Benedico questa frociata

June 18, 2024

(Tasteless and obscene, in two languages, so not to everyone’s taste)


(#1) A rainbow raised fist, representing proud defiance; image from Redbubble, by designer MAS-S (in Berlin, Germany)

And now the frocio ‘queer, homo, faggot, fairy, queen’ mock-Pope intoning benedico questa frociata ‘I bless this faggotry’ (more literally, ‘this faggoting’) at the 6/15 Pride celebration in Rome, where t-shirts proclaimed “There is never too much frociaggine” — never too much faggotry — as participants enthusiastically embraced every vulgar insult they know (but especially frociaggine), turning them into proud badges of identity and defiance, raising the rainbow fist:


(#2) (photo from the National Catholic Reporter on 6/16/24)

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Frivolity is a stern taskmaster

June 17, 2024

The oxymoron-flavored punchline of today’s Zippy strip:


(#1) “Frivolity is a stern taskmaster”: it had the feel of a play on some existing quotation, so I searched on “stern taskmaster” — only to discover that frivolity is a stern taskmaster is indeed a famous quotation, widely attributed (without specific source) to … Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead!

At first, I hoped that one of the trackers of quotation sources — especially the Quote Investigator – would have taken this one on, but no luck there, so it was on to a long and tedious search through the Zippy archives. From which I emerged with an apparent winner, in a 2008 strip (though there was a 2003 strip with Jack Kerouac is a stern taskmaster in it; and a 2023 strip entitled “Stern Taskmaster” — both of which I’ll show you).

Then some investigation of stern taskmaster, which turns out to be a common collocation, one of the big three Adj collocations with the N taskmaster: hard, tough, and stern. Not (yet) fixed expressions — catchphrases, slogans, or even idioms — but something more than the fresh combinations of Adj and N into nominal phrases, approaching stock expressions.

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A Magritte double play

June 16, 2024

Today’s Bizarro, a Sunday strip from Dan Piraro alone, is a Magritte double play:


The Magritte pipe in panel 1, the Magritte apple in panel 3 (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — DP says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page)

The Magritte pipe is, paradoxically, disavowed in The Treachery of Images (La trahison des images). The Magritte (green) apple conceals its bearer’s face in The Son of Man (Le fils de l’homme) — but seems to be on his driver’s license, so that it, paradoxically, makes him recognizable to the traffic cop.

 

A band of four, conferring

June 15, 2024

(Not for kids or the sexually modest)

A particularly well-made ad in my e-mail on 6/8, which I’ve cropped so as to split off two aspects of the composition:


(#1) The Band of Four, who I’ll refer to unimaginatively as Man1 though Man4 (they’re actors, of course, posed for this ad; I’ll give you their stage names below); the first three apparently have their gaze fixed on Man4 (possibly their leader, but certainly their conduit to the world outside their little group, as his gaze is to the side, on us, the viewers of the photo)

#1 shows the four men in close conference with another, the suggestion being that they’re what I’ve called a male band (more on this to come); they could be a sports team, a singing group, a smash-and-grab robbery gang, a police unit, frat brothers, a band of musicians, a street-corner gang, a faculty committee, a religious study group, an improv troupe, and so on, or just a bunch of buddies who hang out together.

But wait. They’re all shirtless, or quite possibly naked. And seriously buffed. They’re also racioethnically diverse. Who are these guys? What is this group? What are they conferring about? And, while we’re puzzling, where are they? In the midst of yellow-focus tropical foliage, it seems. (That’s obviously a stage setting, but it’s undeniably tropical in intent.)

The characters are in Brazil, in multiethnic Rio de Janiero, where the actors were filmed in one episode of the recent gay porn flick Muito Quente:
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A hell of a queen

June 15, 2024

(Some readers will find some of the material in this posting distasteful, but there’s nothing visual or verbal in it to merit keeping the kids away from it.)

I’ll blame this on the luminous Minnie Driver, playing Queen Elizabeth I in season 2 of the Starz tv period drama The Serpent Queen.


(#1) MD in one of her fabulous QEI costumes; the character invites extravagance in costuming and makeup (further examples to come)

Through an accident of dates, QEI will take us to “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” song and secret worlds hidden from everyday life (and, of course, gay bears). Then, through the excellent “hell of a queen” quotation, she will take us on a further wild ride to the Princeton Triangle Club in 1960 and, more generally, to queens in drag.

Buckle up.

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The Princeton rub tool

June 14, 2024

(Even choosing my words carefully, a fair amount of this posting is going to be inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest; you’ll see why in a couple of seconds)

Two themes for today: tools, and their masculinity; and male-male frottage, especially one variant of the Princeton rub. Somewhat astoundingly, these two themes intersect in what I think of as the Princeton rub tool: a dual masturbation sleeve, a device to facilitate two guys getting off together face to face.

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Mid-June: holidays and occasions

June 14, 2024

First, it’s Pride month, so that runs through the 14th through 16th (today through Sunday), the days I’m focused on in this posting. Then: today is Flag Day; tomorrow is what I have wryly proposed as Flagging Day (for displaying your identities and tastes); and Sunday is five special days in one: three date-specific occasions, plus two floating-date events (some of these five are of personal significance to me, others of broader interest).

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The bate shop

June 13, 2024

(Utterly unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest)

My title: yes, a groaner pun bate (a clipping of masturbate) on bait ‘food used to entice fish as prey’; I am shameless.

Clearing things from my desktop (with great sadness, abandoning postings in preparation that I’d spent hours on but were clearly, in the face of new material constantly streaming in, never going to get written up) I found this site advertising a directory of jack-off clubs (/ jackoff clubs / jack off clubs / jerk-off clubs / wank clubs / masturbation clubs / etc.) — which you can think of as bate shops:

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Today’s dissertation defense

June 12, 2024

… in Stanford linguistics — the announcement:

The Department of Linguistics is pleased to announce a dissertation oral presentation on 6/12/24:

Indexing Respectability by Zion Mengesha

Committee: Penny Eckert (co-chair), Rob Podesva (co-chair), Jonathan Rosa, John Rickford, Paula Moya (university chair)

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Rosie, say “mama”

June 11, 2024

From the Doonesbury cartoon of 3/3/19 on baby’s first words:


(#1) Alex Doonesbury, watched by her mother, coaches her infant daughter Rosie to say mama — and is rewarded with Nevertheless, she persisted!

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