Stamps for the season

June 4, 2025

… and the season is Pride Month. Canadian Pride and Canadian pride from Chris Ambidge on Facebook on 6/1:

Oh look — Canada Post is issuing four commemorative stamps in honour of Pride Month. The theme is “Places of Pride / Lieux de la fierté”, and depict four places beloved of LGBTQ2S+ people in Canada, from Hanlan’s Point in Toronto to Club Carousel, Calgary’s first gay bar. I hadn’t seen these last time I was at the post office — I need to go buy me some stamps!


(#1) From the Canada Post website on 5/29:

We’re proud to announce our latest stamp series honouring sites across Canada that 2SLGBTQIA+ [2S is two-spirit, a First Nations term for a third gender] people fought to make their own – places of celebration and freedom to be fully oneself, and spaces that nurtured a sense of solidarity that became a catalyst for change. 🏳️‍🌈

The Places of Pride stamp series honours: Calgary’s first gay bar Club Carousel; Toronto’s Hanlan’s Point Beach; Montreal gay bar Truxx; 3rd North American Native Gay & Lesbian Gathering near Beausejour, Manitoba.

O Canada! … The True North strong and free! — we send Prideful huzzahs to you.

Things are different, stamp-wise, in my troubled country.

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Posted in Art, Canada, Gender and sexuality, Race and ethnicity, Rainbow | 2 Comments »

rollsuck, verb and noun

June 4, 2025

Yesterday’s Strange Planet comic strip by Nathan W. Pyle introduces the delightful verb / noun rollsuck ‘to vacuum’ / ‘vacuum cleaner’ (on Pyle’s strange planet, which has our customs but not our vocabulary):


The verb / noun as in: I am rollsucking the foot fabric ‘I am vacuuming the rug’

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Posted in Ambiguity, Innovations, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Slang | 3 Comments »

Lost in translation

June 4, 2025

A midweek quickie. Yesterday on Facebook, a posting from Thorstein Fretheim (Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, specializing in pragmatics and semantics: intonation, discourse markers, prosody, context), as it came to me in English  translation:

‘Trondheim’s Own Chocolate Factory’ (Address Newspaper) or ‘Trondheim’s Own Chocolate Factory?’

(Address is the regional newspaper in Trondheim)

Now this was utterly baffling, so I asked for the Norwegian original:

‘Trondheims egne sjokoladefabrikk’ (Adresseavisa) eller ‘Trondheims egen sjokoladefabrikk’?

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Posted in Definiteness, Linguists, Norwegian, Possession, Swedish, Syntax, Translation | Leave a Comment »

Today’s catch-22

June 3, 2025

Getting prescriptions (re)filled through CVS Caremark turns out to be a constant unpleasant adventure. My password keeps needing to be changed, for no reason I can see, and what happens when I get to the “manage your prescriptions” page is always something different from all previous log-ins. Sometimes I can find no way to get the list of my (alas, very many) prescriptions, or get the list from two years ago, or some list that probably belongs to someone else, so I just abandon the task and try again the next day.  Twice I’ve been told that that resource is not available.

Today my problem was a prescription for prednisone 5 mg tablets, which I put in weeks ago, got a message saying it had been processed, and then no news whatsoever. So, after elaborately proving who I was and then changing my password, I found the “track your orders” resource (sometimes it just vanishes and I’m shit out of luck, but it was there today. And told me that instead of being mailed to me (as I had instructed), the rx was sent to my local CVS, held for two weeks without being picked up, and returned to the warehouse. All without any notification to me.

Oh, you say, that should be no problem, just put in a new order. The “submit an order” option was in fact available. Joy.

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Posted in AI, Events and occasions, Language and medicine, My life, Technology | 3 Comments »

Adventures in AZ-land

June 2, 2025

That’s the land of maze and Shiraz and similar AZ things, those whose names have the letter-sequence AZ in them; Aslan is something entirely different (see below). I was taken to AZ-land yesterday on Facebook by Aric Olnes (who is, among other things, a floral artist), in one of a series of alphabetic flower photos from Casa Thomas / Olnes in Pioneer (Amador County) CA — where Aric and his husband Mike Thomas live these days — which come with lengthy alliterative captions, in this case for the letter A:


(#1) The photo, of a Pioneer Azalea; the caption:

Astonishingly attractive Azaleas arrest acrimonious assumptions ascending aloft angelic amiability

(Look, Aric wasn’t aiming for elegance or poetic facility, just alliteration playfully carried to ridiculous lengths; otherwise, all it has to do is make some sense)

And my response, also on Facebook, taking things in a direction Aric probably didn’t anticipate:

— azaleas are from AZ-land, like azure, azimuths, and azithromycin, in a region that embraces Azerbaijan, the Azores, and Azusa [but not Anaheim or Cucamonga] — and is next to the Plaza Hotel, the Amazon River, and Jason Mraz‘s recording studio (among many many other things)

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Posted in Alliteration, Art, Books, California, Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and plants, Language play, My life | 6 Comments »

Withering, take 2

June 1, 2025

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit — the trois lapins inaugurating the month of June, and in the northern temperate zone, devastating young gardens; meanwhile, summer rushes in, as chronicled in a modest way in my posting yesterday, “Withering away, or not” (the cymbidium orchids are rapidly withering away, with only 5 flower stalks still standing at the end of yesterday’s garden work; in contrast, I was thriving)

This morning’s update (I was up at 3:40 and labored steadily on house and garden from 4 to 9, when I started work on this posting): only 2 flower stalks remain (the withered flowers and the long thick stalks have been cut into compostable bits); while I continue to thrive, despite seasonal allergies (one more day of stunningly good morning vitals — blood pressure and pulse rate). Meanwhile, in a kind of compensatory bloom, the big-leaved hydrangea (Hydrangea macrophylla) has three flower heads opening up into bright pinkish-red panicles, the tallest (and reddest) on a stem that now looms over 4 ft from the ground (since the plant’s in a big pot, that flower-ball is now right at my eye level).

