June is a month of Sundays. Today in the New York Times it’s the Sunday of Love, with 24 alternative cover photos of couples (of all sorts — mine had two Latino men) kissing, plus photo vignettes of love around the city on Saturday May 19th (the day of the royal wedding in London). Next Sunday is, once again, Triple Play Day: Fathers Day, Commencement Day at Stanford, and World Music Day, all rolled into one (last year’s occasion was also insanely, record-breakingly hot — marking the onset of the chronic dyspnea that has dogged me ever since). And then two Sundays from today: the San Francisco Pride parade. Things to post for all of these occasions. Today, a look forward to Fathers Day, prompted by an ad from the Levenger company.
Gearing up for Fathers Day
June 10, 2018whom can be pardoned
June 9, 2018It’s CruzISOC Day on AZBlog! Time to report on Ted Cruz‘s Twitter adventures with the non-standard case-marking of the lexical item WHO (Nom who, Acc whom) as an in-situ subject of an object complement. As here (marked up mockingly by Oliver Roeder on Twitter):
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The possessed and the damned gather over cheese dip
June 8, 2018A 1969 Velveeta ad:
Ingrid Superstar is obviously possessed, perhaps as a consequence of the entire company of the damned dipping into her chafing dish.
With a little lesson in pronouncing Spanish, and of course a celebration of the processed cheese product Velveeta, which has been beguiling the unwary with its silky smoothness since 1918.
Plus the inventively crude sexual slang dip into s.o.’s chafing dish.
I love Moscow with chocolate syrup on top
June 8, 2018Today’s politically pointed parodic Zippy:
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You might not have recognized the Bosco jingle from the 1950’s, so Bill Griffith has helpfully added a jar of the stuff to the strip.
White stars on a field of green, part 2
June 8, 2018Yesterday, in “White stars on a field of green”, Myoporum parvifolium in bloom, just down the street from my place. But surely there’s a flag of that description? Yes, there is, or was:
(#1) Flag of the Kingdom of Egypt (1922–1953)
White stars on a field of green
June 7, 2018Notable feature of the grounds on the condo complex at the northwest corner of Ramona St. and Homer Ave. (half a block from my house), a carpet of Myoporum parvifolium, with its fleshy leaves and small 5-petaled flowers, as in this photo from the net:
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A few years ago, the original water-greedy plantings around the complex were ripped out and replaced by low-water alternatives, including this handsome ground cover, which has been spreading nicely to fill the area.
To come: on this plant; its cousin M. insulare; the common name boobialla for these plants; and other plants in their family, especially in the genus Verbascum, the mulleins.
contractions
June 7, 2018The One Big Happy from May 11th, in which Ruthie discovers that there are contractions and then there are contractions:
Swiss watchmakers
June 6, 2018Kim Darnell, laboring to assemble a Page for this blog on postings about Switzerland and the Swiss, passed on a charming BBC News video from the 4th, “The Swiss master watchmaker running out of time”:
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Philippe Dufour [born 1948 in Le Sentier, Canton of Vaud, Swtzerland] has been making watches by hand for 50 years but has no-one to pass his skills on to.
He tells the BBC what it means to be one of the very few watchmakers remaining in the craft.
The watches sell for $50,000 and up each — but then each watch takes months of labor to make, and they are artworks in themselves.
I then thought to look for Zwickys in the Swiss watch business, and immediately netted Joëlle Zwicky, at the International Watch Company in Schaffhausen — industrial watchmakers, but at the very high end of the industry. And with an office of Corporate Social Responsibility, which JZ heads.
Now We Are Nine, a Journey to the East
June 6, 2018(Underwear and race / ethnicity / nationality / religion among gay men.)
News from Daily Jocks: a birthday for the Australian premium men’s underwear firms 2eros and Supawear (brothers in sexwear):
(#1) 2eros
(#2) Supawear
Notably, Asian models for the birthday celebration. Most sexunderwear firms are very light on black models, Latino models, Asian models (of all ethnicities and nationalities), and, for that matter, identifiably Jewish models. Andrew Christian is, on the whole, a stunning exception: his advertising reflects the use of “exotic” models in the fashion industry rather than the custom in the premium men’s underwear industry of relying on models whose looks are pumped-up mirrors of their customers’. The customers are mostly SAE-D — standard average European-descended — men (“standard average European” here is a little linguist’s joke, making reference to Standard Average European (SAE) languages, in Benjamin Lee Whorf’s terminology); the products either flatter their self-images or feed their fantasies of exotic men (for certain values of exotic).
mean age
June 5, 2018In the May 9th One Big Happy, Ruthie is faced with the ambiguity of modifying mean — and, unsurprisingly, opts for a familiar sense rather than a technical one:
