Red hots, getcher red hots here!

May 17, 2017

Anticipating Memorial Day (May 29th this year), Pinterest has provided a big Hot Dog board. Memorial Day is a US holiday honoring Americans who died while serving in the armed forces, but it has also come to be the unofficial beginning of the summer vacation season and so the occasion for patriotic picnics (like the Fourth of July, but usually without fireworks or marching bands): hot dogs, hamburgers, mayonnaise salads (especially potato salad), watermelon, and so on.

Now, hot dogs are natural phallic symbols, more potent in a bun, and even more potent with the tip of the hot dog protruding from the bun, simulating a glans penis.

As a bonus, one Memorial Day picnic site suggests fruit skewers for the holiday — just the thing for Queer Memorial Day, with rainbow fruit in Pride Flag order and bright strawberry dickheads.

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Write like the wind

May 16, 2017

A few days ago on Facebook a friend despaired of ever getting his Master’s thesis written, and others chimed in with reassurances and encouragement. Somewhat bizarrely, I was reminded of something I wrote to the newsgroup soc.motss back in May 1996: a recollection of a radio dramatization of Ouida’s romantic adventure novel Under Two Flags (set in the Algerian desert), with a character who cries out at a crucial moment.:

My name is Cigarette, and I can ride like the wind!

And so she can. Meanwhile, I slightly revised the quotation, to:

My name is N, and I can write like the wind!

A mantra for the frustrated writer.

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ice plants

May 16, 2017

… that is, plants in the Aizoaceae, or ice plant, family. On the occason of recent visits to Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden, where there’s a spread of gorgeous Lampranthus spectabilis (syn. Mesembryanthemum spectabile), trailing ice plant:

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(photo by Kim Darnell)

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Reading in the ’50s

May 15, 2017

(Not much about language here.)

From Eleanor Houck on the 13th, a Mother’s Day posting from Reading Historic Neighborhoods on four places to take your Mother in downtown Reading PA in (roughly) the middle of the last century. Including a place I remember with particular affection, the Crystal Restaurant — which was more or less around the corner from my parents’ store: the Memo Shop, a little costume jewelry store a few doors north of Penn Ave. on 5th St.(while the Crystal was a half block east on Penn Ave. from 5th). Penn Square — 5th and Penn — being the very center of the city. The relevant map:

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One of the named features turns out to be key: the Wines & Spririts Stores are right where the Crystal used to be (from 1911 to 1981).

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Names in the comics

May 15, 2017

The One Big Happy in today’s comics feed:

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Ouch: Creighton Barrel / Crate & Barrel.

There’s quite a path in the history of Creighton as a first name. This will take us to probably the most famous person with first name Creighton, US Army General Creighton W. Abrams — and his son Creighton W. Abrams, a classmate of mine at Princeton.

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Fags Before Flags, and other in-your-face t-shirts

May 14, 2017

(Plain talk about men’s bodies and sexual practices, so use your judgment.)

Thanks to Greg Parkinson for a link to this John Crisvitello t-shirt:

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The slogan is a send-up of the odious BROS BEFORE HOS, preserving only the rhyming, the street language, and a message about balancing allegiances. My reading of the slogan is that it calls for gay men to generally value bonds to other gay men — fags stand with fags — over the sorts of allegiances expressed in flags: nationality, regional identity, religion, race and ethnicity, political affiliation, etc.

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Six mothers

May 14, 2017

A Zwicky family photo (from 1945 or ’46) showing Bertha and Melchior Zwicky (my Swiss grandparents), their five children, four of the five spouses (only my uncle Theodore Severin is missing from the photo shoot), and ten of their twelve grand-children (only my cousin Ted Severin is missing from the photo shoot; his sister Eleanor was yet to be born):

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Chenillar moments, including frass and lepidopterism

May 14, 2017

Two caterpillar notes, an old one and a very recent one.

First, from a Language Log posting of mine from 6/2/06:

As for the oak moths, we’ve been exceptionally afflicted by them this spring at Stanford — a rain of caterpillars [California Oakworms, Phryganidia californica], then masses of cocoons, and now clouds of moths.  Ick.  Susie Fork [posting on the Elkhorn Slough site], however, sounds pretty pro-moth.  Well, the Elkhorn Slough staff seem to value all the organisms they study.  But then they don’t have to live with clumps of cocoons disfiguring the pieces in the New Guinea Sculpture Garden, the way we do.

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Then from a visit to Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden last week:

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Months and days

May 13, 2017

Something I’m moderately sure of is that May is National, maybe International, Masturbation Month. All ny sources seem to agree on that. From the current version of Wikipedia:

The first National Masturbation Day was observed May 14, 1995, after sex-positive retailer Good Vibrations declared the day in honor of Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, who was fired in 1994 by President Bill Clinton for suggesting masturbation be part of the sex education curriculum for students.

International Masturbation Day has since been expanded to include the entire month of May as International Masturbation Month

(Note both vaginal and phallic symbols.)

Already there’s a question: why May 14th, back in 1995? Then things get quickly complex: an earlier version of the Wikipedia article, which I posted about here in 2013, identified Masturbation Day as May 7th (a date apparently selected by Good Vibrations in 1999) in the US, May 28th in some other countries. (Other US sources say May 28th is Masturbation Day.) Meanwhile, the current Wikipedia article says with great assurance that Masturbation Day is July 21st. The Wikipedia sources are in no way authoritative: they just assert dates. Thanks to the earlier Wikipedia article, I have May 7th on my calendar as National Masturbation Day, but now I’m all at sea. The 7th, the 14th, the 28th, or July 21st? And why? Why, in fact, May for the Month?

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I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valley

May 13, 2017

It starts with a striking variety of lily of the valley (Convallaria majalis), a flower of the month of May and of weddings:

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Photo from Liz Fannin, in Columbus OH, who found the plant at OSU’s Chadwick Arboretum plant sale last year.

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