Archive for the ‘Stories’ Category
September 1, 2026
(bodily unpleasantness, much of it in street language, so likely to be offensive to many readers)
š
Ā š
Ā š
tiger tiger tiger for terminal August; send in the rabbits of September, and we can marvel (with Stephen Sondheim)Ā Isn’t it rich? / Isn’t it queer? — that we should come to this time of the yearĀ
Yes, this is getting out a day late, but I have an excuse. It’s both painful to hear about — involving 12 hours of excruciating pain for me — Ā and deeply revolting — well, literally shitty — Ā so I’m having trouble framing the story for you. Then, as a kind of ghastly sideshow, various pieces of essential software (Facebook is mostly to blame) simply stopped working as they should, making it impossible for me to make my blog postings available through FB. All together, giving the Lost Blogging Day of 8/31.
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Posted in Events and occasions, Language and food, Language and medicine, Language and the body, My life, Stories | Leave a Comment »
September 1, 2026
On Facebook (substantially edited down): Horton Copperpot on 8/26, with this lead-in to a longer piece:
— HC: We all know AI slop. TikTok is branching out into a bunch of areas, including shopping and “short dramas”, which is a bit different from the original medium. It’s AI-generated soap operas that seem to follow between 3 and 5 script matrices, with some variation in focus, setting and language. The main feature is the ability to monetize them with high efficiency, much like most “free” video games on your phone. Several of them pop up in Facebook Reelz as ads for several “short drama” platforms, with some of the feature “dramas” shared between them. I found several that cross these platforms, mostly Horatio-Alger-type fantasy plots, plus a few cheap romance novelettes.
I got interested in them a while ago, not for the “drama” or visual appeal but more for the recurring plot lines that indicate laziness and greed. The other aspect that intrigued me was just how bad the AI was in keeping track of the details.
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Posted in Academic life, AI, Categorization and Labeling, Compliments, Plays, Pragmatics, Social interactions, Social life, Stories | Leave a Comment »
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 fromĀ Right Place, Right TimeĀ (Falcon Studios, 2026); and Tayte Hanson (TH) and Eli Bennet (EB) as step-brothers in (romantic) love inĀ 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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
January 22, 2025
AĀ 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 »
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:
Iām not sure whether I can bear watching the news any more, and Iām not sure whether I can bear not knowing about whatās happening. For the moment, Iāve retreated into letting all six seasons ofĀ Major Crimes (which Iāve 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:Ā Detective Lieutenant Andy Flynn (Tony Denison), Detective Lieutenant Louis Provenza (G. W. Bailey); 2nd row: +Rusty Beck, +Fernando Morales; 3rd row:Ā 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:Ā 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 »
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 youāre puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon ā Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip ā see this Page)
What do women want?,Ā the princel wonders with a whine, recalling that once upon a timeĀ 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 »
April 25, 2022
It begins in medias res. I am listening to a high-hype tv ad for a movieĀ 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 fictionĀ about male friendshipĀ — 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 »
