(thoroughly raunchy Christmas porn, in verse of sorts; not for kids or the sexually modest)
Inspired by the appearance of gay porn actor Dean Young partnered with Joey Mills in Joey’s Surf Vacation (yesterday on this blog), I pulled out DY’s photos from the Christmas sextravaganza Cum All Ye Faithful (in which he’s a very naughty elf), and whipped out a few lines of raunchy verse (with a linguistic subtext for the academically inclined):
My morning name for 11/28: The Nairobi Trio (TNT). An instant trip back to my teenage years, the 1950s, when my friends and I were wildly entertained by Ernie Kovacs’s TNT skits on television. Today I’ll give you something like the basic facts about TNT (which involves three people in gorilla suits moving in sync with the tune “Solfeggio”) and its creator. But then I’ll ask the question: why is TNT funny? And eventually the question: why does TNT make many people feel uneasy? (One writer has declared it to be “incredibly controversial” and “completely unacceptable by today’s standards”.)
On this last question, I’ll look ahead and suggest that the twinges would vanish if the skit were called, say, “The Solfeggio Players” — no Nairobi reference — and the gorilla suits were replaced by, say, chicken suits or frog suits. Observations that take us into facts about Africa and gorillas, tons of beliefs and attitudes from common culture, assorted tropes from popular culture, and written and filmed works of imaginative fiction (King Kong! Tarzan!). I’m not sure I can do justice to all of this, but I’ll try to at least skim the surface. Just not today.
A Glen Baxter cartoon in the latest — 12/8/25 — issue of the New Yorker:
The scheduled event will go on, complete with umbrella to shelter the picnickers from the blazing sun, even in the snow; even when polar bears arrive (attracted by the smell of food) to steal bites of avocado toast, the way jays and gulls do in the summer
It’s a feature of local life (on the SF peninsula) that temperatures drop about this time of year to chilly nights and daytime highs hovering around 60, while some guys — I am one — persist in going about in short pants (low today 47, high 59, I am in rainbow flag gym shorts), but with a warm shirt (fleece-lined flannel if necessary); I do not, however, picnic in this weather.
And we are unafflicted by polar bears. Chipmunks, roof rats, squirrels, ground squirrels, jays, crows, gulls, hawks, owls, raccoons, skunks, the occasional lynx, every once in a while a mountain lion, but even the tantalizing scent of Safeway’s jambalaya heated up in my microwave has failed to lure polar bears south from Alaska to Palo Alto. But then we are woefully lacking in ice floes and meaty seals.
A short video that came by me this morning, with some guy’s idea (off the top of his head) of the top five things that men actually want for Christmas; you really don’t want to see the original source. The larger point is that such a list is a distillation of someone’s beliefs about what men are really like — or, more accurately, what real men, normative men, are like.
I would prefer to think of it as a list of things men might not have thought of themselves. So: not want they really want, but what they might like yet might not know about or have thought of getting for themselves. That makes more sense. Ranking the items makes no sense at all.
I am, of course, far off normative American masculinity, so recommendations for such a person pretty much just slide off me, as they do in the annual lists for Fathers Day.
(hard-core man-on-man sex action, so totally not for kids or the sexually modest)
Yesterday, in my posting “Surfing like bunnies”:
In this morning’s crop of gay porn ads, in a TitanMen store mailer, the charmingly titled (and apparently single-entendre) Joey’s Surf Vacation, with a dvd cover featuring a porn actor new to me, the boyish twink Joey Mills (paired with a familiar muscle twink, Dean Young, in a scene I’ll write about in a later posting).
— with the cover of the 2024 dvd (released 9/24/24) from MEN.com, showing Joey Mills with a third actor from the video, Troy Daniels.
This is that later posting.
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro is an advanced exercise in cartoon understanding: a wordless strip (no speech, no caption) in which a tuxedoed performer takes a bow, next to a toy piano:
Ah, he seems to be a pianist, and the tiny piano, no more than a foot long, must be his instrument; at that point, you are baffled — unless you’re familiar with a classic walk-into-bar joke (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there’s only 1 in this strip — see this Page)
In this variant of the classic joke, that piano is in fact 12 inches long, a 12-inch piano, so the performer is a 12-inch pianist. This is the status conferred on him by a genie when he wished for a 12-inch penis. Whoops.
(deeply not for kids or the sexually modest: it’s all about man-on-man sexual acts, though the really hard-core stuff will come in a later posting; this one is mostly about lexicography, but even so, there’s a lot of guys pronging guys going on)
In this morning’s crop of gay porn ads, in a TitanMen store mailer, the charmingly titled (and apparently single-entendre) Joey’s Surf Vacation, with a dvd cover featuring a porn actor new to me, the boyish twink Joey Mills (paired with a familiar muscle twink, Dean Young, in a scene I’ll write about in a later posting). The cover of the 2024 dvd from MEN.com:
Troy Daniels and Joey Mills (from a different scene in the dvd)
On to the lexicography, starting with various attested verbs, while working towards what would seem to be a fresh metaphorical verb surf.
A tv commercial for the laundry detergent Tide, heard this morning:
If it’s got to be clean, then it’s got to be Tide [1]
(with the deontic modal of obligation have got to, roughly ‘must’). At this point, I’ll simplify the example somewhat by using the one-word variant have to rather than have got to:
If it has to be clean, then it has to be Tide [2]
[1] and [2] catch your attention because they’re somehow jokey, some kind of play on words. The two parallel underlined stretches are word-for-word identical, but they’re not parallel in meaning, and we expect them to be. This semantic disparity makes [1] and [2] examples of what I’ve called zeugmoids. More on all that to come, but first I want to make the phenomenon clearer.
… And glory shone all around
So I sang this afternoon, immersed in the joy of the Christmas season, weeping with pleasure at being able to sing again (and exercise my lungs; my singing is supposed to be both pleasurable and therapeutic), after many weeks of being laid low. And so I write about the hymn tune Sherburne paired with the text of the Christmas carol “While shepherds watched their flocks”, from which comes the angel descending in a shimmer of glory.
Not what I intended to post about today — but the Ernie Kovacs Nairobi Trio comic routine has turned out to be vastly more complex than I originally thought, so I’m going for the fire-bright Christmas angel. Stay tuned for something later about three people in gorilla suits.
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate the month of December and to begin a new work week
Another lesson from a visit a little while back from an old friend and colleague in linguistics in which three meals (deliveries from local restaurants) were a stand-out feature. I quietly insisted on doing the ordering, so as to offer my guest an array of pleasant surprises. I have since realized that what I was doing was displaying an ability of social value; in earlier years, I would have cooked the meals (I was genuinely good at that), but I’m long past being able to cook, and now (for complex reasons) I’m also unable to take guests out to dinner — but I can still play the role of host, by foraging takeout skillfully.
In a similar vein, though I can’t cook, I can produce new meals in my kitchen, using takeout, household staples, and a microwave [I realize this sounds like the description of a MacGyver episode, with our hero, oh, escaping from a prison using only leftover lasagna, plastic cutlery, and a thimble]; I can still play the role of cook, through my skill at assembling new dishes. As a boast: I Am the Great Assembler. (Totally over-the-top theme music here: Freddy Mercury singing “The Great Pretender”, in this YouTube video.)
