Mostly an accumulation of unblogged material from the past — on, however, a topic that’s immediately relevant to my current medical treatments (stemming from two doctor’s appointments on 11/21), which I’ll get to eventually. But one thing at a time: start with the background.
Autoimmune annals
December 4, 2023In-laws and planetary mnemonics
December 3, 2023My 11/17/23 posting “My in-law news from a month ago” opened with this photo:
(#1) My husband-equivalent Jacques Henry Transue, his mother Monique Serpette Transue, and his older brother Bill (William R.R. Transue) from about 50 years ago
I got the photo in e-mail on the birthday of Virginia Bobbitt Transue (Bill’s wife, and so my sister-in-law-in-law) on 10/12 — the day after Jacques’s and my wedding-equivalent anniversary, celebrated on National Coming Out Day, 10/11. I wrote then:
VT’s birthday took the family’s e-mail messages afield in a different direction, about, of all things, planetary mnemonics … In postings to come, I’ll use that birthday to introduce more about my in-law family, then later get into the planetary mnemonics.
This is those postings to come, in one big package.
(On VT’s being my husband(-equivalent)’s brother’s wife, hence technically my sister-in-law-in-law, see my 8/20/23 posting “Double in-laws”.)
Waxed amaryllis
December 3, 2023A sweet and cheering gift from my old friend Kathryn Burlingham in the mail yesterday: two waxed amaryllis bulbs from Holland Bulb Farms in Milwaukee WI, plants that should bloom in the later winter here, promising spring and Easter.
(#1) The solid-white variety Grateful Heart; you can see the wax coating on the bulb and the attached metal ring on which the plant sits
(#2) The variety Gingerbread, white with red stripesWaxed amaryllises are a new thing for me, but apparently they’ve been around for some time (an invention of Dutch bulb growers, though I haven’t found any sources about the history of wax coating for flower bulbs).
Sense-shifting pun jokes
December 2, 2023A common joke form exploits an ambiguous expression E. Prior likelihood or the preceding context in the joke favors one understanding for E, but then fresh context (in the joke) brings out another, more surprising one. The effect is that the sense of E has shifted as the joke proceeds. It’s a pun, son. Used in a sense-shifting pun joke. (Puns get used in all sorts of jokes: knock-knock jokes, one type of riddle joke, and more.)
I now offer two examples that especially tickled me, to show how such ((phonologically) perfect) puns work. Then some comments on a different joke form, formula pun jokes, which can turn on imperfect puns and involve a different kind of set-up / pay-off from sense-shifting pun jokes.
The elf season
December 1, 2023It’s December, and as the Christmas elves appear, there comes a startling elfshelfism joke (in abbreviated form), on Facebook today. I got it from Ryan Tamares, who got it from Britannic Xen Osiris Zane, who got it from someone else, and who knows where such memic material originated.
(#1) Yes, Spock on a cock: the science officer of the starship USS Enterprise, riding a monstrously large rooster (across a bleak alien landscape)
To get to the punchline Spock on a cock, you have to recognize the figure of Spock (from popular-culture tv and movie fiction) and also recall that cock — most commonly used for raunchy reference to the penis — is also a somewhat antique or specialist word for a rooster. (As a result, #1 is not only a joke, but also a slightly dirty joke.)
As described in my 12/22/22 posting “Elfshelfisms”, the elfshelfism is a riddle form presented visually, and depends on rhyme (perfect rhyme or half-rhyme), with example punchlines: lemur on a femur, Dolly [Parton] on a tamale, and sonorants on cormorants.
ToF’s December 2023 Santa Claus
December 1, 2023(Hey, it’s Tom of Finland, what do you expect? — it’s dripping with raunchy suggestiveness; not to everyone’s taste)
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate December, and time for some seasonal sexy silliness. Meanwhile, it’s World AIDS Day, a moment of retrospective grieving and prospective hope.
For the month of December in my 2023 Tom of Finland calendar, this b&w vintage Santa (from 1982):
(#1) A pleasant smile, admirable pecs and abs, and a gigantic ToF erection
And now, three more ToF Santas, in vivid color.
A high-theatrical digital collagist
November 29, 2023That’s Hector de Gregorio, whose fantasist digital collage Love of Hermes came past me on Pinterest recently:
(#1) The male figure’s face is (a version of) de Gregorio’s own; the composition is packed with symbols and allusions of many kinds. only a few of which I can identify
Some of the iconography in #1 might be understood from information in the Wikipedia article on the Greek god Hermes:
Hermes is an Olympian deity in ancient Greek religion and mythology considered the [emissary and messenger] of the gods.
… his main symbol is the caduceus, a winged staff intertwined with two snakes copulating [sometimes crowned with a pair of wings and a sphere]
[AZ: Among the many female objects of his love was the love goddess Aphrodite, with whom he fathered the god Hermaphroditus — born a handsome boy, then transformed into a hermaphrodite, with a name compounded of the names of the two parents]
… Hermes also loved [many] young men in pederastic relationships where he bestowed and/or taught something related to combat, athletics, herding, poetry and music
Now, four more of de Gregorio’s dream-like, often highly theatrical, body-focused compositions — two relatively spare ones, two densely symbolic ones. Then some words about the artist.
Underwear wolves
November 28, 2023And now for something completely different. On 10/31 it was densely nerdy marveling at the words calceology, telamon, and hallux — I should probably have issued a technical-linguistics warning on that one — but today it’s underwear models (in a Daily Jocks e-mail ad from 9/26) wearing minimal tighty-whities that display the carnal attractions of their bodies, fore and aft, in intimate detail, hot stuff definitely calling for a male-sex-content warning. And then there are racy bonuses: the male couple in the ad is interracial, and the one presenting as a receptive / bottom is celebrated as an equal partner to the one presenting as an insertive / top.
Just to remind you: these are photos of male models playing characters in a sexual story (loosely playing with the image of a wolf pack) for a receptive audience, a story that’s intended to be at least sexually pleasing — or, better, actually arousing — to this audience and thereby to sell more of the company’s wares (DJ is an Australian company, here selling items from The Pack underwear company, distributed by Dragon Label Limited in Hong Kong). I’ve given these characters Italian names: Nero ‘black’ (note: in Italian, Nero is pronounced roughly like English neigh-roe) for the black receptive partner (who brings his tight muscular buttocks and its anal prize to the encounter, plus a focused and open facial expression) and Lupo ‘wolf’ for the white insertive partner (who brings his crotch and its genital prizes to the encounter, plus a decidedly feral facial expression, at least in the first of three photos).
James and the knock-knock joke
November 27, 2023A One Big Happy strip, recently in my comics feed:
(#1) James (mis-)takes Ruthie’s meta-commentary — her talk about what’s going on in her interaction with James — to be part of that interaction, to be her next move in the routine of the knock-knock joke, and shows that he understands that routine, by producing the appropriate next move in the routine
James might be a dirty-faced urchin, but he knows his joke routines. And, in the last panel, is probably wondering how on earth Ruthie’s going to make a pun out of jeezy-peezy-I-forgot-the-joke.
So: mastering the routine of the knock-knock-joke is one thing, but then the routine incorporates another type of joke, the pun joke, which has its own requirements. In addition, the knock-knock joke requires not just any pun, but a (phonologically) imperfect pun, the more distant the better, so that its punch line will have genuine surprise value.