The political / medicinal pun RICO Law / Ricola: on Facebook on 8/15, Kyle Wohlmut passed along — “meanwhile in Switzerland” — the 8/14 Mike Scollins titling RICO LAW of an image from the classic Ricola (Swiss cough drop) commercial:
Posted within minutes of the Georgia RICO indictments (see below)
Now to the commercially medicinal and the political-conspiratorial.
(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.
(The title should warn you about what’s coming. There will be talk — in generally decorous language, but still — about men’s bodies as objects of sexual desire and about man-on-man sex, so not recommended for kids or the sexually modest.)
Yesterday’s Daily Jocks e-mail sale ad:
ad copy:
The ultimate party jockstrap from Vaux! Crafted exclusively from breathable, lightweight athletic nylon/spandex material, Vaux Playa Jockstrap is guaranteed to keep you cool and looking sexy af 😈.
Now, these images are designed to focus the viewer’s gaze on the visual center of the image, the model’s amply filled jockstrap (embracing the object of the intended viewer’s sexual desire but also what’s on sale here) and then, inevitably, the model’s handsome face, because people are strongly face-oriented. Then you appreciate the model’s beautifully developed body and notice the angling of his body in what is in fact a conventional beefcake pose. Buy my clothes and you can become me, or at least fantasize about doing me.
I’ll go on to analyze how the ad drips with gay sex, but after I appreciated the promise of the model’s dick and balls in that jockstrap and the warmth of his gaze — I am, after all, a big ol’ fag, a gay man with a high sex drive and an inventive and diverse fantasy sex life — I just delighted in the beauty of the clothes, which made me smile with pleasure. Every man should wear such beautiful things. Not necessarily in a jockstrap, or of course in what looks like a shredded crop top (though those would be admirably functional as gay partywear — more on this below), but in briefs, swimsuits, shirts of all kinds, and shorts.
Now on to the sociocultural analysis …
A very much not-dead-yet posting to hold this space while I cope with an avalanche of posting material, plus my suddenly much improved medical condition (which is totally exhilarating). In any case, an old One Big Happy cartoon (originally from 9/4/14) in which Ruthie asks her defiantly working-class neighbor James to name something that comes in pairs, but James hears the homophone pears (both nouns pronounced /perz/ in my variety of English) and just can’t get shift his perspective:
Note James’s multiply non-standard negative existential construction in his ain’t no shoes
As a temporary diversion from some truly awful times in my life (which I will eventually post about), two reprised One Big Happy strips recently in my comics feed, in which Ruthie struggles to interpret language unfamiliar to her.
The strips.
(#1) The Iddle-Do Rule; which should lead us to reflect some on the distinction between circumstances in which “good enough for some purpose” — it’ll do — is the appropriate goal (the general case for most aspects of everyday social life) and the special cases in which a perfect performance is called for
(#2) Not Zarella cheese (with Not Zoball soup as a bonus); I note that Zarella is a fairly common Italian surname, which Ruthie (who is of Italian descent) might well be familiar with, so that a cheese named after a Zarella wouldn’t be at all surprising
(#1)
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro (Wayno’s title “Pupper Love”) shows a teacup chihuahua deployed in a routine medical checkup:
(#2) Doctors ask you to say ah / ahh / aah so that you’ll open your mouth fully and they can then examine the back of the mouth, including the soft palate and the tonsils (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
We will then be taken into the world of exclamations, lexical ones (like hi and yikes) and paralinguistic ones (like uh-huh and unh-unh), and the sociophonetics of ah – aw — which happens to be a familiar topic in English dialectology, thanks to the cot–caught merger, also known as the low back merger or the LOT–THOUGHT merger.
Today’s Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting, some diversion from the difficulties of daily life. I take my cue from Ann Burlingham, posting on Facebook on 12/4:
Last night I was watching Nick Cave being interviewed on the BBC when he used the word highfalutin. I looked it up to confirm my sense that that is a word Americans came up with, and it is, and it’s wonderful.
Now, you need to know, first of all, who this Nick Cave is and why it might be notable that he used the slang adjective highfalutin ‘pompous, pretentious’. Then on to the word and who uses it, with two wonderful bonuses, one supplied by OED3, the other by a winery in the Finger Lakes region of New York State.
(A posting for my half-birthday, 3/6. When you’re a child, half-birthdays are good things, because a year is a long time to wait till people celebrate your life on earth again. When you’re old and infirm, they’re good things again, because a year is a long time to hope you’ll live till such a celebration comes again. I’ve gotten through another 6 months: a small but significant accomplishment, though frankly it seems mostly to be luck.)
Choosing more or less randomly from the fish in the sea of unblogged postings: this wry Wayno / Piraro Bizarro from 1/28:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.) Like an antique prank phone call
The prank turns on an ambiguity, in this case on fresh as a predicate adjective: ‘(of food) recently made or obtained; not canned, frozen, or otherwise preserved’ vs. ‘(of a person) presumptuous, impertinent’ (with the mutton, preposterously, personified).
An e-mail exchange on 9/28 between Richard Vytniorgu and me, thinking out loud together on various topics, including the prejudice within the LGBT community against the twinkish, the sexually receptive, the submissive, and the effeminate amongst us queers — all, apparently, on the grounds that such men are wanting in conventional masculinity and so are defective even as queers; they’re just too gay-acting, in the view of some of our number. Richard is an effeminate submissive sexually receptive twink, so he’s got a huge emotional investment in the matter; I am merely a bottom by preference, but I’ve been becoming increasingly militant and outspoken in this arena, moving towards the view that Richard and his kind should be seen as central to the larger community, not as peripheral misfits.
But that’s not what I’m after in *this* posting. Instead, it’s what happened in this exchange between us:
RV: I feel for Tannor [Reed] as I do for all twinks in the [gay porn] industry. Gays can be so hypocritical sometimes: they love to watch us, but will publicly punish or shame us when it suits them. You may have heard of [twink X; his story isn’t the point here, just his being treated with contempt]
AZ: Oi.
RV: What does this mean?
Here’s where I need to remind you that Richard is British and I am American.
