Two items on ADS-L with two-part back-formed verbs. One has old friends recently in the news, the other has a verb new to my files, but similar to some I’ve collected.
New Year’s 2pbfv crop
January 3, 2016Testigraphmanteau
January 3, 2016That’s for testicular photograph portmanteau, in a portmanteau.
The Steam Room Stories episode (very fit guys, gay and straight, clad only in a towel, in a steam room, talking about their bodies and about sex) of December 31st featured two of the steam room guys sitting side by side on the bench. I paraphrase their exchange:
Right asks Left how his vacation was. Fantastic, Left says, bragging that he took some great photographs. Left whips out his cellphone, pages through photos of gorgeous landscapes for Right, who admits that Left is a really good photographer, adding, however, that Left’s camera seems to be defective, because there are dark round blobs at the top of all the photos. Nothing wrong, dude, Left replies, those are my balls, don’t you know about nutscapes? Right is astonished, appalled. Left stands up, bends over, and shows how he snaps his testicles:
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Right is even more appalled; of course he says that Left is nuts.
The news for urinals
January 2, 2016Follow-ups to yesterday’s posting on urinals, starting with a photo of a rainbow men’s restroom that illustrated the piece on “Homophobia in the Bathroom” I quoted from in that posting:
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Such a place would make a number of straight men profoundy anxious; the rainbow says that this is a gay space, or at least a gay-friendly space, and these guys would be hesitant indeed to expose their bodies to a queer gaze. They are likely to believe that gay men are inherently predatory, hence dangerous to them. They might even believe that gay men are contaminated — sick and dirty — and capable of spreading the disease of homosexuality to them. So they sometimes propose that gay men should be forced to use their own, segregated, restrooms (even if they don’t go further and maintain that gay men should be put in internment camps, or go all the way with the injunction in Leviticus that they should be put to death). In any case, they don’t want gay men in the restrooms they use (or in the locker rooms and gang showers they use).
Two for New Year’s Day
January 1, 2016
On urinals and the conventions of the men’s room
January 1, 2016I have need (for a posting in preparation) to talk about the classification of urinals, the naming of the types, and the sociocultural conventions that surround their use.
Start with Wikipedia:
A urinal … is a sanitary plumbing fixture for urination only, predominantly used by males. [And mostly used in public places rather than in private houses, where toilets serve as fixtures for urinating while standing up.] It can take the form of a container or simply a wall, with drainage and automatic or manual flushing, or without flush water as is the case for waterless urinals.
The different types of urinals, be it for single users or as trough designs for multiple users, are intended to be utilized from a standing position (rather than squatting or sitting).
One crucial distinction is clear in this: single-user fixtures vs. multi-user fixtures. The multi-user type is sometimes called a gang urinal (parallel to gang shower), and that’s the label I’ll use here ; the single-user type, as the most common form of urinal in many places, has no standard name; I suggest the name solo urinal.
The other crucial distincrion is not clear in the Wikipedia passage above: between urinals that are hung from a wall (which I’ll call mounted urinals) and those with their base on the floor (which I’ll call standing urinals); again, mounted urinals are the most common type in many places, so that in many places unmodified urinal refers to the default type, a mounted solo urinal.
In any case, that gives us a four-way distinction, with many design details possible for each type.
Holiday images
January 1, 2016Two odd sets of holiday images: a superhero Xmas greeting, and BDSM images for both Xmas and New Year’s.
The Crew with packages and boxes
December 31, 2015(The bulk of this posting — below the fold — is a long piece jam-packed with descriptions of the male body and gay sexual practices in very frank vernacular English, so it’s definitely not for kids or the sexually modest. No X-rated images, though, and some observations about language. The piece is also about affiliation between gay men, deep friendships and love, so that, amidst all that coarse sexual stuff there’s considerable sweetness. And humor.)
When I posted this image a couple of days ago, I promised that I would supply a caption for it, and now I will.
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The caption is very long; it tells a complex story. Like virtually all my captions, it’s free verse: writing intentionally divided into lines, but unmetered and with no other systematic formal regulation (rhyme, alliteration, assonance, whatever). In fact, it’s free verse with long lines, a style of writing that many commenters find hard to classify: is a piece of long-line free verse a prose poem (a poem, but with prose features)? Or is it lyrical prose (a piece of prose, an essay or fiction, but with poetic elements)?
There’s no good general answer to this question, and I’m inclined to say that while there are prose poems and pieces of lyrical prose, sometimes it’s a mistake to insist that a bit of writing with mixed features must always be classified as one or the other. Long-line free verse, I would say, is usually both.
On to the story, um, poem.
Morning name: Baskit
December 31, 2015My recent “boxboys and transitive bottoming” posting led me to the informal English vocabulary for talking about the male genitals euphemistically: package, box, basket, junk, stuff, sack, unit, … (photo #1 there is an entertaining presentation of packages and boxes) — what you might think of as packagecabulary or boxcabulary. (NOAD2 has package ‘a man’s genitals’, but none of the other boxcabulary.)
That posting probably primed me to think of the premium underwear company Baskit; in the very crowded field of homoerotic underwear marketing, the company manages to be profoundly gay, starting with its name.
Zippy’s Eve
December 31, 2015Today’s Zippy has Griffy and Zippy together for New Year’s Eve, apparently in Coney Island in 1951, though their minds seem to be in the present day (Griffy’s looking forward to 2016, and Zippy’s annoyed with Justin Bieber, as he often is):
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In the last panel, their minds roam back to 1892. Time is fluid in Zippyland.
Five cartoons for the penultimate day
December 30, 2015Cartoons have been coming my way in an avalanche recently. Here are five for New Year’s Eve Eve, from four different sources (there are two Zippys) and on four different themes (there are two featuring the Grim Reaper).