(Men’s bodies and talk about sex between men, in street language, so not at all appropriate for kids and the sexually modest)

A follow-up to my 3/13 posting “Pornstars do this so you don’t have to”, in which pornstar Johnny Rapid engages in challengingly athletic sex — in 2021 as the top in 69spitroasting (in NakedSword’s Lake Need), in 2015 as the bottom in Flying Cowboy.

Then, yesterday, in my e-mail, the HUNT e-magazine (for Falcon / NakedSword gay porn) issue 249, with the high-puffery article “Model Spotlight – Johnny Rapid”, about the actor’s evolution from the 2011-15 guy to the 2015 one:

(#1) The callipygian JR on Lake Need; no longer a twink, a boy, or (mostly) a bottom, though he still enjoys getting fucked every now and again

Multiple-award-winning, trend-setting superstar Johnny Rapid is one of the most-popular stars in all of gay porn. The world just can’t seem to get enough of this handsome stud. Constantly evolving since he began in the biz, Johnny, who rose to fame as a bottom, is full steam ahead with his newfound love of topping. In the new era of Johnny Rapid, he’s still the same smooth hunk with a sizeable cock, explosive presence and mouth-watering bubble butt we all know, but now he’s delivering power top energy. This summer, Johnny starred in his very first NakedSword Originals blockbuster, documenting his crazy, epic birthday party in, Happy Fuckin’ Birthday Johnny Rapid. Now, Rapid has stars in the newest NakedSword Original feature Lake Need, and there are more NakedSword titles on the way. You know him, you love him, now join him on his next endeavor, because he only gets better.

You might start as a twink, a boy, (mostly) a bottom, but as you age you are likely to evolve — often, to your surprise — into a daddy (or to a guy who could serve as a daddy), and possibly also (mostly) a top. Three things (at least) here, not necessarily tightly aligned: twink, a sociocultural type (or even subcultural identity) in the gay world (conventionally contrasted with bear, clone, etc.); boy, a persona, as the junior partner in a daddy-boy relationship (accepting emotional support and sexual guidance from his daddy, who is, typically, an older, more powerful, and more experienced man); and bottom, a sexual taste, for the receptive role in anal intercourse.

These changes happen in real life (though sexual taste tends to be more resistant to change than sociocultural type or persona), and if they happen for a pornstar twink, boy, or bottom, they can extend his working life significantly.

Boy into daddy. from my 5/12/18 posting “Beat Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar”:

Recent Facebook conversation, initiated by poster J1:

First time being called “Daddy” while playing with a guy at a bar. Bittersweet!

With a response from J2:

Yeah, I can see the bittersweet part, for sure. Heh. I remember you as a total twink.

And from me:

Ah, those days. For me, it was papacito from a cute server at a Mexican restaurant. I was charmed. [I should add that the server read as way gay and was clearly flirting with me.]

… You can only be young so long (J1 once was indeed a twink [and so was likely to be pegged as a potential boy as well as a bottom]), but then you become a [potential] daddy, and might be addressed or referred to as such.

(There’s a Page on this blog on postings about daddy-boy relationships, but without much on potential daddies and potential boys.)

Aging out of twinkdom. Within the sociocultural type, the ideal twink is a mid to late adolescent, sexually mature but still youthful. For legal reasons in the United States, a porn actor or photographer’s model portraying a twink has to be at least 18, so there’s a premium on guys who are 18 but look like 15 or 16 and for guys in their early 20s — where there’s a big pool of candidate actors and models — who look 18 or 19. But both in the real world and in the fantasy world of actors and models, you can’t be a twink forever; you might still be really cute, you might be submissive, you might be an enthusiastic bottom, but at some point you’re just a queer guy: twink no longer.

Meanwhile, twinkdom is a complex package, with its many fans — including photographers who celebrate the type — and its specialist variants (Asian twinks, muscle twinks).

Of the photographers who have made their careers primarily on twinks, Howard Roffman is especially notable; I think of him as the twinkmeister, as in my 3/6/12 posting “The twinkmeister”. Roffman specializes in twinks, often naked, often engaged in sex with one another. A solo shot, with the model’s dick covered:

(#2) From Roffman’s Loving Brian (2005), on his 18-year-old model Brian exploring his sexuality

(My twinkmeister posting has a substantial section on the term twink. And there’s a Page on this blog on postings about twinks.)

While Johnny Rapid has moved from twink bottom boy to daddy-style top, many great twinks just leave the business when they’re no longer credible as twinks, or shift their porn persona from twink to devoted bottom. Great twink Kevin Wiles in a sense did both: he had a long (roughly 10-year — mid-80s to mid-90s) porn career, in which he transitioned to devoted bottom, and then he retired from the business.

My 2/9/16 posting “Morning names: wiles, Wiles” has a long section on Wiles and his porn persona (and his sexual tastes). From that section:

Though a porn actor is asked to adopt a different persona for each character he plays, almost always he’s developed a more enduring persona, his “porn persona”, if you will, that cuts across different roles and indeed, helps to determine which roles he’s offered and which ones he’s willing to accept and how he will realize any particular role. A porn persona is built on physical appearance (including not only things like body type and hair color but also, very important in gay porn, dick size), the actor’s inclinations to certain kinds of behavior (in voice, gait, mannerisms, and so on), and the actor’s sexual tastes. KW’s porn persona builds, first, on his physical appearance — he has a twinkish body type (boyish and slender rather than hunky-muscular), a sweet rather than rugged face, hair usually classified as blond … He’s also shorter than most of the men he works with. [His porn persona is as a twink, and submissive, and a bottom.]

… [On sexual tastes:] I’ve been reflecting on KW’s take on cocksucking and bottoming. In both cases, he goes well beyond mere willingness … and beyond enthusiasm, into something deeper and more intense, amounting to a kind of sexual orientation of its own, in which he submits with pleasure to another man by taking that man’s cock into his body … and worships it by having it become, in his sexual imagination, part of his own body. He absorbs that cock, as a symbol of the man it represents and the essence of his masculinity, and becomes one with it. He is deeply oriented towards cock (and consequently towards cum), as (I now say) an ubercocksucker or uberbottom (or both, as in KW’s case).

(A lot about dildos and their uses, so probably not for kids or the sexually modest.)

The mail header on today’s Daily Jocks ad. DTF was new to me, but then I’m far from plugged into things — WTF I know, but DTF not, though I guessed the F is for fuck — so I had to look it up. From NOAD:

abbreviation DTF: vulgar slang down to fuck (used, typically on dating websites or apps, to indicate that a person is willing or eager to engage in sexual activity).

(Side query: how to tell when a use of fuck is narrow — a penis is inserted in a sexcavity — and when it is pragmatically broad, conveying (in the context of the moment) merely ‘engage in sexual activity’ — for which a frequent euphemism is ‘play’, which is easily understood too broadly, as covering things short of counting as sexual activity? It’s all a delicate verbal balancing act.)

Then there’s the fact that Mitch is a dildo, so it’s a bit of a stretch to talk about Mitch as always being enthusiastically ready to fuck.

(#1) [text on DJ site:] Cast from a real model, this incredibly lifelike 7.5″ dildo will leave you gasping for more.

Main text in the mailing (not edited):

TAKE MITCH HOME TODAY

With a firm but flexible shaft and a realistic feel, it is so close to the real thing you’ll barely notice the difference.

Made from a high-grade body friendly silicon thats odour free.  Once you’ve tried him out, we guarantee you will come back for more, time and time again.

7.5″ length, 5.5″ girth

Mitch will set you back $50. But then you only have to pay for him the first time.

Digression: DTF at OkCupid. From The CUT site (“Fashion, Beauty, Politics, Sex and Celebrity”) at New York magazine , “OkCupid’s New Subway Ads Rethink ‘DTF’” by Emily Sundberg on 1/19/18:

(#2) (photo: Maurizio Cattelan)

“You know what? I knew DTF meant Down to Fuck, but then I met Melissa and she said ‘No, you silly boy!’” Artist Maurizio Cattelan turned to Melissa Hobley, OkCupid’s CMO, and gestured to a row of seated guests at the party. “Did Frank Gehry design these benches too?”
Cattelan was at OkCupid’s New York City launch party last night for the dating site’s latest provocative ad campaign, which riffs on that phrase shared on Tinder and in texts, “DTF.” Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, the Italian artist duo behind Toiletpaper Magazine, shot the photographs. Coming to a subway near you, each ad features a new version of “DTF” like “Down to Fall Head Over Heels” and “Down to Filter Out the Far Right,” with cheeky pairings of words and images: “Down To Four-Twenty” appears next to a grinning couple on a floating couch.
… New Yorkers will start seeing the OkCupid ads on subways in the coming months.

On OkCupid, from Wikipedia:

OkCupid (often abbreviated as OKC, but officially OkC) is a U.S.-based, internationally operating online dating, friendship, and formerly also a social networking website and application. It features multiple-choice questions to match members. Registration is free. OKCupid is owned by Match Group, which also owns Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, and many other popular dating apps and sites.

OkCupid is decidedly liberal in its politics, and it screams that it’s NOT a hookup site.

Note: In a comparison of 43 online dating services on Wikipedia, all say they support same-sex dating (see #2 above), several exclusively — except for two (Facebook Dating and Right Stuff, which are marked ?).

A tale of two Mitches. But back to dildos, for those of us who, for whatever reason, are going the synthetic route. It turns out that there’s a second Mitch in town. On amazon.com (and many other sites), there’s Hung Rider Mitch from Blush Novelties; the description on Amazon:

(#3) 9″ Long Thick Realistic Dildo – Cock and Balls Dong – Suction Cup Harness Compatible – Sex Toy for Women – Sex Toy for Adults (Beige)

… Sized for those who want more. At 9.5 inches Mitch will definitely satisfy your needs [the description above says 9 inches, the Blush Novelties package says 8 inches; at least some of this difference no doubt comes from whether the testicles are included in the measurement]

… Made of Body Safe Non Porous PVC

[and priced at $22.64]

On the materials: for Hung Rider Mitch, PVC (polyvinyl chloride, a synthetic plastic polymer, available in rigid and flexible forms; the flexible form is used in many applications replacing rubber); vs. for DJ’s Mitch, silicone (a family of polymers based on silicon — which are highly unreactive and very long-lasting, and also more expensive than most plastics).

Head to head comparison: Silicone Mitch is more realistic in many ways (including, apparently, feel as well as appearance; the look you can see for yourself) than PVC Mitch, but is also only about twice as expensive, and also seems to be more realistic in size, though still of (extravagant) pornstar dimensions.

(On the cost of dildos: roughly comparable dildos from similar materials, all without vibrators built in, range in list price from about $20 to about $100.)

Brought to me by Facebook in recent days, advertisements for two playful trade names: one — for the Boy Smells company, offering scented candles, unisex fragrances, and (unscented) underwear, all for LGBT+-folk — covered in my 6/16 posting “Annals of commercial naming: Boy Smells”; and now, for the Bear Naked® Granola company. The two cases turn out to be very different.

Boy Smells belongs with a series of postings on this blog on dubious and unfortunate commercial names — some clearly unintentionally racy, some playfully suggestive, some openly, even brazenly, suggestive, given the nature of the establishments (Hooters). The Boy Smells company is almost painfully earnest about its LGBT+ mission, which makes its name — so evocative of teenage pong — especially unfortunate.

Bear Naked Granola, in contrast, is knee-deep in playfulness, starting with the pun on bare naked, so that on the one side, you get a reference to bears, with their fondness for nuts and fruits and honey (all relevant to granola); while on the other side, you get bare naked, suggesting purity and simplicity. And you also get the pop-culture view of bears, as cute and entertaining.

The granola. A bag of classic fruit & nut, which I’ve actually eaten:

(#1) Ingredients: whole grain oats, honey, almonds, canola oil, coconut, raisins, dried cranberries, oat bran, maple syrup, pecans, walnuts, whole oat flour, ground flax seeds, toasted sesame seeds

Three categories of offerings: favorites, organic granolas, snacking granolas. Then from the favorites category:

steel cut oatmeals, classic granolas (banana nut, cacao and cashew butter, chocolate, fruit & nut, maple pecan, peanut butter), benefit granolas (for fitness)

The story of the company. Pulling out the basic facts from a story on the Food Navigator-USA site, “Bear Naked Granola founder on building a brand” by Hank Schultz on 12/10/12: the company was founded by Brendan Synott and Kelly Flateley in 2002 by distributing hand-packed lots of granola to beds and breakfasts and similar outlets; they then branched out into retail distribution; and sold the business to Kashi, a Kellogg subsidiary, in 2007.

