Three days of commercial Christmas

January 5, 2022

(On the first of these three days, this posting gets right into details of men’s bodies and sex between men, in very plain language, so it’s out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest.)

In the current world, it’s 1/5/22: it’s Twelfth Night (Epiphany Eve) on the Christian calendar. Celebrated in this cartoon from a Liz Climo series (originally on Tumblr in 2013):


(#1) From Liz Climo’s 12 Days of Christmas, as depicted in exchanges between a bear and a bunny — on Day 1, from Bear: “The partridge flew away, and I ate all of the pears”

But back in the Commercial Christmastide of 2021, from Daily Jocks, it’s Day 4 (12/16, Beethoven Austen Day in the real world; Pure for Men in DJ’s Homoland, which will take us right into the down and dirty of sex between men, behind Pure’s veil of “all-natural cleanliness”), Day 5 (a disappointing 12/17, nothing but DJ gift cards), and Day 6 (12/18, Amplify x Circuit underwear from DJX, finally some male bodies to appreciate!).

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Posted in Holidays, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Underwear | 5 Comments »

Seasonal gatherings

January 4, 2022

(Some reflections on my life as an old man, disabled, living alone — resolutely and defiantly — in the midst of this endless, constantly morphing, pandemic. Trying to be clear-eyed about all of this, but a certain amount of unpleasant self-pity will no doubt creep into my account, so this posting isn’t for everyone.)

Two occasions on December 19th, together making my social life for the Christmas season: from 10 to 1 (Pacific time), a Zoom gathering of soc.motss folk (a community going back to the Usenet social newsgroup for lgbt-folk and their friends — members of the same sex — a community I joined in 1985); then at 2, an hour’s visit from my entire immediate family: my daughter, Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky (who lives here in Palo Alto), and my grandchild, Opal Eleanor Armstrong Zwicky (visiting for a few weeks from their first year at college, at the University of Pittsburgh).

These two occasions unified by little more than my costume: my in-your-face FAGGOT t-shirt above, and my Swiss-flag gym shorts below.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and food, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Poetry | 2 Comments »

Miniature Christmas beefcake

January 3, 2022

(Another Xmas-related posting. These will go on for some time, since the backlog of material is huge, and I’ve only been able to manage one posting a day: back in isolation, with plenty of time in my days, but enmired in the tar of dismay, so I work even more slowly than usual.)

It’s about an “It’s a Fairy” ad of the season — for Christmas ornaments from the Stars Gemstone company — on my Facebook page, the ad and the ornnaments fashioned for a gay male audience:


(#1) (Note that a (sprite) fairy in French is masculine gender, un fée; a (faggot) fairy is, less surprisingly, masculine gender too, un pédé) The ornaments are marketed merely as adorable fairies for the Xmas tree — who doesn’t love fairies? — with little notice that they all happen to be male fairies posing as sexy underwear models, in fact as models in beefcake mode (#2 doing a cock tease; the whole bottom row wearing black armbands, on their right biceps to indicate that they’re bottoms)

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Homosexuality | 2 Comments »

Adventures in a balloon

January 2, 2022

In today’s (1/2/22) Bizarro, the Old Balloon Peddler hawks his wares in the park:


(#1) And thought balloons too! Take a word or thought ride in one of these sturdy inflatable delights (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)

The Magical Adventure Balloon Ride
— a private basket adventure exclusively for thrill seekers

He gives the kids free samples
Because he knows full well
That today’s young innocent faces
Will be tomorrow’s clientele

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Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Play | 1 Comment »

Our frugal cartoonists

January 1, 2022

🐇 🐇 🐇 + 🐇 🐇 🐇 (three for the new month, three for the new year)

It’s about re-using resources. In particular, re-using cartoon artwork for fresh purposes — a regular practice in (among the strips I follow regularly) Zippy the Pinhead and Bizarro. In Zippy, it’s mostly re-texting an old strip; but in Bizarro, it’s mostly assembling a strip from a collection of standard components arranged in a standard abstract pattern — rather like a syntactic construction.

