Dialects, Language and the body, Language of sex, My life, Signs and symbols, Slang, Smell, Taboo language and slurs, Underwear | 1 Comment »
May 22, 2023
(considerable talk about male genitals, man-on-man sex, masturbation, and excretion, mostly in street language — pretty much a dirty jackpot — so not for kids or the sexually modest)
In conversation with my caregiver Erick Barros on 5/18, he complimented me on my being well-groomed and smelling good; this was not mere pleasant social talk, but a significant professional opinion from an experienced employee of Bay Area Geriatric. Who has no doubt seen aged folk who have tended to disregard grooming and bodily hygiene in the face of pain and concern with more pressing matters of life; and especially some men who tend to see things through the lens of a normative masculinity that (as part of a rejection of anything that smacks of femininity) views disregard for grooming and cleanliness as an assertion of masculinity — the attitude that leads to all-male getaways where the guys defiantly don’t shave, bathe, or change into fresh clothing and generally behave crudely (as an escape from the strictures of women).
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Posted in Formulaic language, Homosexuality, Language and medicine, Language and the body, Masculinity, Movies and tv, My life, Smell | 2 Comments »
February 27, 2023
Ann Burlingham, posting on Facebook today, recalled with delight the emergence in 2020 of the snowdrops that she had planted when she and Jason first moved to Pittsburgh:
(#1)
And then the discussion roamed far and wide, to fragrances, Switzerland, and Viking ships.
Stroll with me now through the fields of associative memory…
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Posted in Language and plants, Smell, Switzerland and Swiss things | 1 Comment »
February 22, 2023
The CCC — last seen in action in my 2/18 posting “A Neanderthal breakthrough”, in which an inventor cavewoman carves the first definite article out of stone — strikes again in the Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange cartoon of 5/21/21, in which a cavewoman devises a precursor of the candlelit dinner:
(#1) An announcement in Caveman Talk of the first romantic dinner for two; since these beginnings, it has evolved into a elaborated cultural practice
Cultural innovations often come with bold experiments in form at the outset (consider the history of photography and film) — in this case, apparently, in the adventure of scented fire.
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Posted in Books, Comic conventions, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Smell, Style and register | Leave a Comment »
October 16, 2022
(Gets right into gay men’s sexual parts, fore and aft, and man-on-man sexual acts, using street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
… or like cherry, vanilla, peach, or pumpkin spice. These are the Tasty Hole flavored body scrubs, formulated to make your hole tasty for the guy who’ll be rimming you.
(Just for the record: I hate flavored condoms. And flavored lubes. And flavored douches, which is the territory we’re moving into here. Unless the flavor is something like Male Sex Sweat. As for cherry flavoring, I hate it in cough drops and syrups and all that stuff, so I’m certainly not going to get it up for licking cherry scrub out of my trick’s hole. Your tastes might differ, of course. But you should know ahead of time that I’m inclined to mock the basic idea of Tasty Hole products.)
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Posted in Double entendres, Emoji, Language and food, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Phallicity, Signs and symbols, Smell, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »
August 7, 2022
(Racy-raunchy topic, probably not to everyone’s taste, but not actually into sexual organs or man-on-man sex.)
From the annals of commercial naming: today’s entertaining ad flashing by me on Facebook, for Leather Daddy cologne:
(#1) [ad copy:] “Dominate your day with a scentsational blend of Leather, Scotch, Vanilla, & 18 Erotic Spices 😈”
A narrowly targeted product with a carefully chosen name: not just leather, referring to a scent widely perceived as both erotic and highly masculine (so used in colognes and after-shaves from all the high-end men’s fragrance companies — Tom Ford, Ralph Lauren, Cartier, Fendi, John Varvatos, Giorgio Armani, Christian Dior — and plenty of others besides); but leather daddy, evoking the BDSM world of rough, commanding daddies (in their leather gear) and their subservient boys. That’s Way Gay that you’re soaking in, Blanche.
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Posted in Homosexuality, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Masculinity, Smell, Trade names | Leave a Comment »