But on the company’s site, we get no actual facts — instead, under the heading Our Story, an entertaining fabulation:

We’re just going to come out with it. Bears make the decisions around here. They pick out the ingredients, create new flavors and taste-test every batch of granola we make. Nothing goes out the door before it gets their bear stamp of approval.

Now you may be thinking, why? Employing wild, unpredictable animals seems like a terrible business plan. Sure, we admit sometimes things can get a little awkward, like when casual Fridays become naked Fridays and when the company picnic is BYOB (bring your own bees). But the truth is, the bears keep us honest. Their instincts always point them to the highest quality foods found in the wild. Newfangled food science and unfamiliar ingredients scare and confuse our bears, turning them from jovial, happy-go-lucky granola makers into the scary bears Hollywood actors wrestle with to win awards. So when we say keeping our granola good and wholesome is in our best interest, we’re not just talking about brand image.

Plus, they have some pretty good ideas. Like who would think to mix cacao and cashew butter? That’s classic bear blue-sky thinking.

The cuteness of bears. Our Story at least recognizes that bears are in fact wild animals. But the company also taps into the popular-culture image of bears as cute, generally sweet creatures, in such figures as:

teddy bears, the Three Bears (and Goldilocks), Winnie the Pooh, Smokey the Bear, Paddington Bear, the Charmin Bears, Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo, Care Bears, Fozzie the Muppet

The bears in their ads are large and furry, but also adorable:

(#2) From a 2020 animated ad

naked and bare naked. From NOAD on the intensifying adj. naked:

… 2 [attributive] (of something such as feelings or behavior) undisguised; blatant: the naked truth | naked, unprovoked aggression

(as in naked satisfaction in #2).

And from two dictionaries on the intensifying adv. bare ‘totally, completely’ modifying naked, in bare naked / bare-naked / barenaked:

(Cambridge Dictionary online) bare naked: (US) completely naked: He used to walk around the house bare naked.

(AHD5) bare-naked: Chiefly Northern US With no clothes on.

And that’s the expression in one of the names of the Amaryllis belladonna plant. From my 8/8/15 posting “Two in bloom”:

(#3) In the late summer

I know this plant as naked ladies or pink naked ladies [or pink ladies, barenaked / bare-naked / bare naked ladies, or (from Wikipedia) Jersey lily, belladonna-lily, naked-lady-lily, or March lily]. The appearance of the flowers is a sign of autumn, a sign that summer is coming to an end. I was familiar with it from Ohio, and hadn’t realized for some time that it grew around here [Palo Alto CA] as well, and on the same schedule. Its leaves appear in the spring and then die down, and the bulb lies dormant until late summer, when the leafless [“bare naked”] flower spikes appear.

Bonus 1. The Canadian rock band. From Wikipedia:

Barenaked Ladies is a Canadian rock band formed in 1988 in Scarborough, Ontario. [It began as a duo, expanded to a quintet, then contracted to a quartet (in 2009) — all males.]

… When [Steven] Page had an extra ticket to a Bob Dylan concert at Exhibition Stadium, he asked [Ed] Robertson to join him. Bored by the show, the two turned to amuse each other, pretending they were rock critics, inventing histories and comments about the Dylan band. They also made up various fictional band names, one of which was “Barenaked Ladies”.

Oh my, origin stories for rock bands!

Bonus 2. Alternatives to bare naked. From a Merriam-Webster (playful) Usage Note, “‘Buck Naked’ or ‘Butt Naked’?”, the serious summary:

What to Know: While both buck naked and butt naked are used [in an informal variety of English] to describe someone who is fully nude, buck naked is the older of the pair. Butt naked is much newer and likely sees use because of butt having a long history of referring to a person’s buttocks. [And the citations in the M-W files don’t support any of the etymological theories for buck naked the Usage Note surveys. Whatever the etymological story, the two expressions are now simply alternatives in informal English, the Usage Note declares.]

The expression butt naked is in the Eggcorn Database as an eggcorn for buck naked, but marked as now “nearly mainstream”.

And then from OED3, Sept. 2019 (most recently modified version published online December 2020) on the adj. buck naked [1st cite 1913]:

Etymology: Probably < buck [‘the male of several animals’] + naked adj., although the semantic motivation is unclear.

The expression may allude to the resemblance of the smooth and pale skin of the buttocks to buckskin; perhaps compare the motivation of in the buff at buff … Alternatively, it may perhaps allude to buck [‘A male North American Indian or Australian Aboriginal person; any black male’], perhaps reflecting the common practice of stripping slaves naked for inspection by potential buyers. The similar-sounding butt-naked is first attested considerably later

(Please don’t write me to insist that one of these two variants is right and the other wrong. They’re now just alternatives, whatever happened in the past. But nothing obliges you to use them both; if one of them suits you, go with it. I’m a buck naked guy myself, though I have to admit that possible echoes of Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room make me very uneasy; damn you, Vachel Lindsey!)

(As far as I know, not actually used as an advertising slogan for any of the line of Cuticura skin care products — probably too jaunty and wise-cracking for the company, which seems to have been marketing primarily to women since 1865.)

From my 8/17 posting “The grocery order”: “When I was a boy, I applied Vaseline (from the family medicine cabinet) to minor burns and scrapes”. There was Vaseline — petroleum jelly — and then there was a curious patent medicine for somewhat more serious skin problems, a thick green ointment with an intriguing medicinal scent, then sold in glass jars: Cuticura ( /kjùtɪkjúrǝ/ ).

Now, having recovered this childhood memory, I got curious about Cuticura’s history — and its ingredients. Some of my findings (sketchy, because the company’s website is not at all forthcoming with details, and the Wikipedia entry is skeletal) …

It started with soap; from Wikipedia:

(#1) 1894 advertisement for Cuticura remedies from Good Housekeeping Magazine; In the price list, CUTICURA is pills, SOAP is ordinary soap, and RESOLVENT is resolvent soap, stronger soap that words by “dissolving dirt”

Cuticura soap, manufactured by the Potter Drug and Chemical company, is an antibacterial medicated soap in use since 1865.

The ointment (“for irritations of the skin and scalp”) was created in the early 1900s and originally marketed in tins, then in glass jars.

(#2) A tin from ca. 1950; jars from this era had the same labels on them as the tins, so this photo looks just like what I remember from my childhood (the rose geranium oil and vegetable chlorophyll were dropped in later formulations)

(#3) And then came tubes, and modern-looking labels

Ingredients. The early tins were quite reticent about listing contents. Over the years, the contents list expanded to become quite informative, no doubt spurred on by federal agencies in the US; and then there were occasional changes. But, basically, Cuticura ointment was — and still is — an omnium gatherum of substances reputed to be of aid in treating the skin, a kind of compendium of dermatological medicaments. See the list in (2), and now this one from a modern tube, with each ingredient identified by its intended function:

Cuticura disinfectant ointment (since 1865)

Uses: for temporary relief of pain and itching associated with minor burns, sun burn, minor cuts, scrapes, insect bites and minor skin irritations.

active ingredient: phenol 0.6% [antiseptic]

inactive ingredients: aloe vera [traditional treatment for sunburn and wounds]; annatto [as dye]; synthetic beeswax [skin protectant and humectant]; D&C Green #6; D&C Red #17; D&C Violet #2; isopropyl palmitate [moisturizer]; sulfur coloid [= precipitated sulfur in #2: common treatment for skin conditions, esp. acne]; mineral oil [moisturizer]; paraffin wax [skin softener]; white petrolatum [petroleum jelly: skin protectant]; pine oil [see below*]; 8-oxyquinoline base [antifungal marketed as antibacterial and antiseptic]; tocopheryl acetate (vitamin E) [when used topically, reputed to reduce inflammation and slow aging]

*pine oil: from the New Directions Aromatics site:

Used topically, Pine Essential Oil is reputed to soothe itchiness, inflammation, and dryness, control excessive perspiration, prevent fungal infections, protect minor abrasions from developing infections, slow the appearance of signs of aging, and enhance circulation.

But it doesn’t do windows. Or Windows.

(Men’s underwear and its symbolic values, frank talk about male sexuality, but otherwise not over lines; use your judgment.)

Powerfully eruptive, yet respectful of his anatomy: the vaunted twin virtues of Krakatoa underwear for men, especially the company’s Vesuvius collection (which is, presumably, doubly volcanic in symbolic power), all with aggressively full front pouches, designed (as the ad copy has it) to respect a man’s anatomy while preparing him for life’s activities. The goods:

(#1) Krakatoa’s Vesuvius Collection: trunks, boxer briefs, and briefs in intense blue and intense red (power colors) and in black and (for the trunks) saturated gray (strongly masculine “just plain guy” colors), with those volcanic pouches all around

These two volcanos and this underwear will take us many places. But first, two shots of Krakatoa underwear (from lines other than Vesuvius) being modeled by actual men (accompanied by the ad copy “Put a volcano in your pants”).

(#3) Long boxer in intense green

(#4) Trunk in saturated gray

Not just well-filled pouches, but volcanic — eruptive — well-filled pouches, in wording that allows for the possibility that those spacious pouches would facilitate ejaculation: if you want to, go for it, man, ejaculate in your underwear, come in your pants, nothing wrong with that (and in fact, in the proper place, there isn’t). Promissory note: I’ll get to underpants eruptions in a while.

The associative neighborhood of Krakatoa underwear. On Facebook recently, I noted that I’d come across men’s underwear from a company called Krakatoa and was considering posting on it. And garnered responses that merely played on volcanic eruption (Jeff Goldberg: Sounds like a blast) or exploited the possible sexual innuendo (Chris Ambidge: Big bangs imminent!). In a sequence, Aric Olnes started with the innuendo (Your tease is erupting with possibilities), to which Ann Burlingham punned (lava it alone), leaving it to Timothy Riddle to tie the whole thing together with This whole conversation is going east of Java… — a summary that incorporates a play on the movie title Krakatoa, East of Java (more on this below) and a play on the idiom go south ((NOAD) informal, mainly North American fall in value, deteriorate, or fail).

The associations of Krakatoa are those of volcanos in general — eruption, explosion, spewing; great power; noise; fire; flows (of magma); death and destruction — clouds (of ash and debris); unpredictability — with, for Krakatoa specifically, a spectacular eruption, incredible power, a gigantic noise (literally, heard round the world), and enormous clouds (darkening the skies all over the globe and affecting the world’s weather for years). Only a couple of these associations — spectacular eruption and great power — can be easily exploited to sell underwear, and Krakatoa the underwear company works these to the fullest.

Krakatoa’s audience and how it proposes to reach it. Most of the underwear that comes by on this blog is transparently homowear, with a primary audience of gay men. I have, however, posted some on what you might call machowear, specifically communicating toughness, and also sold primarily to gay men. And in passing on the neutral family-guy underwear of mass-market Y-front white briefs and plain boxer shorts. Even, in my 9/5 posting “Masculinity messaging from Sweden”, on men’s high-end premium underwear that is explicitly and conspicuously framed like the mass-market stuff:

The [Ron Dorff] company’s main product line for men is sportswear that is absolutely, solidly masculine, but in remarkably unobtrusive, understated ways; the company offers masterpieces of conspicuous unconspicuousness. Apparently designed to offer no flash of peacock self-display — nothing macho — and no erotic appeal whatsoever.

Krakatoa sells what you might call guywear, for straight men with some swagger, men who want to feel powerful, also men who hate to buy underwear, can’t be bothered with fussy stuff like that. For such men, the company proposes to harness the symbolic values of the volcano — the eruption and the power and even the noise. From the “What’s Krakatoa?” page of the company’s website:

In 1883, volcano Krakatoa in Indonesia erupted with absolute power, pulverizing 6 cubic miles of island into the atmosphere and changing the weather patterns around the globe for almost a decade. It’s considered the most powerful blast ever heard by mankind and the biggest eruption ever recorded.

While its shockwave circled Earth 3 times and the 200 Megaton explosion created 100-foot-high waves with devastating consequences, the dust from Krakatoa’s eruption had a beautiful side-effect: It created incredible sunsets for years around the planet.

