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(about the holiday, and masculinity, and enough man-on-man sex to make this posting out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest) First take: the long pan. From my 6/16/19 posting “On this day in 2019”: (US) Fathers Day. For some of us, this is a day to remember our fathers with affection. I’m one of the lucky ones; I’ve written about mine several times, most extensively in my 1/30/11 posting “It Gets Better / Wonderful dad”. It’s also an American commercial holiday that might better be…
In the New Yorker‘s 6/15/26 issue, a “Talk of the Town” piece “The Boards: Like Willy Wonka” by Zach Helfand on the theatre director Michael Arden experiencing indoor skydiving at a facility in Queens (in preparation for his latest show, “The Lost Boys”, which includes actors in intricate flying sequences). Then: In his acceptance speech for his first Tony, in 2023, Arden recounted being a bullied queer theatre kid in Texas, and then said, “All I can say is that now I’m a faggot with a Tony.”…
… from the New Yorker issue of that day: a Liana Finck cartoon on the never-done work of women; and an Ellis Rosen cartoon featuring a fully-accredited monster. The Finck. A young mother, frazzled by the care of a newborn, faces the thoughtless assumption that she is there to serve others: (#1) Dark, murderous, thoughts flit through her mind, but she’s a genuinely nice person, so she will make lunch for her appallingly dense visitors; but they’ll be the first to go down when the revolution…
(a note on taboo avoidance and euphemism, but with enough explication of the raw reference of various expressions to make this posting unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest) A poster wrote: I am a male corn actor. — adding that he had worked in adult entertainment before getting into corn. Just enough background information for me to exclude, oh so reluctantly, a wide range of colorful but unlikely understandings of corn, in favor of its just being an intentional replacement for porn to…
Just 3 days ago (6/15), it was the mantric pleasures of my ball: Key lime cheese ball, Key lime cheese ball, Key lime cheese ball. And then today (6/18), the Pinhead citizens of Dingburg have taken to chanting for their remarkable flange: galvanized steel socket flange, galvanized steel socket flange, galvanized steel socket flange. Respect their flange! onomatomania, onomatomania, onomatomania! Coming soon: the steel flange cheese ball, a triumph of textural contrast. Rivaling the US capital’s…
(Significant amounts of sexual crudity, so not for the eyes and ears of kids or the sexually modest) Niall Maher’s New Yorker daily cartoon for 6/15/26: (#1) To make any sense of this wonderful cartoon, you need to have detailed knowledge of two different events: from 5/19/1962 (I was just a month away from graduating from Princeton); and from 6/14/2026 (essentially, now), with a glance forward to 7/4 — events celebrating the birthdays of two different US Presidents (John F. Kennedy then, our…
(There will be some man-on-man sex, in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest) From my 6/13 posting “Two laughs-out-loud and a shiver of self-recognition”, about this Sarah Akinterinwa Psychiatrist strip: The therapist recommends, as a relief from anxiety, the familiar comfort of rewatching the same series until its outcomes feel more knowable than your own: a very common strategy for dealing with the terrible burdens of the daily news — and [a salve for anxiety] I regularly…
(fairly quickly detours into phenomenally raunchy free verse and then swivels again — but in there’s some stuff that’s way out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest) I was roused from my pastoral torpor this morning by a Facebook ad from the Tastefully Simple® website offering basic preparation directions for Key Lime Cheese Ball Mix. And I immediately fell into a Zippyesque seizure of onomatomania, moved to chanting Key lime cheese ball, Key lime cheese ball, Key lime cheese ball. Then,…
Cartoons that especially moved me in the latest — 6/1/26 — issue of the New Yorker: two by artists who are old acquaintances on this blog (Drew Dernavich and Frank Cotham), trafficking here in their brands of absurdity (their gags made me laugh out loud); plus one by British cartoonist, illustrator, and writer Sara Akinterinwa (whose work, all recent, explores dating, relationships, identity, politics, and navigating adult life as a young woman of color) that gave me not a great laugh but a…
A busy two days, with an avalanche of fresh things to post about, but all of it overshadowed by the hot news that I have found a place to live in. For complex reasons, it’s not technically an assisted living facility, but an independent living facility (think: retirement community); and for even more complex reasons, it’s a 2-bedroom (and 2-bath) unit for the same price as a 1-bedroom (so that fitting the crucial books I need into the place is now trivially easy, and I can also swing the…