And then I got the sweetest compliment from Robert Coren this morning, in a comment on yesterday’s posting that took off from the verb wither in the posting. To which I had a complex response.

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Posted in Allusion, Events and occasions, Language and plants, Metaphor, My life, Plays, Pragmatics, Quotations | 3 Comments »

Withering away, or not

May 31, 2025

🐅 🐅 🐅  three tigers for ultimate May, and locally (here in the middle of the San Francisco peninsula) the tigers are blazingly summer-hot — in the 80s F yesterday, which made tending to my garden even in the early morning a challenge; the blooms of my cymbidium orchids (which thrive in our cool rainy winters) are withering away faster than flies dropping in a mist of Raid

Two flower stalks went down yesterday morning, and by 2 pm two more needed removal (although mad dogs and Californians will go out in the midday sun, this exotic Swiss transport from the green farmlands of Pennsylvania Dutch country will not), a task that awaits me as soon as the sun comes up — it’s only 4:30 am as I write this — by which time more will probably have succumbed, and they might all have gone down by the time the rabbits of June appear tomorrow. That would not be unusual. The plants will use the summer sun (and my daily waterings) to fortify their root systems, develop new pseudobulbs, and (eventually) send up fresh shoots as the rainy season begins, in December.

Meanwhile, the grasses and other plants on the hillsides will wither from lack of rain. The hillsides will turn golden brown for the hot dry summer, only to revive in fresh bright green when the rains come again; the world is renewed in green for Christmas and New Year’s Day, a transformation that never fails to delight me.

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Posted in Clothing, Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, Language and plants, My life, Seasons | 2 Comments »

Leather jackets, jockstraps, boots, and d&a

May 30, 2025

(Entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest. Starting with the painting that set this posting off when it appeared in today’s Pinterest mailing for me. Which has a leather jacket, a jockstrap, boots, and an a in it; we’ll get to the d in the fourth and last painting in today’s series)

The painting is Man Wearing Leather Jacket (n.d.) by Bruce Sargeant, a prolific wildly homoerotic artist who is also entirely fictional (but died in 1938 in his timeline). Sargeant is the creation of Mark Beard — who is even more prolific, queer as fuck, plus he’s a real person (still living, now aged 69).

Pinterest has been offering me this painting every so often for a long time, but without any identification; today, I was finally intrigued enough by the tough and direct offer of the model’s muscular ass for sex to use Google Images to dig out the source. Who turned out to be an artist we’ve seen on this blog before, in my 7/18/23 posting “A homerotic painting by Bruce Sargeant” (the painting is Locker Room Scene — Charlie in Three States of Undress).

I’ll look at that first, to establish an important characteristic of Sargeant’s work: it might drip homoeros, but it’s also intended as commentary on art-historical genres, styles, and themes (in Locker Room’s case, with a bow to Marcel Duchamp’s studies of bodies in motion). Then I’ll move to four closely related paintings, transportations of the classic male nude study to the subterranean world of man-on-man sex, in this case leathermen offering or soliciting dick or ass (in popular art, the standard sexual display of women for a male audience being t&a, tits and ass; of men for a male audience, d&a, dick and ass).

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Posted in Art, Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Language and sports | Leave a Comment »

Weepy, sneezy, sleepy

May 29, 2025

… with runny nose and gravelly voice. Yes, I am afflicted by spring allergies. Many possible contributors, but an obvious trigger is the stand of star jasmine blooming so beautifully, and smelling so sweetly, right by the mailboxes in the condo complex’s parking area.

I fell into a 2-hour nap yesterday afternoon and then slept 9 hours last night, but have still been yawning all day today, despite some application of very dark coffee (which I drink straight and cold; I like bitter, respect my trip).  Nevertheless, with my helper J I’ve been laboring mightily on housework from 5 am on: fresh sheets! laundered towels and clothing! everything neat and clean! garden plants watered!

Meanwhile, it’s now warm enough that I have moved to tank tops — today, a bright blue one with a rainbow over my heart, so I feel jaunty, even if I do use a hell of a lot of Kleenex.

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Posted in Clothing, Language and medicine, Language and plants, My life | 2 Comments »

Nutritional mishearing

May 28, 2025

I posted this query on Facebook yesterday:

— AZ: I’ve been regularly getting a tv spot ad for the Boost Max nutritional drink , ‘Here’s to Now: Boost Max’ (published 8/13/24), in which a young Black man says what I hear as “Here’s to bean meat soup every Thursday” (which puzzles me). Can anyone correct — or confirm — my impression?

You can view the ad, from ispot.tv, here.

Crucially, I failed to take into account the context the speaker is in; I really should know better.

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Posted in Context, Language and food, Language of advertising, Mishearings | Leave a Comment »

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