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?
Today’s Zippy strip, with an undisregardable piece of public art in Manhattan’s fashion district:
(#1) The giant button and needle leaning on the kiosk of the Fashion District Information Center
Now: about this sculpture — the kiosk structure and the sculpture itself were removed last year — and then about its bright yellow stand-alone replacement, unveiled in February of this year.
Dan Piraro’s Bizarro from Sunday 7/30, in which Vikings with bunny-eared helmets demand horned helmets:
(#1) No more eating grasses, it’s time for Viking pillaging and plundering in an appropriately fierce costume (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 10 in this strip — see this Page)
Now, you’re thinking, I’m going to tell you that actual Vikings didn’t wear ornamental horned helmets, just to look fearsome; that instead they wore more effectively protective helmets of thick leather; and that the horned helmet thing is totally an invention of artists — or some disappointing shit like that. And I am.
It’s a good story, and it makes for amazingly impressive operatic scenes and a totally menacing muscle-hunk Marvel comics superhero (among other things), but all that horns stuff is fanciful.
Another chapter in the annals of phallicity. From Owen Campbell on Facebook yesterday:
(#1) Owen sucking on an Otter Pop
Owen’s comment:
At my job, teenagers deliver freezies [AZ: freezies ‘Otter Pops’]
otter pops (often no longer understood as a brand name) are also known as freeze pops or ice pops; freezies might be a regional term, but I’ve been unable to get information about it in any of the likely lexicographic sources: the OED, GDoS, and DARE. For what it’s worth, Owen’s in Winnipeg MB.
Now, two things: about Otter Pops; and (very briefly) about Owen.
(This posting starts out merely being racily suggestive, but then I diverge into cheerleading for smaller penises and cataloguing the pleasures of fellatio, so it turns into something unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest. Though I look back at this section and think: I wish I’d had this to read as a kid, as a very young fagling with shame about the size of his penis and an unfocused yearning to learn how to perform fellatio to my satisfaction and my partner’s)
From Steven Levine on Facebook this morning, posting from the Netherlands:
[SL:] Pastries in Haarlem, about which I have no comment but the obvious.
(One photo of one bare-chested and one entirely naked porn actor apparently about to get it on, but otherwise it’s about facial expressions; the posting is, however, about a piece of gay jack-off porn, so it might not be to everyone’s taste.)
From Falcon | Naked Sword as before (when we got puppy play, way out in the fields of kink), but this time, just two hot guys — the actors Adrian Long and Angelo Marco — posed as if they’re about to get it on, Long as top to Marco’s bottom (his bottom being prominently displayed in the p. r. shot). Meanwhile, however, their gazes are fixed on us, the viewers and prospective buyers for their jack-off porn. Now, how to read their facial expressions?
(Naked men, gay BDMS fetish porn discussed in street language, entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)
In today’s e-mail, from the Falcon | Naked Sword Store (with hyphens inserted for clarity): summer cyber-Monday half-off hits on sale (1 day only):
(Increasingly naked model, doing a cock tease sequence before full frontal nudity (not shown here, for WordPress modesty), but the beauty of his body, cock included, is admiringly discussed in plain language. So not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
Yes, it’s ultimate July, 7/31. 🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers to lead us out of the jungle of July. Tomorrow there will be the inaugural rabbits, but I fear August’s bunnies will all be demon creatures (cue Monty Python’s Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog).
From Bill Stewart on 7/29 (Bill feeds me naked men every so often; they’re a hobby we share), an issue of Eroticco magazine featuring the model Jared, as photographed by Roger N.
Each issue of the magazine is a photo shoot, with no text whatsoever beyond the identification of the name of the model and the name of the photographer — in this case, just a (presumably professional) first name in the case of the model (who I’ve not been able to identify further in searches, but then I have little search-fu), first name and initial for the photographer (similarly obscure for me).
The thing about this shoot is that while it is in some sense gay porn, it’s executed with a high level of craft, on the part of both photographer (who sets up the shots and then composes the final photos) and model (who acts in this dramatic sequence, projecting a persona and engaging his viewers). Some of it is funny. Meanwhile, the final cock reveal turns out not to be about Jared’s cock; the cock is just an element of a larger composition that equally features Jared’s face (with a welcoming half-smile) and his perfectly sculpted torso. His cock, large and half-hard, fits the rest of his body perfectly; but large half-hard cocks can’t be viewed as elements of fine art, so I can’t show you the cock here, have to fuzz it out.
Now, the cover of the Eroticco issue. Then 7 shots from the larger sequence in the magazine, showing the full progression in the magazine’s layout. With commentary from me along the way.