We built Krakatoa because we believe power and beauty can be translated into sensible personal garments that are powerful in their execution and beautiful in their craftsmanship.

We also think eruptions and loud noises are a typical guy thing and a perfect name for the most important garment in a man’s wardrobe.

… The Krakatoa Anti-Gravity Briefs – Vesuvius Collection combines the most modern technical fabric with a full front pouch for a comfort-focused connection between materials and fit.

Designed with your life’s activities in mind, it delivers softness and support from the first wear, so you can power through your day fearlessly with a piece of art in your pants.

… personal garments that are powerful in their execution … you can power through your day fearlessly …[and, yes] eruptions and loud noises are a typical guy thing …

So you, typical guy, can be free to erupt and make loud noises in, and through, your Krakatoa underwear. With a song in your heart and a piece of art in your pants. Let’s hear a cheer for Krakatoa!

A bit more on the volcano. From Wikipedia:

(#5) Indonesia as a whole; within it, the Sunda Strait and the island of Krakatau

Krakatoa [also transcribed Krakatau] is a caldera in the Sunda Strait between the islands of Java and Sumatra in the Indonesian province of Lampung. The caldera is part of a volcanic island group (Krakatoa Archipelago) comprising four islands: two of which, Lang and Verlaten, are remnants of a previous volcanic edifice destroyed in eruptions long before the famous 1883 eruption; another, Rakata, is the remnant of a much larger island destroyed in the 1883 eruption.

In 1927, a fourth island, Anak Krakatau, or “Child of Krakatoa”, emerged from the caldera formed in 1883. There has been new eruptive activity since the late 20th century, with a large collapse causing a deadly tsunami in December 2018.

… The most notable eruptions of Krakatoa culminated in a series of massive explosions over 26–27 August 1883, which were among the most violent volcanic events in recorded history.

(#6) Cover of Simon Winchester’s 2005 book

… The 1883 eruption ejected approximately 25 km3 (6 cubic miles) of rock. The cataclysmic explosion was heard 3,600 km (2,200 mi) away in Alice Springs, Australia, and on the island of Rodrigues near Mauritius, 4,780 km (2,970 mi) to the west.

According to the official records of the Dutch East Indies colony, 165 villages and towns were destroyed near Krakatoa, and 132 were seriously damaged. At least 36,417 people died, and many more thousands were injured, mostly from the tsunamis that followed the explosion. The eruption destroyed two-thirds of the island of Krakatoa

And the 1968 movie, from Wikipedia:

Krakatoa, East of Java is a 1968 American disaster film starring Maximilian Schell and Brian Keith. During the 1970s, the film was re-released under the title Volcano.

The story is loosely based on events surrounding the 1883 eruption of the volcano on the island of Krakatoa, with the characters engaged in the recovery of a cargo of pearls from a shipwreck perilously close to the volcano.

… Famously, the movie’s title is inaccurate: Krakatoa actually is west of Java, but the movie’s producers thought that “East” was a more atmospheric word, as Krakatoa is located in the Far East. [note: words chosen for their associations, rather than for accuracy]

Using the name Krakatoa. And now, for a while, we leave the world of Krakatoa the volcano and Krakatoa the underwear, to look at a broad sampling of other applications of the name (no doubt there are many more).

Hot sauce. From a HotSauce.com site review of CaJohns Fiery Foods Co.’s Krakatoa! Pure Red Savina Mash Hot Sauce:

(#7)

… be warned – it can cause an eruption of fire and flavor to rival the obliteration of Krakatoa, an Indonesian island, in 1883. From Ohio. Red Savina [a variety of hot pepper], Habanero chiles, and vinegar.

An Indonesian restaurant. Named after one of the country’s most famous features: the Krakatoa Indonesian Restaurant in Hollywood FL (in Broward County, between Miami and Fort Lauderdale):

(#8)

A bike servicing shop. Maybe an allusion to the power of racing bikes and mountain bikes.

(#9)

[ad for:] Krakatoa Bikes [in Fairfax CA (in Marin County, home of the Marin Museum of Bicycling)] was founded in 2008 by Olympian Athlete Miguel Figueroa. Whether you’re an occasional rider or a serious pro, our store brings you the collections, the knowledge, and the passion you need for your next adventure. We service all kinds of bikes from Road Bikes to Ebikes. Suspension Services on Fox, Marzocchi, Rock Shox and more. Mountain Bike specialists since 2008. Call us today to schedule your next service.

A live music bar in Aberdeen (Scotland). Maybe because the music is hot and the bar itself is steamy. A Tripadvisor review says it’s the original live music bar in Aberdeen.

A game. Probably because of the danger of death as you flee. According to the Steam site on the game:

Krakatoa is a single player Action-Adventure/Survival Horror game. Attempt to escape Siren Head by surviving its onslaught of attacks. Integrated with 3D audio you’ll need to listen closely, act quickly and be aware of your surroundings to stay alive.

Notes on coming in your pants. Postponed from the beginning of this posting. From GDoS:

verb-1 come: (abbr. [Standard English] come to a climax) to achieve orgasm; of a man, to ejaculate [1st cite 1599 Shakespeare Much Ado About Nothing] [then variants in which this verb is reanalyzed as a denominal, derived from come ‘semen’: cum, jizz, cream]

come in one’s pants to behave in an exggerated, over-excited manner; the image is of extreme premature ejaculation [this is the figurative phrase; lovely cite: They had a choco-sprinkle-cream made you come in your pants.]

And then there’s the literal phrase, with head verb come ‘ejaculate’. The literal phrase is consistent with spontaneous ejaculation (in sleep, by hair-trigger response to a sexual stimulus, or by premature ejaculation during sex play); and with masturbatory ejaculation (masturbation either of oneself or by someone else). It’s also consistent with ejaculation in one’s (under)pants alone — as in a common variant of masturbation — or with ejaculation in one’s  trousers or jeans, usually (but not necessarily) through underpants.

On the health question: from the Young Men’s Health site, “Is it safe to ejaculate in my underwear?” on 5/17/19:

Thank you for your question. Many guys wonder about this, so you are not alone. The good news is there are no health risks to ejaculating in your underwear. The downside is your underwear will feel wet for a while, and then it will likely feel a bit stiff (like a starched shirt) when it dries. The stain and stiffness comes out when you wash them. Many guys find it easier and more comfortable to use a towel when they masturbate but ejaculating in your underwear is fine too.​

So: masturbate away, happily — but in private, of course. Masturbating publicly, even surreptitiously in your pants, is creepy, and against the law as well.

Note: strippers who see themselves as performers rather than sex workers warn their customers sternly against coming in their pants: facilitating ejaculation isn’t something they have on offer, and if they’re giving you a lap dance, it’s messy for them as well as you — but they’re wearing a costume that they need to protect, and they’re going on to other customers after you. In any case, you’ll probably get barred from the strip joint for life.

Finally, the lame Come-In-Pants Joke, which can be found in a number of variants. Two of them:

The annual Premature Ejaculation Society dinner will be held on Friday night. No dress code – just come in your pants!

When you don’t know what to wear to the premature ejaculation symposium, so you just come in your pants.

Notes on fleeing from a volcano. Here we shift from Krakatoa in the year 1883 — fleeing is hopeless — to Vesuvius in the year 79, where quick thinking could get you out of Pompeii or Herculaneum. From a Wired Classic (a republication of an earlier story, from September 2020), “How to Escape From an Erupting Volcano: If you had been in Pompeii in 79 AD, you might have tried to hunker down or escape by sea. This would be a mistake. But there is a way to safety.” by Cody Cassidy (a piece in which we get to see uses of the verb vitrify and the noun vitrification — not things that happen very often):

Let’s say you were visiting the Roman town of Pompeii on the morning of August 24, 79 AD. And let’s say you arrived sometime between the hours of 9 and 10 am. That should give you enough time to explore the port town and maybe even grab a loaf of bread at the local bakery … But it would also put you in Pompeii in time to experience a 5.9 magnitude earthquake, the first of many, and watch the black cloud rise from Mount Vesuvius as the mountain began to erupt 1.5 million tons of molten rock per second and release 100,000 times the thermal energy of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. All while you were standing a mere 6 miles away.

Your situation would seem challenging – but, surprisingly, not hopeless! When I emailed Pier Paolo Petrone, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Naples Federico II, asking if any Pompeiians survived the eruption, he wrote back to say that many did. “But likely only those who took immediate action.”

Unfortunately, instead of immediately evacuating, some Pompeiians took shelter from the falling ash. This may seem prudent, but it is a mistake. Buy that bread. And get it to go.

… Depending on its composition, lava ranges from 10,000 to 100 million times as viscous as water. This means even the runniest molten rock has the viscosity of room temperature honey. Unless you’re on a very steep slope, you can generally outrun it. Stationary objects like houses can be flattened by these fiery rivers, but “usually people can move out of the way,” says Stephen Self, a volcanologist at UC Berkeley.

Instead, it’s the magma beneath the mountain, and its precise composition, that should deeply concern you.

… When I asked Petrone where the survivors of Pompeii went, he wrote that there’s evidence of successful escapes to both the north and south. However, he suggests you run north toward Naples – and toward the eruption. He says the road between Pompeii and Naples was well maintained, and the written records of those who survived suggest that most of the successful escapees went north – while most of the bodies of the attempted escapees (who admittedly left far too late) have been found to the south.

But if you do run north, you’ll need to move quickly, because you’ll pass through the small Roman resort town of Herculaneum on your way to Naples – and Herculaneum is hit by the first pyroclastic flow.

Herculaneum sits barely 4 miles east of the volcanic vent, but for the first few hours of the eruption the prevailing winds largely spare it from most of the ash and pumice. Unfortunately, when Vesuvius first taps into the deeper magma and develops its first pyroclastic flow, the heated gas and ash will move directly into Herculaneum and kill everyone almost instantly.

Archeologists have found scorch marks in [Herculaneum] that suggest the cloud may have been as hot as 930 degrees Fahrenheit, and because its victims were encased in negative spaces of ash, archeologists can see their final, frozen poses. These poses show almost no signs of the boxer-like defensive stance typically taken in extreme heat, which suggests to Petrone that the victims in Herculaneum may have been killed so quickly that they did not even consciously register discomfort. Petrone even found a glassy piece of brain-matter in the skull of one Herculaneum victim, suggesting the cloud heated this person’s brain so quickly it vitrified. Nevertheless, you can avoid vitrification if you follow these instructions carefully.

(In the world of turning into glass or a glass-like substance, there’s both an intransitive verb vitrify, inchoative in meaning, as in When the wave of superheated air reached Cicero, his brain vitrified instantly; and a transitive verb vitrify, causative in meaning, as in When the wave of superheated air reached Cicero, it vitrified his brain.)

… that is known as Miller Time … when you deserve a beer break today.

None of this makes sense unless you know the advertising slogans: It’s Miller Time (for Miller High Life beer, not for novelist Henry Miller, playwright Arthur Miller, or bandleader Glenn Miller), You Deserve a Break Today (for McDonald’s, hawking hamburgers, not beer). But Calvin knows:

(#1) The Calvin and Hobbes strip distributed today, originally published 10/9/86, alluding to “Miller Time” slogans in Miller High Life beer commercials from the period

Calvin is supposed to be 6 years old — admittedly, with the sensibilities of a boy of roughly 10, but, still, not expected to be familiar with the ways of beer-drinking, so his father is alarmed that Calvin seems to be looking forward to a brew after the occupations of his day. (Whatever happened to the Children’s Hour? Television happened.)

(“Comes a pause in the day’s occupations, / That is known as the Children’s Hour” — “The Children’s Hour” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, first published 1860)

A “Miller Time” ad from the period:

(#2) It’s all about personal connections — over a beer — after a hard day at work

About the beer. From Wikipedia:

The Miller Brewing Company is an American brewery and beer company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Molson Coors acquired the full global brand portfolio of Miller Brewing Company in 2016, and operates the Miller Brewery at the site of the original Miller Brewing Company complex.

… Miller High Life: This beer was put on the market in 1903 and is Miller Brewing’s oldest brand. High Life is grouped under the pilsner category of beers and is 4.6% abv [alcohol by volume].

About the advertising slogans. from the Molson Coors Beer & Beyond site, “”If you’ve got the time”: The history of the High Life beer jingle”, by Erik Brooks, on 1/10/17:

In 2016 Miller High Life brought back a jingle that’s been on the minds of many Americans since the ’70s. … “If you’ve got the time, we’ve got the beer — Miller Beer.”

