Yesterday’s Bizarro/Wayno collaboration:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
A strenuous exercise in cartoon understanding: you need to be familiar with a certain kind of (seafood) restaurant, and to recognize both anteaters and a children’s educational toy known as an ant farm. And then to understand that the cartoon embodies a metaphorical translation from a seafood restaurant world to an anteater world.
In today’s Zippy, a recurrent theme in the strip: the game of Telephone, or Chinese Whispers:
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(About gay porn, but not wildly racy. Edgy for kids and the sexually modest.)
On the 26th, about the Lucas gay porn sale for Memorial Day 2018: “Memorial mansex” on AZBlogX; and “Porn for the holidays, with narrowed eyes” on this blog, about offering gay porn for various holidays (for Memorial Day as a cultural celebration of summer, in particular), and about interpreting narrowed eyes and drooping eyes.
Now, in “More Memorial mansex” on AZBlogX today, two more gay porn ads for the holiday: one from TitanMen featuring Liam Knox; and one from Dirk Yates featuring Rod Peterson. Here I’ll pick up some themes from those ads: from the Titan, Knox’s tats, and what tats convey; from the DY, a note on palming off pros as amateurs, plus reality vs. fiction and the playful invention new cummer.
There’s Fenwick, and then there’s Fenwich, a Zippy name to conjure with: used as a narrative semi-generic address term, and in explicit discussions of names and their uses.
Following up on yesterday’s posting “In the morning: the B list actor and the scholar”, Gadi Niram asked on Facebook:
Do you know where the term B list comes from? I tried searching, but I didn’t find anything. My assumption is that it comes from casting lists in the old studio system.
Well, the A list / B list usage started with lists of things ranked according to importance, but it really took off when it got a foothold in the entertainment business generally (the A sides and B sides of records might have played a role in this) — and then, via the expression A-list gay, we got the count noun A-gay to refer to a gay “type” and to members of a gay male subculture. (There’s almost always a gay angle to linguistic topics, just as there’s almost always a linguistic angle to gay topics.)
I know this thanks to entries in OED3 that have been added in this century (2002, 2009, 2011). All praise to lexicographers!
On a larger scale, the war between randomness and organization, in which Zippy fights on both sides. In today’s strip, he’s in his random mode, distributing non sequiturs from a polka-dot van:
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One thing doesn’t lead to another. Instead, things just pop up from out of nowhere, without rationale.
But at other times in Zippy’s world, everything leads to something else, in steps. On paths that might go in surprising directions, the way conversations tend to wander.
Either way, linearity bites.
On AZBlogX today, a posting “Memorial mansex”, about a Lucas studio gay porn sale for Memorial Day 2018, with an ad offer (cropped below to avoid penises) showing three naked men with narrowed eyes, plus a shot of the onset of fellatio (with two men knee-deep in a pool of water, for added interest), to show you the sort of thing you can get from the Lucas sale offer:
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To come: on porn for the holidays; then on narrowed eyes and drooping eyelids and how these might be interpreted.
On the 20th, the morning name was W. Sidney Allen; if you’re not a linguist or a classicist, you’ve almost surely never heard of him — but then great scholars rarely work in the spotlights of public attention. On the 25th, the morning name was Lisa Whelchel, an actor you would probably recognize under the name of her most famous role: Blair Warner in the American tv sitcom The Facts of Life. So, in the penumbra of the spotlights, a B list celebrity.
From Day 2 (May 25th) of the 2018 Association for Psychological Science’s convention in San Francisco:
“For many years, involuntary memories were ignored. I’m here to tell you what we have learned about this intriguing phenomenon,” said APS Board Member Dorthe Berntsen in the 2018 Presidential Symposium. Berntsen’s multi-decade body of research on this unique form of autobiographical memory has shown the wide-ranging influence of the memories that simply pop into our heads without intentional retrieval. She presented an impressive body of experimental findings on the role of involuntary memory across the lifespan in humans as well as in apes.
For some time, I’ve been collecting examples of one particular form of involuntary memory in my life — morning names, the expressions that come to me unbidden when I rise in the morning. There’s a Page on this blog listing my postings on them. So it’s nice to discover that there’s actually a research community working on involuntary memories.
Today’s Dilbert, in which the pointy-haired boss goes portmanteauing:
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boss + exercise (in a spelling variant with –ize) = bossercize, formed on the model of the name of the dance fitness company Jazzercise.