Archive for the ‘Stories’ Category

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Variations on a theme

May 17, 2026

(by the time I’m just a bit of the way into revealing the themes of this posting, certainly once Jake Mathews appears, it should become entirely clear why this posting is not for kids or the sexually modest)

A follow-up to my posting “Taking Pleasure” yesterday (5/16), with scenes from two gay porn videos:

The two scenes have Mr Deep Voice (the screen persona of actor Thomas Johnson (TJ) ) and Andy Toro (AT) in a random hookup of complete strangers in a scene from Right Place, Right Time (Falcon Studios, 2026); and Tayte Hanson (TH) and Eli Bennet (EB) as step-brothers in (romantic) love in Big Bro Little Bro Raw (CockyBoys, 2021)

Right Place is a compilation video, of 5 Falcon Studios scenes in which chance encounters end in wild raw man-on-man sex: 5 variations on this theme, with different pairings of men, different tones, different stories. Some details below, because one of the pairings has the cute Mancunian muscle bottom Jake Matthews filled with Barcelonian dick and great pleasure, serving as a kind of sweet hero of bottoming, a model for men who love to get fucked (he also stars in gangbang videos, where he takes dick with intense enthusiasm; yes, it’s a performance, but he has fully mastered the Catamite genre, and I want to tip my hat to the maestro).

Big Bro Raw also has a series of variations on a theme, “big bros give it hard to their little bros’ tight holes”, as the Cocky Boys publicity has it. And then this video is the third in a series of “big-dicked tops showing their lil’ dudes how to take dick” (again from their publicity). That is, the last of three compilations of “a cast of men pounding young butts”, with different men and different young butts in each compilation. Yielding a sort of visual encyclopedia of this domain of sexual connection.

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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Slogans, Stories | Leave a Comment »

Tell us their story!

February 25, 2026

(Underwear models displaying their bodies, with allusions to various forms of intense man-on-man sex, so not to everyone’s taste)

A Daily Jocks sale ad in my email today (2/25):


[ad text:] Cellblock13 at Daily Jocks — buy 2 & save 30%

What sort of dramatic relationship from the world of the butch faggy — Red Guy and Blue Guy, resplendent in their gorgeous intense colors — is illustrated here? Tell us their story!

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Posted in Identities, Language and the body, Language of sex, Stories, Underwear | 2 Comments »

Morning name with scorpion

May 10, 2025

My morning name on 5/6 was a misremembered word — I report to you, regularly, on the fragility of memory, including my own — that evoked an excellent political portmanteau from the autumn of 2016, as the Presidential elections (HC vs. DT) were heating up, these words together taking me to a bit of prescient song-writing by Gilbert & Sullivan in 1882 — involving loud braying, vulgar display, and open contempt for their inferiors — a character sketch of the moral monster of 2016, who has over the ensuing decade transfigured into a foolish but vindictive scorpion, with a deadly sting in its tail and no control over its instincts.

Now come with me back to the morning of 5/6. As I woke, what dinged in my mind was the repeated:

tarentara tarentara

which I recalled with pleasure as a chorus of peers from G&S’s Iolanthe, imitating the sound of brasses, specifically of trumpets, as they marched. I went to the net to recover the rest of the chorus, only to discover that I had misremembered the marching noise; it was actually

tantantara tantantara

And so began the journey that ends with all of us embrangled in the animal tale The Frog and the Scorpion.
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Posted in Language and poitics, Memory, Mistakes, Morality, Morning names, Music, Nicknames, Portmanteaus, Quotation, Stories | 6 Comments »

An anecdote

April 12, 2025

… which will plug into two topics being developed in my posting queue (which is totally unmanageable in the face of recent events in my life and in the world): rich people, and the death in January of the Princeton philosopher Paul Benacerraf (who was my senior-year adviser in mathematics). I will have a lot more to say about both of these topics in future postings, but today I’ll just give you the zinger.

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Posted in Academic life, Awards, Mathematics, My life, Philosophy, Princeton, Science, Stories, Teaching, Yiddish | Leave a Comment »

The fox plays in many memes

January 22, 2025

A Mark Thompson cartoon in the 1/20/25 issue of the New Yorker offers a foxy goulash of cultural forms: cartoon memes, joke forms, story formats, and conversational routines:


(#1) The Dog in Bar cartoon meme (with a fox instead of a dog), the Walk Into Bar joke form (a fox walks into a bar,…), the Fox Eludes Hound(s) story format, and the Tell Them I’m Not Here conversational routine

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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Conversational formulas, Jokes, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Memes, Movies and tv, Narrative, Routines and rituals, Stories | 2 Comments »

Major Crimes

October 29, 2024

Well, I fell into this. In this morning’s posting “Removed!”, I reported myself as at the end of several tethers, one of which I addressed in this observation:

I’m not sure whether I can bear watching the news any more, and I’m not sure whether I can bear not knowing about what’s happening. For the moment, I’ve retreated into letting all six seasons of Major Crimes (which I’ve seen several times) go past me in the background while I work.

Ellen Kaisse then wondered about the show, and I embarked on an appreciation of it. And ended up with something worth expanding on a bit and posting on this blog.


(#1) An early poster for the show (+ marks characters I’ll discuss below): +Sharon Raydor in the upper right; then in four rows, left-to-right: in each row — 1st row: Detective Lieutenant Andy Flynn (Tony Denison), Detective Lieutenant Louis Provenza (G. W. Bailey); 2nd row: +Rusty Beck, +Fernando Morales; 3rd row: Civilian Surveillance Coordinator (videographer for crime scenes and interrogations) Buzz Watson (Phillip P. Keene), Detective Amy Sykes (Kierran Giovanni), Detective Lieutenant Michael Tao (Michael Paul Chan); bottom right corner: Assistant Chief Russell Taylor (Robert Gossett)

I’m not going to give you an account of the whole show, which ran for six years in hourlong episodes, but just notes on a few of the characters and a few bits from some of the story lines.

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Posted in Actors, Gender and sexuality, Movies and tv, Narrative, Stories | 3 Comments »

Former Frog in Fableland

August 7, 2024

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, in which a prince grouses, over a tipple, about his amatory career, to a nobleman, one of his courtiers:


It seems the prince was once a frog and could rake in the chicks with nothing more than a few commanding ribbits; those were the days of easy scores (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

What do women want?, the princel wonders with a whine, recalling that once upon a time a short squat body, moist smooth skin, and long hind legs for leaping used to drive them into an osculatory frenzy. It’s all so damn unfair. (Wayno’s title for the cartoon: “Unhappy Ending”.)

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Posted in Clothing, Comic conventions, Costumes, Folklore, Hats, Language and animals, Portmanteaus, Stories | Leave a Comment »

Meze: male friendship in fiction

April 25, 2022

It begins in medias res. I am listening to a high-hype tv ad for a movie whose title I didn’t catch:

This compelling story of male friendship will move you deeply!

Whoa, I think, this is my stuff, I’ve gotta make a note of that URL and search for a theatrical release poster or something else I can put in a posting.

Then I realize that this is a dream, and in dreamland there’s no way to save notes and images on your computer.

I’m only two hours into my sleep for the night, but the related idea of fiction about male friendship — I’ve posted quite a lot about male friendship in the movies and tv and, of course, real life — grips me, so I get up and go to my actual computer to see what’s out there. I check stuff out for maybe an hour, taking copious notes and saving some images, and then go back to bed; returning to sleep takes me no more than a minute, sometimes I’m back in ten seconds. (Yes, I realize that this ability is some kind of gift from nature, but I’ve had it, strikingly, since I was a teenager. Occasional moments of insomnia or disordered sleep are, for me, red flags signaling a serious problem.)

Very satisfying search; report below. But first, the prequel to that dream.

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Posted in Fiction, Homosexuality, Masculinity, Music, My life, Stories | 1 Comment »

The grocery order

August 17, 2021

A report from my grandchild Opal a few weeks ago, about one of their adventures as a customer service employee at a Redwood City Safeway supermarket / grocery store. In this event, they observed as another employee coped with a male customer who had come with a small but somewhat eccentric shopping list from his wife (who he had on the phone) and needed help in finding the items. (I’m telling the story from memory and no doubt have gotten some of the details wrong, and have embroidered on some of the others; an experienced story-teller always reserves the right to improve on their tales.)

First, some soap. Bar soap. Lavender bar soap. Possibly it had to be some specific brand. I’ve picked a very earnest lavender bar soap to fill this slot.

Then, Vaseline. The original petroleum jelly — once from Chesebrough, now from Unilever, still available.

Then a third item I’ll put off. It’s the clincher.

As it turned out, the store had no lavender bar soap, though stores very close to it carried some. And then, somewhat surprisingly to me, they had no Vaseline either, though neighboring drugstores did. Well, for a Safeway it’s not very big, and it’s in a shopping center with lots of well-stocked specialty shops, so it’s inclined to focus on, you know, groceries. Anyway, she wanted all three together: the order was coherent, serving a single purpose, not a random assortment of household items the woman needed (cat fd, loaf pumpernickel, tampons, grn chartreuse — that sort of thing).

Stop for a moment to reflect: what might unite the lavender bar soap and the Vaseline? (My friend and helper Kim got it right off, called it out, even before I got to item #3.)

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Posted in Language and the body, Social interactions, Stories | 6 Comments »

Sports commentary

December 20, 2018

Thanks to Facebook friends who provided a link to an xkcd cartoon from way back (5/27/11): #904 Sports:

The point is that sports color commenators treat essentially random day-to-day fluctuations as indicators of trends — because they have lots of time to fill and not a lot of substance to fill it with (play-by-play coverage is something else), and because like all of us they are narratophiles (lovers of story) and seek to find a coherent narrative in pretty much anything that happens. Meanwhile, color commentators can fall back on all that accumulated data, to wield fan statistics as another time-filler.

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Posted in Discourse organization, Linguistics in the comics, Stories, Style and register | Leave a Comment »

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