… It started with another familiar slogan — “Miller Time,” a High Life campaign that was the brainchild of the late Bill Backer and ad agency McCann-Erickson. (Today “Miller Time” is most associated with Miller Lite, though it was created for High Life.)

… The “Miller Time” campaign [from 1971] ran till 1982, when it was replaced by “Welcome to Miller Time,” co-written by Backer and featuring another catchy jingle

The company ceased using the Miller Time slogan at some point, but revived it in the 21st century. (The history of the interim period might be in an Ad Age article on the revival of the slogan, but the article’s behind a pay wall.)

Before Miller Time, there was the slogan The Champagne of (Bottle(d)) Beer(s) — for its high level of carbonation.

I’m not a cognoscento in this domain; it’s entirely possible that Calvin knows more about Miller beers than I do (though I do know a tasteless joke about Miller Lite: Q: What’s the difference between beer piss and Miller Lite? A: The Miller Lite is carbonated.). My personal taste was for British bitter (pale ales) and dark beers, but mostly ran to wine rather than any kind of beer (but I haven’t drunk alcohol since early November of last year).

Today’s Piraro/Wayno Bizarro crosses iconic space aliens from popular culture (sequestered, according to lore, in Area 51 in Nevada) with an anthropomorphic Heinz ketchup bottle (advertising itself, on its label, as one of the Heinz 57 varieties):

(#1) This unlikely couple met on the arid high desert of Nevada; but the ways of the heart are inscrutable, so they now live together in a rough cabin in Area 54, along with their oddly tasty progeny — bottled as Out Of This World salsa verde (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)

Background: Area 51. From my 3/7/18 posting “Aria 51”:

Yesterday’s Rhymes With Orange, with a challenge to cartoon understanding:

(#2)

For basic appreciation of the cartoon, you need to recognize that the event in it is a stage performance by a singer with accompanying trio; to recognize that all the figures in the cartoon are conventional space aliens from popular culture; to know that an aria is a song in an opera; and to know that Area 51 is a highly classified area in Nevada associated in popular culture with the investigation of extraterrestrials.

Then you can groan at the aria vs. area pun.

Background: Heinz 57. From Wikipedia:

Heinz 57 is a [short form] of the historical advertising slogan “57 Varieties” by the H. J. Heinz Company located in Pittsburgh [PA]. It was developed from the marketing campaign that told consumers about the numerous products available from the Heinz company.

Henry J. Heinz introduced the marketing slogan “57 pickle Varieties” in 1896. He later claimed he was inspired by an advertisement he saw while riding an elevated train in New York City (a shoe store boasting “21 styles”). The reason for “57” is unclear.

(#3) H. J. Heinz Company marketing material c.1909 (from Wikipedia)

… The first product to be promoted under the new “57 varieties” slogan was prepared horseradish. By 1940, the term “Heinz 57” had become so synonymous with the company the name was used to market a steak sauce.

The Wikipedia article has a 1934 Heinz cookbook list of 57 varieties: baked beans, soups, pudding, peanut butter, cooked pasta, pickles, relishes, sauces, condiments, olives, vinegars, breakfast cereals, tomato juice. Yes, of course, jiggled so as to end up with 57. (The company, already a huge conglomerate by 1934, markets considerably more than 57 products.)

(Somewhat astonishingly, this is going to end up in over-the-line raunchy territory — not for kids or the sexually modest — with a celebration of a character who’s both a feminist and a dirty slut, who deserves the right to fellate men “in the bathroom at Acme on a Wednesday” (from Rolling Stone). I’ll issue a warning when it comes up.)

It starts with today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, with yet another cartoon riff on Magritte’s painting The Son of Man:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.) That’s a green M&M candy where Magritte’s painting has a green apple (so the doctor’s message is that the Magritte character has been consuming too many sweets, like that piece of candy, and needs to substitute fresh fruit, like an apple)

Two things here. Thing one, this is (by my reckoning) the 9th cartoon riff on Magritte’s painting that I’ve posted about. Thing two, about M&Ms, and the green one in particular, which has its own life as a character in ads: a life as a sexy, seductive woman. So M Magritte (the cartoon character) might well desire to take her body into his mouth and, figuratively, eat her.

The #9 Son. On thing one. For reference, a reproduction of the Magritte original:

(#2) René Magritte’s The Son of Man green-apple painting

— in my 5/13/21 posting “One more time: Magritte and Schrödinger”, #1 there is a Bizarro riffing on the Magritte. With links to 6 more postings:

My 7/1/18 posting “Photobombing Magritte” has [a Bizarro, plus] an inventory of four earlier postings involving the painting; it’s a recurrent subject on this blog. [the four earlier cartoons, in order: a Rhymes With Orange, a Zippy, another Rhymes, and a Bizarro]

Then more recently, #2 in my 1/30/21 posting “Two cartoons on the 30th” is a Zippy play on the Magritte

—  and in my 1/18/22 posting “The infested apple”, a Rhymes With Orange cartoon

There’s a lot you can do with #2.

(I note that I’m not proposing to inventory cartoons taking off on #2; these are just the ones that happened to come by me in my comics feeds and got posted about.)

The M&M watch. On thing two. About the candies, from Wikipedia:

(#3) An assortment of plain M&Ms (Wikipedia photo)

M&M’s (stylized as m&m’s) are multi-colored button-shaped chocolates, each of which has the letter “m” printed in lower case in white on one side, consisting of a candy shell surrounding a filling which varies depending upon the variety of M&M’s. The original candy has a semi-sweet chocolate filling which, upon introduction of other variations, was branded as the “plain, normal” variety. Peanut M&M’s, which feature a peanut coated in milk chocolate, and finally a candy shell, were the first variation to be introduced, and they remain a regular variety. Numerous other variations have been introduced, some of which are regular widespread varieties (peanut butter, almond, pretzel, crispy, dark chocolate, and caramel) while others are limited in duration or geographic availability. M&M’s are the flagship product of the Mars Wrigley Confectionery division of Mars, Incorporated.

The candy originated in the United States in 1941, and M&M’s have been sold in over 100 countries since 2003. They are produced in different colors, some of which have changed over the years. The candy-coated chocolate concept was inspired by a method used to allow soldiers in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) to carry chocolate in warm climates without it melting. The company’s longest-lasting slogan reflects this: “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand.” [with its touch of an allusion to oral and manual sex]

Then the characters. From a different Wikipedia entry (with the description of Green bold-faced):

Early black-and-white adverts for the candy in 1954 featured two talking, anthropomorphic M&M characters — one plain and one peanut — diving into a swimming pool full of chocolate.

The first incarnation of the characters in CGI was a 1994 celebrity campaign which had the characters interacting with celebrities on which M&Ms candy color is their favorite. This campaign was created by Blue Sky Studios. Concurrent with 1995’s blue M&M campaign, M&M’s introduced second computer-animated “spokescandies” in their television commercials. The depiction and campaign of the M&M’s were made by Will Vinton in 1995. Vinton previously created the clay-animated California Raisins in 1986. Around the time he worked on CGI projects, he made the depiction of the M&M’s as more mature than most food mascots.

(#4) The current lineup

These include the team of the cynical and sardonic Red (originally voiced by Jon Lovitz, thereafter Billy West) who is the mascot for milk chocolate, peanut butter, and crispy M&M’s, and the happy and gullible Yellow (originally voiced by John Goodman, thereafter J.K. Simmons), who is the mascot for Peanut M&M’s (he was originally known as “Peanut” when first introduced). Other mascots include the “cool one”, Blue (voiced by Robb Pruitt) who is the mascot for Almond M&M’s; the seductive Green (her personality is a reference to the 1970s urban legend that green M&Ms were aphrodisiacs) (voiced by Cree Summer and Larissa Murray), who is the mascot for both Dark Chocolate Mint and Peanut Butter M&M’s, and the slightly neurotic Orange (voiced by Eric Kirchberger), who was introduced when Crispy M&M’s were first released and returned when Pretzel M&M’s debuted in 2010. Orange, upon his return, was joined by the second non-M&M mascot, Pretzel Guy, who “supports” him and offers helpful advice as he hates the idea of having a pretzel put inside his body.

Note: Green is one of two women, versus five guys; the recently added Brown (voiced by Vanessa Williams) is the other. Green’s a sex-pot, a temptress, and so on, though very recently she was toned down by having her stiletto boots replaced by sneakers. A move that EJ Dickson (Rolling Stone senior editor reporting on internet culture) slammed fervently in her 1/20/22 piece “Let the Green M&M Be a Nasty Little Slut: Mars Wrigley is trying to make the green M&M wear Larry David sneakers and we will not stand for it”.

This is where we get to the really raunchy stuff; Dickson is a pungent non-mincer of words, with fierce opinions. Savor her rant (or leave now, if you’re a kid or sexually modest):

The recent push to rebrand corporate logos to be more inclusive has, for the most part, been a good thing. Making Barbie more body-positive? Great. Renaming Aunt Jemima syrup? About damn time. Yet in brands’ fervent quest to capture youth audiences and capture the woke zeitgeist, they may be going just a little bit too far. Case in point: the slut-shaming of the green M&M.

Essentially, this is what happened: the CEO of Mars Wrigley, the company that makes M&Ms, announced today that it would be revamping the characters to make them more “current” and “representative of our consumer” (presumably, people united by their willingness to ignore the fact that they’re eating shittier Reese’s Pieces). How do they plan on doing this, you ask? By replacing the characters’ footwear.

This distinction is pretty negligible for the male characters (CNN goes into detail about the changes, but frankly they are men, and thus I don’t really care). For the female characters, however, the changes are apparent and formidable. The brown M&M’s heels have been lowered to a more sensible Alexis Neiers-esque kitten heel, while the green M&M’s signature go-go boots have been swapped out for non-descript white sneakers, the kind that Melanie Griffith’s character in Working Girl changes into at her desk to signal she’s a Girlboss with a head for business and a bod for sin. Let the river run, ladies! (Mars Wrigley did not immediately return a request for comment.)

For those familiar with the iconography of the green M&M, this change is nothing more than tectonic. I imagine it is similar to how the people of Wittenberg must have felt watching Martin Luther nail his 95 Theses of the Protestant Reformation to the church door. But it is also a major error on Mars Wrigley’s part, because the green M&M being a dirty slut, as signified by her iconic white go-go boots, is precisely what has engendered her a devoted fan base, particularly among similarly libidinous women and gay men who have embraced the character. Consider, for instance, [an] ad where she does erotic ASMR

Please view this post in your web browser to complete the quiz.

for no reason other than to give the male M&Ms a massive boner, then feigns ignorance at the impact her performance has. Can we, or should we, attempt to put a cap on such virulent, untrammeled female sexuality? Can you stop the wind from blowing? Can you prevent a dog from vomiting after eating too much cheese? Can you keep Twitter libs from being self-righteous about adhering to COVID protocols? No, you cannot.

The green M&M has spent decades building her brand as a horny, sexy bitch, and for what? For her creators to give her Larry David footwear in the name of feminism? For Mars Wrigley to give themselves pats on the back and big fat fucking raises at the next corporate retreat in Palo Alto? Guess what: the green M&M is a feminist, and she’s a dirty slut. We are real, and we exist, and we refuse to tolerate this disgusting attempt at erasure. We are given so little, and we have tolerated so much. Let the green M&M keep her go-go boots. Let her get blackout and suck dick in the bathroom at Acme on a Wednesday. This is what we want. This is what we deserve. This is what she deserves. 

Yes, yes, she should get to suck dick as much as she wants; if that’s her pleasure, she should be encouraged to, as Paul Morris puts it in his series of gay porn films from Treasure Island Media, Suck Dick and Save the World (subtitle: “saving the world one dick at a time”). Meanwhile, someone — maybe Ms. Brown — should give her a really good ride by going down on her. It’s what she deserves.

Note on ASMR. Very brief summary from Wikipedia:

Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), sometimes auto sensory meridian response, is a tingling sensation that usually begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. A pleasant form of paresthesia, it has been compared with auditory-tactile synesthesia and may overlap with frisson.

Two ways of looking at lounge shorts (for men) in two ad campaigns. Both touting the softness of the clothing (genuinely desirable in coverings for men’s private parts), but one pushing it as a vehicle for sexual display, the other celebrating it as a vehicle for joy.

