Variability in our mental lives

April 11, 2026

Variability in language — from person to person, and for any particular person, from context to context — is all around us. It’s a routine aspect of our mental lives, amazingly complex in its details, but in no way surprising as a phenomenon. Similarly for variability in factual and procedural knowledge: impressively intricate, but familiar.

But now it turns out that more and more of our mental lives is open to variation. As a way into the topic, consider an NPR Radiolab segment from 2024 that came by me on KQED-FM a while back, on the phenomenon of aphantasia.

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Posted in Sociolinguistics, Variation | 2 Comments »

Z number

April 10, 2026

E-mail from Ellen Kaisse this morning:

I don’t know how I failed to learn this for 60 years or so but Purcell’s cataloguer is a Z person, Franklin Zimmerman. You probably have known forever, but thought I’d mention it just in case. How can someone who died so young have 860 Z numbers? And probably most are glorious.

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Posted in Abbreviation, Death and dying, Figurative language, Music, Names | Leave a Comment »

Welcome to the t-room

April 10, 2026

(about sex between men, described in street language — entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

Welcome to the t-room. The noun t-room (now my favored term; also tearoom):

a public men’s room (restroom, lavatory, toilet, etc.) frequented by men for (typically anonymous) sexual encounters; these encounters are clandestine, kept secret from other users of the facility

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More TMR goofiness

April 9, 2026

(about sex between men, described in street language — entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

Continuing my laborious examination of the 2026 MEN.com 5-part DVD The Men’s Room (TMR). So far, two postings on the goofy “human urinal” segment (#1): 4/8 in “human urinal” and 4/9 in “human urinal, the photo album” (nobody expects a porcelain pissoir to have human bodyparts and a fierce desire for sexual relations with men).

Contrast TMR with Joey’s Surf Vacation from the same source — see my 4/5 posting “Travels with Joey”, where I note how carefully designed JSV is. TMR, however, seems have been thrown together from five scenes: the pieces of two previous videos, from 2022, reordered, plus some new material (in “poking the bear”, now #4) — see the appendix for the sources and their ordering in TMR — and some of it is definitely goofy: “human urinal” (#1) and, notably, “porta pounder” (#3), which involves a toilet but one not in a men’s room at all (instead, in a porta-potty).

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human urinal, the photo album

April 9, 2026

(raunchily entertaining but utterly unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

To the photo in my “human urinal” posting yesterday — Tony D’Angelo reacting in surprise to Edward Terrant’s half-man half-pissoir (in a scene from The Men’s Room DVD from men.com) — two further images:

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Posted in Facial expression, Gay porn, Language and the body, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Silliness | Leave a Comment »

human urinal

April 8, 2026

(a brief note about sex between men, described in street language — entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

The hybrid. From “The Human Urinal” episode of MEN.com’s The Men’s Room DVD (the first scene (of 5) on my recently arrived copy of the 2/26 DVD:

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Posted in Ambiguity, Clothing, Form and function, Gay porn, Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, Lexical semantics, Semantics | Leave a Comment »

Easter cressheads

April 6, 2026

A Jacquie Lawson digital greeting card from my old friend Benita Bendon Campbell (who appears frequently on this blog) for Easter, featuring garden flowers, cresshead eggs (eggshells with human faces drawn on them and with green plants — cresses especially — sprouting from them, like hair), and, eventually, large amiable rabbits (not shown below). A penultimate shot of the developing scene:


(#1) A festival of spring flowers and cressheads

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Posted in Art, Compounds, Events and occasions, Language and plants, Language play, Lexical semantics, Semantics of compounds, Taboo language and slurs | 6 Comments »

Travels with Joey

April 5, 2026

(thoroughly unacceptable for kids and the sexually modest)

Or: The swains in Spain  / Are effing profane.

A posting on the occasion of my scoring my own copy of the gay porn romp Joey’s Surf Vacation (MEN.com, 2024), in which twink Joey Mills travels to Spain to learn to surf, but ends up mostly with endless sex  — manual, oral, and anal, both giving and getting — instead of endless summer (though a certain amount of surfing does occur)

JSV provides me with more material for a standard Sunday custom: playing familiar gay porn as background while I work on assembling postings, staying mildly aroused and alert. I realize that this isn’t most people’s idea of a pleasant Sunday morning, but it works for me, and doesn’t get in anybody’s way. (It’s much less noisy than my shapenote singing, which is truly loud, but hasn’t elicited any complaints from the neighbors.)

So here’s the program: reports on three postings on this blog about JSV, with some fresh additions. And then a few notes on Thomas Johnson, aka Mr / Mister DeepVoice / Deep Voice.

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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex | Leave a Comment »

Living tubes, no sex

April 4, 2026

Walking the neighborhood with Isaac brought us to resting by a planter of weird plants — tall, stiff, hollow tubes in sections, living green things with no hint of flowers or seeds — outside Joe and the Juice at 240 Hamilton Ave. (at Ramona St., a block and a half from my house).  I noted how tough the plants were (with some moisture, they grow ferociously, and their stems are naturally coated with silica, so that the stems can actually be used to scour pots and pans).  Unfortunately, I forgot the evocative names of the plant — common name horsetail, botanical name Equisetum (Latin for ‘horse bristle’) — or the significant fact that the plants had neither flowers nor seeds because (like ferns) they were modern plants surviving in much the same form as their ancestors from prehistoric times, before the invention of sex in plants, and produced spores rather than seeds.

An impressive stand, in the wild, of the species Isaac and I rested by at Joe and the Juice, Equisetum hyemale:


The prehistoric plants included gigantic horsetail trees

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Posted in Language and plants, My life, Names, Palo Alto, Taxonomic vs. common | Leave a Comment »

Maximus

April 3, 2026

(alcoholic drinks and lots of condoms, so not for kids or the sexually modest)

I put in a grocery order for delivery from Safeway (a bag of mandarins, 2 containers of yogurt, 2 cartons of milk, 4 boxes of Kleenex, and some Dijon mustard), and Safeway suggested a pile of additions to my order, the first of which came as the word MAXIMUS, which my highly penis-invested imagination took as a reference to condoms, huge ones (no doubt as a compliment to the power of my body; for the purposes of sales, every man is admirably horse-hung, whatever his actual equipment is like). As it happens, I am happily snug — salestalk for small / slim — rather that max / thick, congenial rather than showy, but I’m entertained by the gesture.

But it turned out that MAXIMUS was an allusion to max taste, not max size — specifically to the powerful taste of an ale, Lagunitas Maximus Colossal IPA. Safeway was encouraging me to order some. Or Mad Dog Bling Blue Razz blend raspberry wine. Or Absolut Tabasco — chili pepper flavored vodka. (I swear I am not making these up.) There were probably further remarkable alcoholic drinks on succeeding pages, but I did not venture further into this astounding catalog. In fact, I was falling back on visions of snug but silky condoms. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, My life, Taste | 1 Comment »

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