Toys for Twisted Boys

January 31, 2016

(On sex toys for gay men, with illustrations of the devices, but not on or in actual bodies, so the visuals are strictly speaking not X-rated. Also about the names for these devices, so  there’s some language stuff here. But there’s discussion of the way these devices are used in very plain language, so this posting is certainly not for kids or the sexually modest.)

A sale ad yesterday from C1R (mostly a company that makes and sells gay porn flicks, but they hawk other items for gay men as well), with the headers: “OxBalls Toy Sale! Get Dirty & Play Hard! Toys for Twisted Boys”:

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Posted in Language and sexuality, Language of sex, Names | Leave a Comment »

Queen for a King

January 30, 2016

Benita Bendon Campbell writes:

The dominant grocery chain in Denver – a subset of Kroger Foods – is called King Soopers. Their very popular market branch in the gayest neighborhood of our town is known (affectionately) as Queen Soopers. As you could have guessed.

Lovely. A few notes on Queen Soopers, then a re-play of some notes on queen as used by gay men.

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Posted in Language and sexuality, Slang, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Raiding the thesaurus

January 30, 2016

Today’s Zippy explores several domains of English vocabulary:

rankled, perturbed, exasperated, plunged into despair

confused, confounded, disconcerted, baffled, placed in a quandary

From NOAD2‘s thesaurus:

upset, distressed, troubled, perturbed, dismayed, disturbed, unsettled, disconcerted, worried, bothered, anxious, agitated, flustered, ruffled, unnerved, shaken, unstrung, hurt, saddened, grieved

confused, bewildered, bemused, puzzled, perplexed, baffled, mystified, nonplussed, muddled, dumbfounded, at sea, at a loss, taken aback, disoriented, disconcerted, flummoxed, clueless, fazed, discombobulated

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Vocabulary | 1 Comment »

Freezing eggs?

January 30, 2016

A Charlie Hankin cartoon in the January 25th issue of the New Yorker:

Penguins, yes, but also an illustration of how much you need to know to appreciate a cartoon. In this case, you need to know about IVF and the option of freezing a woman’s eggs so as to perform the procedure at some time in the future. (This reduces the chances of successful IVF, but women can have reasons for saving eggs up for the future.)

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P.C. Vey

January 29, 2016

A cartoonist new to this blog, encountered in the New Yorker issue for the 25th, as the artist for the week’s cartoon caption contest:

(#1)

It caught my eye as a remarkable instance of Phallicity: The Wurst and also as a nice example of a visual convention of cartoons: the lines indicating movement, in this case the growth of the hotdog. The holder of the giant hotdog has presumably come to consult with someone who might help him. It’s not obvious who the man at the desk is, or where this office is.

Soon three contenders for captions will be published in the magazine, and then readers can vote for their favorite.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Phallicity | 1 Comment »

Language and sexuality

January 29, 2016

Just arrived in the mail, the book

Language, Sexuality, and Power: Studies in Intersectional Sociolinguistics, ed. by Erez Levon & Ronald Beline Mendes. Oxford Univ. Press, 2016.

Interactions of sexuality, gender, social class, social status, race, ethnicity, nationality, rurality, context, and more in linguistic usage. An introduction by the editors, and ten chapters located in an admirable assortment of places around the globe: Hong Kong, South Africa, Japan, Denmark, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Hungary, smalltown California, Thailand, and Israel.

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aussieBum, Shearing the Rams, and Slim Dusty

January 29, 2016

On our last visit to Australia (in “Bruce Bruce Bruce” on the 27th), we started out in Aussie underwear (the Daily Jocks AUS line), moved through Monty Python and Bruce as a  stereotypically Aussie name (and in the U.S., as a stereotypically gay name) and on to Barry Humphries and two Australian characters he created, with notes on the Aussie celebration of working-class masculinity (amiable crudity, matiness) and disdain for effete Pommies (Brits). At the end, a promise:

For a later posting, on Aussie masculinity (and class): aussieBum underwear, Shearing the Rams by Tom Roberts, and Slim Dusty.

Now’s the time. Looking ahead: two images of Aussie men in their aussieBum swimwear and underwear, a surfer and a jackaroo:

(#1_

(#2)

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Language of sex, Masculinity, Music, My life, Underwear, Verbing | Leave a Comment »

Three Thursday cartoons

January 28, 2016

From today’s feed: a Zits, a Rhymes With Orange, and another rich Zippy:

(#1)

(#2)

(#3)

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Posted in Art, Diners, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »

Yesterday

January 28, 2016

Two things yesterday: it was Mozart’s birthday, and it was a bright sunny day, cool but not cold, so after a long time away, Juan and I had an al fresco breakfast at Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden, which was packed with things in bloom (winter-blooming flowers and also spring-blooming flowers, since for plants spring starts locally in January) or simply flourishing (like many cool-weather food plants).

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Posted in Anniversaries, Language and plants, Music, My life | Leave a Comment »

Dean Phoenix, Dirk Yates, and curvature

January 28, 2016

On AZBlogX on the 26th, a posting “Dean Phoenix in disguise” that starts (#1 there) with an ad (titled “Ahead of the Curve”) for the Dirk Yates gay porn flick God Was I Drunk (2013), in which the DP character is presented as a straight army private who, under the influence of drink, agrees to have sex (for cash, in a video) with another straight soldier. This is a routine story line for the Dirk Yates flicks, which purport to show straight military men having sex with men (other straight military men) for the first time (for cash, in a video by Yates). The men are framed as real military men, not actors, and they always get seriously into the sex.

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

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