The first (from Helsinki Athletica) in a Daily Jocks ad from 3/26, marketed as homowear — the shorts are a very pale pink, whispering I Am Gay — highly sexualized (the model is sitting up on his knees, in bed, and his crotch is the visual focus of the photo); an accompanying photo has him in gray shorts (more macho, less homo), lying on his belly on a sofa with his ass humped up for sexual penetration. In both he displays an impressively muscled body (bulging biceps, massive pecs, rocky abs), a businesslike mustache, no-nonsense hair, and an impassive face with a challenging gaze (conveying: are you man enough to take this, buddy?).

(The title is an allusion to William Blake’s The Lamb.)

(#1) Athletica 1, the pastel pink crotch shot

(#2) Athletica 2, the gym-gray butt shot (that is one fine muscular male ass, one attractive to both straight women and gay men — because it is so clearly a masculine ass)

The ad copy:

SPECIAL BUY: LOUNGE SHORTS
EAT, SLEEP, LOUNGE, REPEAT
The Helsinki Athletica Classic Lounge Shorts are made from the softest jersey marle fabric. With a thick waistband and a whole lot of stretch, you’ll never want to take them off. Available in Pink & Grey.

gnarly marly: a discursion on marl(e). Then there’s the semi-technical term marl(e). The spelling marl is the standard one; marle is an alternative spelling that harks back to Middle English and seems to be used by a few commercial firms to convey pretentiousness — well, piss-elegance. On marl:

NOAD on the noun marl-2: [usually as modifier] a mottled yarn of differently colored threads, or fabric made from this yarn: blue marl leggings. ORIGIN late 19th century: shortening of marbled.

OED3 (Dec. 2000) has its 1st cite from 1892, an ad in Queen (a British society magazine): Ladies write for Patterns of the entirely new designs in .. Marls, Tweeds, .. and Beiges. Then in 1922, in a Daily Mail ad: Knitted sports suit in rich Marl mixtures and plain colours.

The concept is a bit tricky: the word refers to a kind of fabric, but a fabric one of whose most salient characteristics is its coloration (mixed, in this case). In this it’s like the noun tweed (from NOAD: a rough-surfaced woolen cloth, typically of mixed flecked colors, originally produced in Scotland). And this is the way the word seems to used in garment contexts.

Consider the Gymshark men’s blue marl t-shirt (note: the model’s shown here in repose, but in other Gymshark shots he’s leaping about athletically; he’s presented as a hunky jock, not as a sexual object):

(#3) [ad copy:] It’s your favourite t-shirt reworked with a marl design. The Arrival Marl T-Shirt offers a lightweight material, sweat-wicking properties and a slim fit design so you can perform to the max with confidence.

What’s important here is that the fabric, though primarily blue, is indeed mottled or marbled (NOAD on the adj. marbled: having a streaked and patterned appearance like that of variegated marble). There’s nothing contradictory about blue marl (as in the NOAD entry or in the Gymshark ad).

But now, wrenching ourselves back to the high-carnality guy in #1 and #2, the fabric in his pastel pink lounge shorts in #1 looks utterly unmottled / unmarbled to me. I grant that the fabric in his gray lounge shorts in #2 is indeed very lightly mottled, but that’s what the jersey fabric used for almost all athletic shorts is like (I just checked my entire collection of Champion gray jersey gym shorts, to reassure my recollections on this point, and I see the same in ads on the net).

My point is that you if you say gray / grey jersey shorts, you get the very light mottling automatically, so marl(e) would be unnecessary. I guess I’m willing to concede that the pink shorts in #1 might be even more subtly mottled. But in the real world that would be irrelevant; who could care?

But then why do the Helsinki Athletica copywriters insist on using the unfamiliar semi-technical term marl(e)? I suggest that throwing in marl is a lot like using the marle spelling for it: more piss-elegance. In fact, pretentiousness of a sort frequently noted on this blog.

Look at my 6/2/20 posting “Cereal adjectives” on “edible adjectives” (from my 12/22/16 posting with that title ), with a look back at Zwicky & Zwicky on “tasty adjectives” in menus, Mark Liberman on menu modifiers as social anxiety, me on “ornamental adjectives” in ad copy for gay porn, and Dan Jurafsky on “linguistic filler” modifiers (and “exotifying” language) in restaurant menus.

As with food, now with clothing. The modifier marl isn’t there to be informative and useful, it’s there to sound attractive and desirable. And note Mark Liberman’s invocation of social anxiety and Dan Jurafsky’s development of that theme.

Yes, I know, you just wanted to know what the hell marle means, and now we’re onto social anxiety. We go where the data takes us.

lounge shorts. You probably need a reminder about the term, because it’s another semi-technical term from the world of commerce, in this case the marketing of apparel. From my 7/7/21 posting “Lounge shorts”:

I didn’t recall having previously experienced lounge as a modifier naming a type of short(s) before … The larger category embracing lounge short(s) is labeled loungewear, and is defined in the NOAD entry by in the NOAD entry:

noun loungewear: casual, comfortable clothing [specifically, outerwear] suitable for wearing at home.

… As for function, loungewear is designed for particular occasions of use (informal occasions, especially at home, alone or in the company of others); and to afford properties desired by wearers (providing comfort, via light weight and freedom from restriction, while protecting the wearer’s modesty: the fabric is opaque, and loungewear bottoms for men — lounge shorts and lounge pants — have no flies).

Like athletic / running / fitness / exercise / gym shorts — see my 6/29 posting “Rainbows and penguins at the gym” — lounge shorts (and lounge pants) are beltless, supplied instead with elastic waistbands or drawstrings (more formal shorts, with belts, are streetwear). Unlike gym shorts (which are customarily worn with briefs or a jockstrap as underwear, however, it seems that lounge shorts are worn without (constricting and bulky) underwear: to get the advantages of lounge shorts, guys sacrifice the advantages of underwear (protecting their private parts from the world and the world from their private parts) and go commando. (Or so it seems; underwear is neither mentioned nor depicted in material on lounge shorts. Since the item is unfamiliar to me — I lounge at home in gym shorts, and wear them as informal streetwear in warm weather as well — I could use some first-hand reports on the customs of men’s lounge shorts from users.)

With three examples, from Nice Laundry, Patagonia, and Land’s End (with the shorts in many colors and patterns).

Now we turn from lounge shorts as homowear, invitations to man-on-man sex, and embrace lounge shorts as engines of (unisex) joy. Out with the glowering, in with the smiling. Welcome to lounge shorts that are fun: playful, handsome, pretty.

Jamby Joy. The user-friendly ad copy:

Introducing Jambys, the boxers with pockets. Meet the perfect hybrid of your favorite boxers, briefs, and basketball shorts. Jambys are super-soft unisex house shorts you can wear all on their own around other people.

Stick your stuff in the stretchy pockets and they won’t fall out. Roam freely around your house guests and the delivery guy — there’s no button fly, which means no accidental flashings. (We’ve all been there.)  Wear them in your bed, on your couch, on your roof, however you want to hang and do your thang.

They were originally designed for men — see the notes on flies — but they suit women equally well, and they come in unisex sizes. Also, as with the Helsinki Athletica lounge shorts, their softness is a major selling point. (They’re fashioned from modal (fabric), which is made by spinning beech tree cellulose — so, essentially, beech-based rayon — and is known for its softness.)

They come in 16 colors: solid; bicolor (body in one color, waistband in the other — e.g., lavender / mint, black / hibiscus); plus two kicky patterns, confetti and ice cream. Happy happy joy joy Ice Cream:

(#4) Easy-going stance, wonderful smile, and a fabulous pattern for the clothes; plus, extra points, the model is unthreateningly counter-cultural (and of course has a nicely toned, but not extravagantly developed, body; well, he’s a model, not some random guy off the street)

I think he’s just adorable, in a way that’s orthogonal to sexual attraction but invites physical contact. At least a touch on the shoulder, maybe an arm around his shoulders, or even a full buddy-hug. (In these pandemic years, I’ve been starved for physical contact, achingly.)

(Note: he’s wearing Jambys — “boxers with pockets” — plus a JamTee — “looks like a tee, feels like a robe”. The company also offers long Jambys –“Jambys, but pants” — and more.)

Alas, I stocked up on Ultras gym shorts (in polyester rather than cotton or modal) a while back — last week in the Swiss flag, this week in Rainbow Pride — so I’m not in the market for shorts. But I really like those Ice Cream Jambys and would happily wear them (with briefs underneath, I’m not a commando guy) around Palo Alto as well as around the house.

xx

(Warning: some discussion of sexual slang in a serious but straightforward tone.)

From the annals of masculine meat holidays in my country, a Blackstone tv spot “Father’s Day: Griddle Envy” (first aired 6/1/22), in which the announcer projects macho good-buddy enthusiasm for a Blackstone griddle as a Father’s Day gift (6/19 this year, just two days away! And the next American MascMeatHol, Independence Day, aka the Fourth of July, is only two weeks away):

(#1) The envy-inciting appliance: a Blackstone 4-burner 36″-griddle propane-fired cooking station with side shelves (about $300); you can view the ad at this site

From the alliterative text:

Give him what he really wants … Your Dad can be the master of the meat, the king of the cookout, the sultan of steak

The snickering guy-joke stuff — griddle envy as a play on penis envy, meat as covert reference to penises, then steak too — was surely intended; it’s naughty-boy talk. Probably even give him what he really wants [for Father’s Day], ’cause everybody knows that what guys really want is to get laid.

(And then there are dads like me, whose desire to get laid aligns neatly with their desire to master metaphorical meat.)

Meat Master, Master of Meat, Master of the Meat. The alliterative play isn’t new with Blackstone; it’s all over the place. A few examples:

(#2) The first gourmet meat store in Jordan (yes, .jo, the country in the Levant)

(#3) Etsy Meat Master apron by Zero Gravitee Shop (available in red, Kelly green, or khaki)

(#4) Etsy Master of the Meat apron by Wicked Bird designs (available in black or white)

Background: MascMeatHols. From my 5/30/22 posting “Into the holiday fire pit”:

Welcome to the holiday fire pit! For Memorial Day (this year, Monday May 30th, today) — because searing slabs of raw meat over an open fire is an obvious way to honor our war dead — and for Father’s Day (this year, coming up on Sunday June 19th) — because searing slabs of raw meat over an open fire is the obvious way to recognize a man’s ability to, as the poet put it, fuck kids up.

In past years, advertisements that came my way for the masculine meat holidays were entirely focused on  conventional grilling apparatus: from various forms of charcoal-fired grills (the simplest round portable grill / barbecues, more substantial wheeled rectangular devices), through gas-fired stoves on wheels, up to motorized spit-roasting machinery.

But in my on-line life, this seems to be the year of the fire pit …

The gas-fired stoves on wheels (as in #1) endure, of course.

Background: metaphorical meat, (tube) steak, and beef. In some previous postings on this blog:

— from 6/25/15 in “The news for penises, including accidental ones”: tube steak and white gravy ‘ejaculating penis’

— from 1/19/17 in “Meaty Matters”: meat ‘body’; meat ‘penis’; meat market, meat rack, meatmen

— from 4/9/17 in “The trophy boys park the beef bus in tuches town”: beefy body type, beef ‘muscles’ and ‘penis’; tuches ‘buttocks’ and ‘anus’

— from 1/19/20 in “Meat on the Beach”: sexual slang uses of meat

Then, of course, there’s the ambiguity in beat one’s meat: use a meat tenderizer on one’s literal meat (#5), masturbate one’s metaphorical meat (#6):

(#5) 10ʺ aluminum meat tenderizer from the Webstaurant Store, with meat

(#6) From the XVideos site: “Gorgeous man masturbating his big [meat]”

Appearing in my FB as a response to my 7/4 posting (for Fathers Day) “I am a good Boy for you, Daddy” (about Daddy – Boy relationships), this remarkable billboard (without identification or comment), featuring a pig-cop character — Mister Piggie — getting oral with an inert character Boy :

(#1) Pig Kisses Boy! Pig because he’s a cop? Pig because he’s unable to control his sexual impulses? (or, of course, both); I suppose that’s supposed to be life-saving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but still: ick

The text looks like a book title (or maybe a quotation from a book), attributed to some Bobby Peters we’re expected to recognize. Is the billboard advertising a book by football player and game analyst Bobby Peters? About whom I had trouble getting much information, but then that’s an alien world to me. I spent maybe half an hour fruitlessly trying to chase Bobby Peters down, and then a search on “some call him pig” turned up a Boing Boing posting “Some call him pig!” by Rob Beschizza from 3/3/22. To start with, the football Bobby Peters has nothing to do with it; it’s about a Columbus GA mayor named Bobby Peters. And there’s a 50-year history of “Some call him Pig!”.

[Background note: Boing Boing is an immensely popular and well-informed group blog covering various topics, including (according to Wikipedia) technology, futurism, science fiction, gadgets, intellectual property, Disney, and left-wing politics.]

The original 1971 billboard, from Minnesota, with the image used in #1, but a simpler text — just the “Some call him Pig!”, no expansion to sir used as a mark of respect or subordination to authority (the feature of #1 that made it relevant to the Daddy – Boy world or the wider world of dominant and submissive men) — with no attribution to a source of the wording (it’s just an advertising slogan):

(#2) Intended as an ad hyping the heroism of the Minneapolis police. Note that the outdoor advertising firm (Naegele) that created the billboard is credited on it (b&w reproduction of the billboard from the Boing Boing posting)

Variant billboards and take-offs. After 1971 the pig billboard in #2  was repurposed for other billboards, for police or others; and served as the model for take-offs of various kinds, some earnest, some pointedly comic, some perhaps merely memically playful.

The immediate point is that #1 is decidedly fishy as a billboard. Strikingly, because there is nothing identifying the ad agency that created it (they crave credit for their work) or the sponsor of the message, information that is always, in my experience, available somewhere on real billboards, like the ones in the Boing Boing piece (reproduced below), in particular the one that was surely the model for #1:

(#3) Infinity is the outdoor ad agency, Georgia Police & Fire Games the sponsor; this billboard (dating from the early 2000s) seems to be the first incorporating sir and Bobby Peters in its text

I’m not sure whether it’s even legal (in most American localities) to erect a billboard that identifies neither ad agency nor sponsor. Laws govern the size of billboards, their placement, and their content, but I’m not sure whether it would be legal to put up one that just said

LOVE THY NEIGHBOR

without identifying the ad agency or the sponsor — which might be (among other possibilities) a local church, the National Coalition of Christians and Jews, or the gay porn Next Door Studios (featuring sex with guy-next-door types).

[Background note: from Wikipedia:

Bobby G. Peters (born February 21, 1949) is a Superior Court judge in Columbus, Georgia. He is also the former mayor of Columbus. He was first elected mayor in 1994, after twelve years as a city councilor [and served as mayor from 1995 through 2002].

And from the Boing Boing posting:

Bobby Peters was mayor of Columbus, Georgia and is now on the Superior Court there; his wikipedia biography makes note that “in a field of six candidates, including a black minister and the president of the N.A.A.C.P., he won without a runoff and won every black precinct in the city,” that being important for some reason to this white judge. [AZ: the Wikipedia entry is both adulatory — “eight great years without a tax increase and over a billion dollars of new investment in the city” — and weird — “This is a fact, one of his grandchildren is Jagger Cash Watson”. No doubt written by Peters himself or, more likely, someone on his staff.] ]

In any case, #3 is the beginning of the story about how Bobby Peters ended up along with Mister Piggie in #1, which now appears to be, not an actual billboard, but a take-off on it, a memically playful one that preserves the image from #2 and #3 (probably for the ick factor) and alters the text of #3. Abut 20 years ago, somebody used software to run changes on #3, and then the result, #1, has been fairly widely distributed as entertainment. As with most memic images and texts,  there’s no known creator, and no one cares much about that: people just pass the things around.

Boing Boing on #2. Which begins with this image:

(#4)

[Several readers] noticed an interesting painting at their local police station. The painting is titled “And some call him pig!” and features [Mister Piggie as] an officer of the West Virginia State Police. What the officer is doing, exactly, suggests well-trodden debates over artistic intent and effect.

The phrase was to be found in a pro-police billboard ad campaign produced by a Minneapolis ad agency in 1971 [#2 above]. It’s obviously the direct inspiration, more competently painted if no less peculiar.

It was noticed by radical Italian architect Gianni Pettena:

(#5) Note the very prominent name of the ad agency Naegele

That poster was paid for by the [Minneapolis] police department to celebrate the courage of their agents, but faced with the image of a policeman kissing a little boy on the mouth, I said that it was no surprise they were called ‘pigs.’ But I was the only one to have seen it as a kiss and the others saw nothing funny in it

The campaign cropped up in Rochester, N.Y. and many other places:

(#6) Mister Piggie in Rochester NY

(#7) Mister Piggie in Port Huron MI

Here it is being mocked by Hustler:

(#8) The Hustler parody of Mister Piggie; of course they call him Pig: Boy in #2 is nowhere near the age to consent to Mister Piggie’s manhandling and oral passions, not to mention Boy’s being unconscious; now in the parody, Boy is still alarmingly unconscious — and though he’s ephebic rather than childish and might actually be panting for the attentions of a male lover (gay teens are everywhere) or even have a thing for cops (a gay male taste for police and military men is not uncommon), he’s still a piece of chicken (US gay ‘underage boy’) — so hands off, you creep

The memory of this campaign is dear to the boomers and it turns up now and again: [see #3 above] photographed on a billboard in Georgia, with some new additions: the subtitle “I call him OFFICER & SIR!!” and the attribution to “Bobby Peters Mayor.” [Boing Boing follows with the information about Peters, above]

A musical tribute to Mister Piggie. As in the title of this posting. From the Steed Mucker Band (“never cool, always crude”) song “The Poker”:

Some people call me the space cop, yeah
Some call me the gangster of love
Some people call me Piggie

(the band is the evil twin of the Steve Miller Band, with their song The Joker”, the title track of their 1973 album, in which some people call the joker the space cowboy, some the gangster of love, and some Maurice).

Well, they actually call him Mister Piggie — as in They Call Me Mister Tibbs. From Wikipedia:

They Call Me Mister Tibbs! is a 1970 American … crime drama film directed by Gordon Douglas [with Sidney Poitier in the role of police detective Virgil Tibbs, someone you call sir, not boy]. The second installment in a trilogy, the release was preceded by In the Heat of the Night (1967) and followed by The Organization (1971). The film’s title was taken from a line in the first film.

(What can I say? There will be dipsticks and dipshits, so eventually this posting will be at best borderline for kids and the sexually modest.)

News commentator explains that in citing the slogan

You can pay me now, or pay me later. (the pay-me slogan)

the day before, he’d attributed it to the wrong advertiser, adding that the right one was FRAM oil filters. The slogan conveying that you can pay some money now for a good oil filter — or you’ll pay more later when your car breaks down (though of course with wider applicability, conveying at least that you can pay for prevention, or you’ll have to pay more for the remedy).

And then added with a big grin that FRAM was also responsible for the slogan

The dipstick tells the story. (the dipstick slogan)

conveying that you should check the dipstick regularly (and change the oil when it looks dirty) and serving more generally as an exhortation to monitor the state of any important mechanism regularly — in particular, using the sexual slang dipstick ‘penis’, as urging men to check their dicksticks regularly to make sure they’re in working order.

The dipstick slogan came first, 80 years ago. By thirty years into its career, the slang uses of dipstick (for both ‘penis’ and ‘fool, stupid or incompetent person; obnoxious person’) were spreading, so FRAM switched to the pay-me slogan, which is much harder to raunch up (but not impossible, in a world in which high-end prostitutes, of both sexes, accept payment by credit card).

The slogans: history. From Wikipedia:

FRAM is an American brand of automotive replacement parts offering oil filters, air filters, fuel filters, and similar products.

(#1) Early FRAM decal with the dipstick slogan; the earlier separated spelling dip stick has since been replaced, apparently everywhere, by the solid spelling dipstick

… FRAM introduced its first slogan, “The Dipstick Tells the Story” in 1942.

(#2) From a commercial with the pay-me slogan

FRAM introduced its iconic slogan, “You can pay me now, or pay me later” in 1970.

Keep those dates in mind: dipstick in 1942 (during WW2), pay-me in 1970 (during the Vietnam War and the Counterculture period of roughly 1964-1974 often referred to as The Sixties).

Gentlemen, insert your dipsticks. From Wikipedia:

A dipstick is one of several measurement devices.

… Dipsticks can … be used to measure the quantity of liquid in an otherwise inaccessible space, by inserting and removing the stick and then checking the extent of it covered by the liquid. The most familiar example is the oil level dipstick found on most internal combustion engines.

Such as the FRAM dipstick shown in this 1944 magazine ad, in which dipsticks are mobilized for the war effort by an authority figure presented as an MP (standing for Military Police in the real world, for Motor Protector in the ad world):

(#3) The MP is wielding a dipstick with an oil droplet falling from its business end (all this in the very masculine world of auto mechanics); and then the dipstick slogan at the bottom

Now, some reflections on the V + N compound noun dipstick. First, on the automotive compound and its semantics:

— the compound is subsective, endocentric: a dipstick is a stick

— it is interpreted as V + Object, as ‘stick that you dip into something (for some purpose)’, with the specifics of the thing dipped into and the purpose of the dipping stipulated for different senses of the compound; in the case at hand, the stick is dipped into an automobile engine to test the level of engine oil

The compound then falls in with a collection of other V + Object compounds in English — for example, pull chain (a chain that you pull, to switch electricity on or to flush a toilet; cf. push button); stickpin (a pin that you stick into clothing, specifically ‘(North American) a straight pin with an ornamental head, worn to keep a tie in place or as a brooch’ (NOAD)); call girl (a girl — that is, a female — that you call (by telephone, traditionally) to arrange for her sexual services, ‘a female prostitute who accepts appointments by phone’ (NOAD)). (Note: V + Object compounds are very much a minority option in English morphology.)

Now, on the compound dipstick in all of its senses. From OED3 (Dec. 2021):

… 2. An instrument used to ascertain the capacity or content of a vessel containing liquid; (in later use) esp. a rod used to determine the level or quality of oil in a vehicle’s engine. [1st cite 1824]

3. A strip of paper or plastic containing one or more reagents, which is dipped into a sample of a body fluid or other liquid to test for specific substances such as protein, glucose, etc., the presence and concentration of which are typically indicated by means of a colour change. [1st cite 1960]

4. slang (originally U.S.). A stupid or obnoxious person. Cf. dipshit n. [1st cite 1968 in a slang collection]

5. slang. The penis. [1st cite 1970 in a slang collection]

You can see from appearance of the slang senses in 1968 and 1970 collections — indicating oral usage for some years before — why FRAM might have decided to abandon its dipstick slogan in 1970 and replace it with something less suggestive: the pay-me slogan.

GDoS then provides documentation on the later spread of the slang senses, undoubtedly encouraged via the BBC tv series Only Horses and Fools and the US tv series The Dukes of Hazzard. A photocopy of the entry (the best I could do with the tiny print in GDoS, but I flinched from trying to type the thing out by hand):

(#4)

Finally, the development of automotive dipstick to penile dipstick is a routine metaphorical extension, and the developments from there to ‘fool; incompetent; unpleasant person’ and a generalized insult are routine extensions of words for penis to pejorative uses (with prick and dick as prime examples). But this pejoration of dipstick might have been catalyzed or facilitated by its phonological similarity to (pejorative) dipshit. So, some final (speculative) words on dipshit.

From NOAD, taking things back to pejorative dip:

noun dipshit: vulgar slang, mainly North American a contemptible or inept person. ORIGIN 1960s: perhaps a blend of dippy and shit. [AZ: or a N + N compound of dip and shit]

noun dip: … 6 North American informal a stupid or foolish person. [AZ: might be a clipping of or back-formation from dippy — as noun ditz < adj. ditzy clearly is — or adj. dippy might be an ordinary derivative of noun dip, as in adj. bossy = noun boss + –y,  etc.]

adj. dippy: informal stupid; foolish: dippy ideas. ORIGIN early 20th century: of unknown origin.

