(This posting describes man-on-man sex in street language, so is entirely unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest)
[A lightly edited fictobiographical / porn story from 1991 (20 years ago), on a t-room theme. Note: the main events described here (the Scherzo) took place in 1967, the Coda scene in 1974. All of that was a long time ago. This is the version posted 2/5/11 (11 year ago, so 31 years from the original story) on my (livejournal) XBlog.]
Georgia Morgan (now retired from linguistics in Brattleboro VT, where she creates and sells amazing jewelry) on Facebook on 8/3:
— GM: I will be at the Brattleboro Area Farmers’ Market this Saturday in the Rosie’s Wonders booth. Bringing these, and lots more …
(#1) Including this peapod pendant
— AZ: Love the peapod. I would wear that (except that I can no longer manage any kind of jewelry with my poor disabled hands)
— GM > AZ: If you ever want one, I do make pendants with an adjustable sliding closure that just go on over your head
— AZ > GM: Georgia, if you can do that for the peapod, I want one.
And it has been done. Georgia is working on the pendant; the check is in the mail. It’s my birthday present to myself; I have a prime birthday, my 83rd (I still can’t quite believe that I have somehow managed to live this long) in a month from now, 9/6.
(Well, about gay porn and men’s bodies and man-on-man sex, discussed in street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
Today in my e-mail, a Lucas Entertainment new (gay porn) scene, cropped here so I can focus on the faces:
About my body — my core body, and, separately, my peripheral and surface body — and how it’s been changing, dramatically in the past few days. Dramatically improved, I hasten to add, in case you were worried you were about to hear another litany of my sorrows.
(About men’s genitals and man-on-man sex, in street language, with an image that’s WordPressable only because I’ve fuzzed out a ton of penises — so entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
Today only: yet another flash sale from gay-pornmongers Falcon | Naked Sword:
From Steven Levine, continuing his observations in the Netherlands, on Facebook yesterday:
[SL:] A McDonald’s in Haarlem. I can’t decide if I think this is creative reuse or a violation of sensibility. Either way, what a building.
Ah, a continuation of my architecture theme, specifically in my posting “Durability, utility, beauty” from yesterday, where I looked at architectural design as simply the design of very large everyday objects, subject to the same judgments that we apply to kitchen tools, downspouts, typewriters, and the like.
In this case, there’s a certain cognitive dissonance (Steven’s “violation of sensibility”), between the elegant design of the building and the crass display of a fast-food restaurant. (On the other hand, for a McDonald’s, this display is positively modest and unobtrusive.)
(Obviously unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
cock time, an atrocious pun on clock time, from the Tumblr gallery of penis4u: a very substantial, fully erect penis wearing a (sturdily masculine) watch. In the hope of getting the image on WordPress (it is transparently NSFW and certainly not acceptable on Facebook), I have cropped the photo so that it shows only a few inches of shaft — which might as well be a piece of light colored wood.
I post fairly often on the design of everyday objects, looking especially for genuinely useful things that are also a pleasure to use, hold, or see. Now, I find myself getting thoughtful postings from someone at Tumblr — a side effect of my having to join Tumblr in order to get at some racy male photography that I have since posted — the 8/1 posting Firmitas, utilitas, venustas being about guiding principles for the mind, eye, and hand of the architect: that is, about the design of very large everyday objects.
I have no link to this posting, only the mailing, so I’ll reproduce that in full for its interest in the principles of good design, and the pleasure of its writing, which is both personal and analytical. (I don’t know who the writer is. The posting is unsigned — the e-mail reply address is merely welcome@tumblr.com — and I see other identification of them, so Tumblr cognoscenti are presumed to know who the voice of the site is. Grr.)
The text under the line. Then some comments and illustrations.
From Steven Levine, reporting from Amsterdam, on Facebook this morning:
If you have time to learn only one Dutch word, I’d say wildplassen makes an excellent candidate.
(#1) Du wildplassen ‘wild pissing’, with Du wild in the sense ‘free, loose’ (yes, it also has the sense ‘savage, fierce’, and that adds to the excellence of the signage)
(From a while back, but this exchange, on a very small bit of usage, between SRA (Stephen R. Anderson, the Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics Emeritus at Yale University, now living in North Carolina) and AMZ (me), came during various medical crises on my part, so never got posted. But now …)
The usage issue set out in 7/18 e-mail from SRA to AMZ:
I guess lots of people send you weird things they saw online for commentary. Let me join that crowd.
In a story today on NPR about the soldier (apparently on his way to discipline on an assault charge) who ran across the demilitarized zone in Panmunjom into the arms of the North Koreans, we read that
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he expected to have more information on the man in the coming hours and days.
“I’m absolutely foremost concerned about the welfare of our troop,” he told reporters during a Tuesday briefing, offering little other information than what has already been confirmed.
He obviously is referring to this individual guy as the troop he’s concerned about. I can’t find any instances of troop as a singular referring to an individual and not a group, but I’m not all that good at Google-searching for that kind of thing. The singular exists, of course, but it’s not the singular of [our] troops. Is this somehow a usage in the military?