The 6/1 Zippy strip celebrates a vibrant life on the side of the road, in drive-in joints offering comfort food and in flashy highway motels, in the lost days of mid-20th-century America (think HoJo’s clam strips): (#1) Stunned by signage: an octogenarian’s bulletin from the golden days; the cartoonist Bill Griffith was born in 1944, I was born in 1940, so this was the time of our youth Remembrance of lost time: L-Ken’s Drive-In Restaurant in Colonie NY (a northern suburb of Albany, the state…
(plenty of raunchy sex talk, not for kids or the sexually modest) (#1) That’s gooner ‘someone who masturbates a lot, enthusiastically’ — one of a family of senses for this noun — and it’s a fair cop (on the song, see the footnote at the end of this posting) But that’s not how I got wrapped up in goonerology (and what Mickey Dolenz sang in 1966 — back in pre-gooner days — was, of course, I’m a believer). That I blame on the Peachy Kings 30%-off Memorial Day sale on (100% polyester) mesh football…
I begin the story in medias res, with a May 27th Facebook comment by Probal Dasgupta on a posting of mine: — PB > AZ: Speaking of the way one pronounces the acronym “AZ”, I’ve been puzzled by the fact that some function words that end in orthographic s in English (as, is, has) use a /z/ while others (us, this) use an /s/. I’ve failed to find a specialist who is generous with their time to tell me the diachronic sequence that led to this … My puzzlement originated in the fact that a friend of…
Every year, for me this day (June 5th) is one of the most emotionally difficult days of the year; it’s my man Jacques Transue’s death day, in the bright early summer of what unfolded as the disastrous year 2003. Jacques died, after all those years of withering through dementia to death; I was crazed with grief (actually, I still am, it never went away, though the sharpest edges have worn down some, they would have had to); and then in November the flesh-eating bacteria came for me, and I just…
(dripping with raunchy sexual content, entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest) Not what TSE had in mind, but peach-eating was the topic for some bros in a Facebook reel that came by me this morning. Another chapter in the great book of schemes for talking about analingus without sounding really gross. (And the topic comes up because a great many people find the act deeply pleasant to receive, and a fair number of us find it satisfying to perform, for the sense of bodily intimacy…
(high sexual content, not for kids or the sexually modest) Lexicographic notes from Young America, heard on Facebook reels from bros in their 20s discussing sexual matters in a mostly bantering way: the verb to collab. Collected this morning (6/4), one bro to another: When I collabed with Pepe, I was doing something I’d never done before … we were tossing each other’s salad (to toss someone’s salad ‘to rim someone’ — verb rim-2: [with object] vulgar slang lick or suck the anus of (someone) as a…
On Facebook on 5/28, Bert Vaux reported on responses to a query of his on curtains vs. drapes. On that posting, an incidental comment by Heidi Harley: Did anyone [among BV’s respondents] mention that you can’t threaten anyone with the utterance, It’s drapes for you! But you can with curtains! Eliciting a series of responses from me: — 1 As you surely know, this is not some totally idiosyncractic fact, but follows from some other (admittedly, idiosyncratic) facts: the vertical fabric barrier…
(not the cartoonist’s fault, but my discussion veers occasionally onto fellatio, in vulgar street language, and that’s out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest) The Pearls Before Swine strip of 5/31, Stephan Pastis’s farewell to the month of May, devoted to one of his outrageously complex jokes (it’s so off-the-wall intricate that Rat, one of his characters, takes to protesting against it): Three contributions: (1) the joke genre (the setup / payoff formula pun); (2) the English verb…
… all fictional, unimaginably different, each one moving in its own way; welcome to the queen of the months, here in the northern hemisphere, where, on this celebratory day, the rabbits — — come to play Ir starts with a burlesque of the nursery rhyme “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” in yesterday’s posting “The server’s absurd attentions”, which led Benita Bendon Campbell to Kipling’s heartbreaking short story with that title. That led me to Saki’s black-comic short story “Sredni Vashtar”. And that to…
Hey, there, server lad, Have you any wool? Yes, sir, yes, sir, One alpaca full! This Drew Dernavich cartoon in the 6/1/26 issue of the New Yorker: A wonderfully absurd riff on the custom of restaurant servers offering freshly ground black pepper (occasionally, also freshly ground sea salt) upon the appearance of food at the table, obliging the diners to participate in a pretentious edgy ritual of condiment dispensation The nursery rhyme. From Wikipedia: “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” is an English…