However, GDoS distinguishes two subsenses of its noun dip-5: 1 (orig. Aus.) (also dippo) a fool [1st cite 1885] … 2 (US campus) a bore, a dullard; something tedious [1st cite 1964 in a slang collection] — in compounds diphead ‘a fool, an unpleasant person’; dipshit; and dipwad ‘(US) a general term of abuse’ [and also, perhaps, dipstick]

(underwear, swimwear, plus references to men’s raunchy bits and one (edited, but decidedly hot) image of gay male pronging — so not for kids or the sexually modest)

The day started with some Elia beachwear in gayboy-themed patterns, in my posting “Hey, buddy, we’ve been waiting for you!” While I was posting that, among the swarm of swimwear and underwear ads that infest my Facebook page came a deeply goofy ad for Skull and Bones underwear (and related apparel), set in a subway car:

(#1) Not your usual premium underwear ad: floral designs for such underwear have become common, but this one is based on Dutch masters; potently sexy ads are all over the place, but this one is framed instead as a kid just horsing around — still it manages to be sweetly sexy (don’t you want to nuzzle that adorable belly?); and, yes, check out the subway car cards

As it happens, flagrant man-on-man sex in a moving subway car is a subgenre of gay porn, one I find strangely moving, so the ad came with an extra resonance for me. (Example soon to come.)

The ad took me to the S&B website, where I was greeted with this banner display for the company’s swimwear line:

(#2) Whoa! Pride Rainbow on the right; yes, it turns out they have a whole Pride collection, with hipwear of several types — swimwear, underwear, and gymwear (well, jock straps)

From this collection, two items of underwear:

(#3) The Pride check [that is, checked] brief

(#4) The Bear Pride trunk (worn by a model who’s obviously no bear, though he could be playing a bear-lover)

Digression on hipwear. A useful term for items of apparel worn on the hips, embracing and enclosing — often showcasing as well — the two foci of gay male desire, the penis in front and the anus in back.

Digression on the hipbones. The hipbones are the cradle for these prizes — the rainbow bones par excellence — and also the mediation between the lower body and the upper body. The thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone, the hip bone’s connected to the backbone, as the song goes.

From Wikipedia:

“Dem Bones” (also called “Dry Bones” and “Dem Dry Bones”) is a spiritual song. The melody was composed by author and songwriter James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) and his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson. It was first recorded by The Famous Myers Jubilee Singers in 1928. Both a long and a shortened version of the song are widely known. The lyrics are inspired by Ezekiel 37:1–14, where the prophet Ezekiel visits the Valley of Dry Bones and prophesies that they will one day be resurrected at God’s command, picturing the realization of the New Jerusalem.

Oh, dem rainbow bones! Hear the word of the Lord.

Digression on Jeff Quinn taking it between the rainbow bones from Jim Pulver. In a fictive NYC subway car (cf. #1). In the stunningly hot scene 5 from Inch by Inch (Falcon, 1986):

(#5) Standing doggy, sort of; the scene is a memorable hard fuck, but (in my opinion) more memorable for Quinn’s facial expressions throughout the fuck (screen capture from the flick, not a posed shot)

Will these digressions never end? Yes. We get back to S&B with this 2017 ad shot featuring Dutch-master floral hipwear, in NYC, but not the subway:

(#6) A two-man drama; write your own script

Well, yes, it’s funny. Funny-hot, like #1. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that S&B also has a line of really very pretty lace hipwear for men, in several pastel colors. Plus a more traditional line of leather gear, high macho. And remember the Pride line. From all of this, you would conclude that the company is run by some extremely gay-friendly people with good taste and a wicked sense of playful humor.

So you turn to the About Us section of the website and its amazing ad copy (all in lower-case). Which starts out as a garden-variety hymn to quality and adult masculinity, of the sort that premium men’s underwear lines churn out routinely. But at the point I have underlined, it bursts into a riff on self-mocking masculinity (and I burst into laughter); the bold face at the end is in the original text:

skull & bones mission is to give men more than just a flashy selection of undergarments and basics. we wanted to create a line that focused on beautiful prints, would treat each individual pair as a work of art, and would maintain the luxurious quality that men have come to expect. … tying luxury and excitement together for adult men.

… the creation of the skull & bones logo was easy. we wanted a symbol that represented a revolt against underwear conventionality and instead conveyed attitude and masculinity.

something that would remind men of their mortality, to forget fear, and to live life. something to illustrate the courage to go out every day and to take what you want while you can. something that would make you smirk at the office when you thought about the bold pattern right underneath your gray suit. something from the history of New York City — where our idea was born.

so we chose the skull & crossbones because of its past use in military flags and insignia to illustrate courage and ferocity, and because, in 1829, new york state began to use the symbol to warn the world that something was dangerous.

In november of 2015, the skull and crossbones started its next movement in history — as the logo for skull & bones. a symbol designed for the perfect fucking gentleman.

There is a genuine message here, and it’s wonderful:

It’s All Fucking Masculine.

Beautifully crafted pastel pink panties are masculine. Totally smooth bodies, armpits shaved, are masculine. Hairy bodies in thick leather harnesses are masculine. Artiness and good taste are masculine. Scholarliness is masculine. Screaming eagle tattoos are masculine. Twinks are masculine. Impudent goofing around in public is masculine. Being unserious and playful is masculine. Good manners are masculine. Moose-knuckles and unremarkable crotches are both masculine (see the guys in #6). Proclaiming your queerness via your rainbow swimming trunks is masculine. Being secretly gay is masculine. Whatever.

Yes, it tips towards conventional male boldness, action, and dominance. But I think we can read this manifesto as celebrating the perfect fucking gentleman, but also extending a welcome to the perfect fucked gentleman, not to mention those who might be seen as dangerous because they subvert normative masculinity.

Another adventure in dubious commercial names and slogans. In the past few days the hyperkinetic tv pitchman Phil Swift — the id of the Flex Seal company, the Billy Mays of liquid rubber — has been assaulting my senses with a slogan that annoys me every time — just the way it was supposed to — because I get the sleazy sense of the commercial’s slogan

Take it from the man on the can

(‘from the guy sitting on the toilet (doing his business)’) instead of the innocent sense ‘from the man whose picture is on the label of the can (of Flex Seal)’. (In passing, I note the mini-festival of metonymy here: the man isn’t on the can, his picture is; well, not on the can itself, but on the label affixed to the can.) Let me start with a photo of an exemplary Flex Seal can:

(#1) You will note the absence, on the label, of a face of any person whatsoever, much less Phil Swift; as far as I can tell, the labels are all like that, and that’s no accident: Swift’s face is entirely beside the point — you’ll see that plenty in the commercials — because the ad’s all about taking your thoughts, memorably, into (or onto) the toilet

The commercial is so new that I haven’t been able to find it on-line. But here’s screen shot from a breathless TikTok announcement, apparently from 7/14:

(#2) [accompanying text on TikTok, from the company:] Fact – to be the man on the can, you gotta know your stuff. And when it comes to trusted quality products that work, Phil Swift definitely knows his stuff. Inside and out. Check out Flex Seal’s new commercial, premiering TOMORROW at 3PM EST. on YouTube! Link in Bio.

The Flex Seal story. From Wikipedia:

(#3) Swift posing with the object of his enthusiasm

Flex Seal is an American brand of adhesive bonding products made by the family-owned company Swift Response in Weston, Florida. Founded in 2011, the company employs 100 people led by its pitchman and chief executive officer Phil Swift. Flex Seal has become a popular internet meme because of its television advertisement demonstrations of the product in absurd and exaggerated situations, such as a boat sawed fully in half and made seaworthy again with the product.

The company makes a line of adhesive bonding products that are based around the concept of liquid rubber.

Flex Shot was released as an alternative to a caulk gun. Flex Tape was released as a waterproof tape. Flex Glue was released as a fix-all adhesive.

Cans: the lexicographic story. From OED3 (Sept. 2016), selected subentries for the noun can-1, with the indices for the crucial ones boldfaced:

— I. 1. a. A container for holding liquids; (originally) one made of any of various materials, and of various shapes and sizes, including drinking vessels; (now generally in more restricted sense) a container, usually larger than a drinking vessel, typically made of metal, and often cylindrical in form, with a handle for carrying. [attested from OE on]

— I. 3. c. Chiefly North American. A large container or bin, typically cylindrical in shape, made of metal or plastic, and serving as a receptacle for ashes, rubbish, etc. [1st cite 1872] [metaphorical extension of I1a, based on similarity, in both form (hollow, cylindrical shape) and function (as a container)]

— II. 4. b. slang (originally and chiefly U.S.). The buttocks, the bottom. [1st cite 1913]

— II.4. c. slang (originally and chiefly U.S.). A woman’s breast. Usually in plural. [1st cite 1946]

— II. 5. North American slang (originally and chiefly U.S.). A toilet; the room containing this. [1st cite 1900] [the hardware / appliance sense is a metaphorical extension of II3c, based on similarity in both form (hollow shape) and function (as a container for waste material); the room sense is then a metonymy from this, the two senses being exactly parallel to the senses of standard toilet)

— II. 6. slang (originally and chiefly U.S.). Chiefly with the: a prison, a jail; a cell in a police station. Also: imprisonment, time spent in prison. [1st cite 1912]

O pickle, my love / What a beautiful pickle you are!

Blame it on Nancy Friedman (@Fritinancy on Twitter), who took us down to the pickle plant in Santa Barbara on 7/18, citing these 5 delights, with their label descriptions:

Unbeetables (pickled beets with unbeatable heat) – pun on unbeatable

Carriots of Fire (pickled carrots to light your torch) – punning allusion to the film Chariots of Fire

¡Ay Cukarambas! (dill-icious spicy dill pickle spears) – complex portmanteau of the American Spanish exclamation ¡ay caramba! and the noun cuke ‘cucumber’

Asparagusto (pickled asparagus with a kick) – portmanteau of asparagus and gusto

Bread & Buddhas (semi-sweet bread & butter pickles) – pun on bread and butter (pickles)

(#1)

Pickles are automatically phallicity territory, and the Pacific Pickle Works in Santa Barbara CA (website here) doesn’t shy away from their penis potential, augmenting it by references to phallic carrots, asparagus spears, and unpickled cucumbers. If you have the eye for it, we all live in Penis Town.

Artistically arranged display on the PPW website:

(#2)

The company’s own copy, heavy with word-initial /p/ and vivid word choices, generally evoking the picture of PPW as a place of fun, fun, fun (till some meanie takes the pickles away):

Fresh from the farm to our sunny Santa Barbara factory, peak-season produce is hand-packed in the bold & spicy brine that makes a West Coast pickle truly shine. Our signature recipe blends punchy California chiles and umami-rich aromatics with a classic vinegar pucker and delightfully snackable crunch. Whether you mix up a batch of savory cocktails with our award winning mixers or pluck a pickle straight from the jar, we hope you enjoy sharing a taste of the good life with great friends. We‘re stoked to be sharing this one with you.

(#2) The pickle-plucking poem (from AZ, not PPW); in performance, the noun cuke in the final line can be freely varied

Nine more from PPW, again with the playful label descriptions:

Pandemic Pickles (spicy habanero caraway pickles)

No Big Dill (baby kosher dill pickles) – pun on the idiom no big deal, perfect for varieties with the lowering of ɪ to ɛ before l (so that deal and dill are homophones); imperfect (but very close) for the rest of us

Mother’s Puckers (home-style garlic dill pickle halves) – play on the vulgar insult motherfucker (well, muthafucka), plus a reference to the puckering of the lips on consuming sour things, like pickles and pickle brine; perhaps — much more outrageously, taking a cue from the sexual verb fuck — an allusion to the puckered appearance of the anus

Pickles Under the Ginfluence (brined with gin, rosemary, and jalapeños) – a pun on the idiom under the influence ‘drunk’, plus a portmanteau of gin and influence

Jalabeaños (pickled green beans in a spicy jalapeño brine) – a complex portmanteau of jalapeño and bean

Brussizzle Sprouts (semi-sweet and tangizzy pickled Brussels sprouts) – a complex portmanteau of Brussels sprouts and sizzle

Stokra (totally killer pickled okra) –  portmanteau of slangy stoked ‘excited, euphoric’ and okra

Cauliflower Power (peace, love, and pickled cauliflower) – rhyming cauliflower and power, plus an allusion to the 60s slogan flower power

Fenn Shui (pickled fennel slices in rice vinegar) — play on Feng Shui (using the fenn– of fennel), adding to the overall Chinese effect

Selected background notes.

— Nancy Friedman, also dba Fritinancy, from her own site:

Nancy Friedman, chief wordworker of Wordworking, is a name developer, corporate copywriter, and recovering journalist.