The topic for New Year’s: assembling a Bizarro Psychiatrist strip.

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Dreams of a flitter mouse

December 30, 2021

(The posting veers almost immediately into the world of sex between men, sometimes in very plain terms, so it’s not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro finds Batman on his therapist’s couch, reporting bat dreams — but who knows what flying and insect-eating really stand for in the dreams of a flitter mouse?


(#1) Gm. Fledermaus (literally ‘flitter mouse’) and similarly in other Germanic languages, including, according to OED2, in English cites of flittermouse, flitter-mouse, flutter-mouse, and flitter mouse from 1547 through 1872 (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page.)

Clearly, we have to understand both flying and eating insects as dream substitutes, screening Batman’s true anxieties: his shame about being gay (concealed by a veneer of macho posturing); his constant fear that his secret life as a famously effeminate enthusiast of fellating other men in the sexual underworld of Gotham City will be exposed; and his deep regret for years of being in sexual thrall to his younger, dominant, and more masculine lover, Robin the Boy Wonder (“I wish I knew how to quit you”, he sobs in dismay).

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Posted in Comic conventions, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

Christmas Eve mussels

December 29, 2021

Warning in advance: this posting will turn to discussions of genitals, mostly female, with symbolic and schematic representations, so it won’t be comfortable for everyone.

But it starts with a culinary celebration of the holiday season, Owen Campbell’s Facebook posting of course 3 of Christmas Eve dinner at his house:


(#1) Seafood moments: mussels here — and then oysters (courses 2 and 4), plus mushrooms stuffed with crab

Why all this seafood? Because it was Christmas Eve, and though Owen and his husband are in wintry Winnipeg and not sunny Sicily (where the seafood is a component of La Vigilia), bivalves and crustaceans are still appropriate for anticipating the arrival of the Child.

So, first: about the Seven Fishes (with fish ‘seafood’). Then specifically about mussels, as food. And then more about mussels, as symbols of the female genitalia (where we will encounter an instructive anatomical diagram cheerily entitled “Meet the Vulva” — note warning above).

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Posted in Clothing, Holidays, Language and food, Language and the body, Music, Phallicity, Vaginality | 2 Comments »

Eating like a Pygmalion

December 28, 2021

… Wayno’s portmanteauing title for yesterday’s (12/27) Wayno/Piraro Bizarro:


(#1) A play on Shaw / slaw (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

Three things: one, plays on the Shaw of George Bernard Shaw (plenty of room for silliness here); two, on the wonders of (cole) slaw; and three, a note on the exclamation by George (which of course has nothing to do with GBS, but also nothing to with kings of Great Britain, since George I (from Hanover) didn’t ascent to the throne until 1714, while exclamations calling on a George go back at least to 1616).

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Posted in Euphemism, Language and food, Language play, Movies and tv, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Puns | 1 Comment »

The steamy side of Santaland

December 27, 2021

(Well, yes, men’s bodies and man-on-man sex, discussed analytically but in very plain language, with photos, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

Extracted from the Titan e-mail ad for the gay porn studio’s Christmas sale for this year, a pair of naked naughty boys making (two very different) sex faces for their audience:

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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality | 2 Comments »

The saurus with a chorus

December 26, 2021

A chorus of semantically related words — synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, hypernyms, derivatives — organized in a book by concept. In today’s Zippy strip, such a book literally embodied in a saurus (‘lizard, reptile, dinosaur’) very much resembling a Tyrannosaurus rex. A saurus that Griffy-daddy is cajoled into letting Zippy-boy keep as a pet:


(#1) … so long as he keeps his pet Thesaurus in his room

Not, as it turns out, the first Thesaurus rex joke out there. There’s my 10/7/12 posting “Thesaurus rex” (which I’ll get to in a while, along with a couple of Thesaurus rex books); memic Thesaurus rex t-shirts, mugs, and the like; and even an “Oh crap! It’s a Thesaurus.” sub-meme.

But first, notes on thesaurus and the jokey thesaurus rex.

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Posted in Books, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

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