tiger tier tiger for ultimate May, the gateway to the sultry rabbits of summer, those promiscuous creatures of the great queen, Juno (is it hot in here?) A follow-up to my 5/29 posting “Three mishearings”, with yet another surprising slip of the ear, eco-terrorist heard as ego-terrorist: model utterance with /k/, variant with /g/, differing minimally, in voicing — setting up a relationship that can be exploited in an imperfect pun, a possibility that’s been ostentatiously realized in writing by…
(the third mishearing takes us, in street language, into fellatio-land, a place not suitable for kids or the sexually modest) Recently logged, three mishearings of televised reels, two from commercials, one from a joke reel on Facebook, all easily verifiable as to what was said (vs. what I heard when I wasn’t looking at the tv, so didn’t get visual information about the text): I’m not sure which substance offering body pain relief item 1 came from, but the expression is common in ads of many…
The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro of 5/26: A Wayno Psychiatrist cartoon, this time with couples therapy in which the couples’s conflicts are referred to the attitudes of their inner children, one of whom is said to be infected with the dreaded cooties of childlore (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page) It’s likely that some of my readers will find this one-sentence summary of the cartoon’s content to be simply incomprehensible —…
The Stanford linguistics AZ community — adjunct faculty Annie Zaenen and Arnold M. Zwicky, graduate student Anissa Zaitsu — is pleased to announce the PhD dissertation oral presentation of one of its little band: The Landscape of Polarity-Sensitivity in African American English: Meaning and Structure by Anissa Rei Zaitsu: PhD dissertation oral presentation (Monday, June 8, 2026, 1:00-2:15pm). Committee: Vera Gribanova (co-chair), Cleo Condoravdi (co-chair), Boris Harizanov, Nandi Sims, and…
(a dip into the rhetorical organization of texts and into figurative language, but getting its raw material from gay porn and so ut’s going to be entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest) In the opening of Raging Stallion’s 2024 porn flick Tourist Attractions (scenes from the stream of visitors to Beau Butler’s (fantasy) rental house in Barcelona), BB explains the pleasures of the city: I like to take in everything Barcelona has to offer: art, culture, food, cock — you know, the…
(genitals and sex acts discussed in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest) From the Monty Python fandom wiki: Biggus Dickus is a fictional character in the Monty Python film Life of Brian, portrayed by Graham Chapman. He is a Roman nobleman and officer. He is married, according to his friend Pontius Pilate, to Incontinentia Buttocks. BD’s sexual-onomastic legions have advanced throughout modern media, where they have a particularly powerful role in gay male pornography; some…
Yesterday, in my posting “Sir, I bring you a token of my subservience”, a Zippy strip in which Griffy addresses a Muffler Man, offering the fiberglass giant a phallic offering to his superior masculinity. It turns out that this strip is a reworking of the text from an earlier strip on a similar theme. And there we have the two-strip set-up for today’s discussion: (#1) [The 5/21/26] strip “Tired Out”, with, oh dear, the alpha male theme made explicit; it is, in any case, all about…
The crucial moment of today’s (5/21) Zippy strip, in which Griffy addresses a Muffler Man, offering the fiberglass giant a phallic offering to his superior masculinity. It’s hard to know where to start with this — and then it turns out that this strip is a reworking of the text from an earlier strip on a similar theme. (#1) Today’s strip “Tired Out”, with, oh dear, the alpha male theme made explicit; it is, in any case, all about (hyper)masculinity vs. inferior masculinity (#2) The 6/2/17 strip…
Whoa: toxic, resilience, Rizzler — all cry out to Zippy as he makes his critical way along a forest path, deprecating — despite their (respective) colorfulness, exactness, and freshness — the way these expressions are overused: In the Zippy strip of 5/17, the forest is alive with the sound of lexical lamentation — with 14 such sounds, to be specific For each of them, you might feel that you’re legitimately complaining that you’ve been hearing the expression often in recent times, though this…
(by the time I’m just a bit of the way into revealing the themes of this posting, certainly once Jake Mathews appears, it should become entirely clear why this posting is not for kids or the sexually modest) A follow-up to my posting “Taking Pleasure” yesterday (5/16), with scenes from two gay porn videos: The two scenes have Mr Deep Voice (the screen persona of actor Thomas Johnson (TJ) ) and Andy Toro (AT) in a random hookup of complete strangers in a scene from Right Place, Right Time…