A notable observer of language in advertising.

— Chariots of Fire, the 1981 film. From Wikipedia:

The film’s title was inspired by the line “Bring me my Chariot of fire!” from the William Blake poem adapted into the British hymn “Jerusalem”; the hymn is heard at the end of the film. The original phrase “chariot(s) of fire” is from 2 Kings 2:11 and 6:17 in the Bible.

— caramba. From NOAD:

excl. caramba: informal, often humorous an expression of surprise or dismay: ay caramba! ORIGIN mid 19th century: from Spanish. [in Spanish, euphemistic variant of vulgar carajo]

And then on carajo, from Wiktionary:

masc. noun carajo: 1. (vulgar) penis | No importa ser inteligente si tienes grande el carajo. ‘Being smart doesn’t matter if you have a big dick.’ 2. [AZ: as a vulgar minimizer] (un carajo) shit (US), jackshit (US), sod all (UK), bugger all (UK) | [No] me importa un carajo. ‘I don’t give a fuck.’ 3. (al carajo) hell | ¡Vete al carajo! ‘go to hell! bugger off!’

— bread-and-butter pickles (with various spelling variants, notably the separated bread and butter pickles). From OED3 (Sept. 2020):

bread-and-butter pickle  n. North American (in plural or as a mass noun) a sweet pickle made from sliced cucumber pickled in seasoned brine, typically eaten on sandwiches. (Apparently so called because originally eaten just with bread and butter.) [1923 and 1968 cites with recipes; 2019 The burger features two certified grass-fed patties .. on a potato bun. The Double is topped with bread-and-butter pickles made in-house.]

— pucker. From NOAD:

pucker: verb (especially with reference to a person’s face) tightly gather or contract into wrinkles or small folds: [with object]:  the baby stirred, puckering up its tiny face | [no object]:  her brows puckered in a frown. noun a tightly gathered wrinkle or small fold, especially on a person’s face: a pucker between his eyebrows. PHRASES pucker up contract one’s lips as in preparation for a kiss.

And from OED3 (Sept. 2007) on the noun:

A tightly gathered wrinkle or small fold; a pleat, crease, or gathering in a piece of cloth or the like, as caused by drawing a thread or seam too tightly. Also: a ridge, wrinkle, or corrugation of the skin of the face, brow, lips, etc.

— stoked. From NOAD:

adj. stoked: informal, mainly North American excited or euphoric: when they told me I was on the team, I was stoked.

The adjective is a metaphorical development from a fire-tending verb; from OED2 (currently in revision):

1. a. transitive. To feed, stir up, and poke the fire in (a furnace), to tend the furnace of (a boiler). Also, to feed or build up (a fire), and with up.

The OED has the AmE slang usage in cites from 1963 on.

 (goodbye, July). A cartoon ad for New Yorker Bagels, offering “22 flavors of fresh hand-rolled bagels” made daily in New York City:

(#1) Going straight to bagel hell on the Circle Line Tour of the Damned

22 flavors? you ask, suspiciously, wondering what could lie beyond plain, sesame, poppyseed, onion, salt, and maybe garlic, made with white high-gluten bread flour. Well, there are other flours: whole wheat, pumpernickel, quinoa eek multigrain. And bagels with other stuff in them or on them: blueberry, apple cinnamon, cinnamon raisin, Kalamata olive. Bageloid and bagel-adjacent food items that depart from the bagel pier, with Charon at the helm, to veer into the murky waters of doughnuts, sweet breads, cakes, quiches, and pizza. Bound for that mournful bourne,  the scorched and reeking landscape of the Bagels of the Damned.

On the voyage, the passengers shriek as they are torn from their familiar bagel world and swept into an appalling vortex:

(#2) Charon Carrying Souls Across the River Styx (1861) by the Ukrainian-born Russian painter Alexander Litovchenko

They comprehend the true horror of their plight when they sail past the last beacon light of New Yorker bagels, the Rainbow Bagel:

(#3) [ad copy:] Our bakers spent months to perfect an all-new New Yorker Rainbow Bagel. These beautiful, hand-rolled bagels have dried cranberries, raisins and cherries baked right in — giving delightful pops of flavor and texture, in addition to a huge pop of gorgeous colors! No two are exactly alike!

The doom that awaits them on the other shore is the Dirty Double Dozen, the appalling pops of flavor and texture in the 12 piquant flavors of the Bagels of the Damned:

muscone, bile, cigar, matjes herring, manure, patchouli, urinal, lutefisk, vomit, limburger, gasoline, cadaverine

and their two extreme textures: stiff leather and Wonder Bread (together making 24 bagel choices, even more than New Yorker Bagels’ 22). There’s nothing like gasoline leather bagels or urinal Wonder Bread bagels for perfect moments in toroidal dining hell.

 Hail, Caesar Augustus! (rabbit rabbit rabbit for the 1st day of this month, August) Hail, Helvetia, unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno!

Swiss flags for Swiss National Day, August 1st; I am of course wearing my Swiss-flag gym shorts — plus a rainbow-heart tank top, since I cheer for Team Queer as well as Team Helvetica.

But wait! I also cheer for Team Z, of everything named with a Z, from zucchini and zithers, through Zerlina (là ci darem la mano) and Zippy & Zerbina, to Zoroaster / Zarathustra and Zuckerberg, with a special fondness for ZW names: zweiback, zwölf of anything, Die Zwitscher-Maschine, die sieben Zwerge (und Schneewittchen), Zwingli, Zworykin. And, in the food world, I cheer for Team Savory, embracing umami, meaty, fermented, fragrant, and flavor-intense (taking in dark and bitter chocolate). And, in the word world, I cheer for Team Fuck, embracing vocabulary from what I’ve called the profane domain (see my 5/7/18 posting with that title).

So what would catch the eye of someone who cheers for Team Z, Team Savory, and Team Fuck too?

A fudge company with a Z name.

And so, one appeared, in an ad in my Facebook feed, about a week ago. (To anticipate your unspoken query: no Swiss or queer connection I could find. Well, nobody’s perfect.) This ad, for Z. Cioccolato:

(#1) An attractive ad, for a genuinely local company, offering very traditional plain fudges (dark chocolate, milk chocolate) and fudges with nuts (walnuts, pecans, peanuts, almonds, coconut), plus entertaining inventions, eventually working out to confections that would have to be called fudge-adjacent (bottom left above: “7 layer peanut butter pie” (which I would describe as containing some fudge, but not being itself fudge)

This posting is going to go some surprising places. I’m putting off for another occasion some material (long in my posting queue) on the place of fudge in the taxonomy of foodstuffs, but there still is an enormous amount of stuff. I’ll lead with two big things, about the name Z. Cioccolato and about Z.C’s fudges (there will be a rave review coming, totally unsolicited by Mike of Z.C).

(#2) The company’s banner

The Z of Z. Cioccolato. I was strangely incurious about the Z, despite the fact that it was what first caught my eye; I suppose I was led by cioccolato to suppose that it was just some Italian surname (Zamboni, Zappa, Zefferelli, Zimbardo, Zoccoli, something like that) or place name (there are a fair number of these, but all small owns: Zerbo, Zoppola, Zuccarello, for instance). I did notice the address to write to with queries etc.:

Contact Mike:  info@zcioccolato.com

But then this Mike could just be the company’s order guy. Well, yes, but it turns out that Mike is also the company X guy for most values of X. Thanks to my first order having gone awry (misdelivered by the USPS), Mike and I have had a series of e-mail exchanges, so I can tell you that Mike is the Z of Z. Cioccolato; that his Z surname is Bavarian, not Italian (I looked its origin up, and Mike confirmed); and that, oh frabjous day, Mike is in fact a ZW like me (but with a 4-syllable name — Zwiefelhofer — that doesn’t trip off the tongue and should probably be avoided except when necessary, though I have his permission to tell it to you, for the sake of a paragraph (coming later on) about difficult names — “Oh, what makes you think your name is difficult?”, Tony Rzepela once wrote to me.)

Some chocolate. I put in an order, for a box of six big pieces of fudge, chosen from a list of flavors available at the moment (the list changes often, at least once a month): dark chocolate; dark sea-salt caramel; chocolate peanut butter; Heath English toffee; raspberry chocolate swirl (with a solid raspberry puree; raspberry and chocolate are fabulous together); 7 layer peanut butter pie (yes, as above, and I recommend it; it’s a stunt, but it’s also a study in contrasting textures, among other things). A new month has come by, with a new list, and I’ve now (as of 7/30) ordered: chocolate pecan, maple walnut, Reese’s (I’m a peanut butter and chocolate guy), Snickers caramel, California Earthquake (fudge with walnuts and coconut), Black Panther fudge (milk and dark chocolate, peanut butter, caramel).

(For some reason, big cats figure prominently in the names; from the lists I’ve seen: panther. cheetah, cougar, saber tooth, tiger.  Rrrowr.)

The storefront, from Z.C’s advertising:

(#3) I like to put things in context, so in a moment I’ll write some on 474 Columbus Ave in North Beach; but I also need a candy store photo as backdrop for the Marmalade Surprises and rhubarb creams that are about to push their way rudely into my admiration of Z.C’s fudge

The stuff is really expensive — those are really big pieces of fudge, but, still, 6 of them go for $40. In fact,

the stuff is indeed made in small batches on a daily basis, from really good ingredients, and the results are just amazing: intense, with carefully balanced flavors and textures. Let the fudge slowly melt in your mouth, so that the flavor floods your taste buds and you can catch the smell; chew it pensively, to enjoy the texture. I incline towards one or two primary ingredients, but have been trying out the more playful confections too. It’s all delightful.

A dreadful digression. I don’t think I’ve written a candy / confection review before, so I wasn’t prepared for this one to run off the rails in helpless giggles. I’ve indented the fudge-rave bit, if Mike wants to use it for advertising, but at reading my own “chew it pensively” (which is good and true and heartfelt), I was plunged helplessly into recollections of the candy scene from Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow (which has gotten mingled in my mind with the roughly contemporaneous Crunchy Frog sketch from Monty Python). Just a tiny piece:

… He reaches in the candy bowl, comes up with a black, ribbed licorice drop. It looks safe. But just as he’s biting in, Darlene gives him, and it, a peculiar look, great timing this girl, sez, “Oh, I thought we got rid of all those  — ” a blithe, Gilbert & Sullivan ingénue’s thewse — “years ago,” at which point Slothrop is encountering this dribbling liquid center, which tastes like mayonnaise and orange peels.

“You’ve taken the last of my Marmalade Surprises!” cries Mrs. Quoad, having now with conjuror’s speed produced an egg-shaped confection of pastel green, studded all over with lavender nonpareils. “Just for that I shan’t let you have any of these marvelous rhubarb creams.” Into her mouth it goes, the whole thing.

And on it goes. It gets much more awful. And funnier.

Now, Black Panther fudge might sound snarky (or lubricious, depending on your dispositions — could I possibly get away with writing, “I am eating / savoring / … a Black Panther”? ), and the name is meant to be entertaining, but the candy really is the polar opposite of Mrs. Quoad’s Marmalade Surprises.

I’ll just guffaw for a bit more, and then I’ll recover my composure. Stay with me.

Difficult names. Regular readers of this blog know that I tend to avoid using my real name if I can avoid it. A fair number of people get the Arnold part wrong, and a huge number, when faced with the spelling beginning with ZW or the pronunciation beginning with /zw/, become unhinged, decide (unconsciously) that it’s an ungraspably foreign name, alter it in one way or another, and then fail to cope entirely with -ICKY, pronounced /ɪki/ (as in sticky, tricky, and picky), turning it into something vaguely Slavic. So I have alter egos Alexander Adams and Alex Adams and just Alex. Most of the reception staff at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation prefer to address me as “Mister Arnold”, which makes me feel (very unpleasantly) like a plantation owner in the Old South.

I don’t know what Mike Zwiefelhofer does, though he admits that some people call him Zwief.

North Beach. So I looked for #3 in context. Wow. Picturesque San Francisco:

(#4) You’ll see that the Z.C building is a nondescript commercial building, contrasting notably with the painted ladies next door; I asked Mike what it was before it became Z.C, and Mike told me it was a Radio Shack, which led us to reminisce about Radio Shack (a long time ago, there was one just up Ramona St from me in Palo Alto)

And then I was reminded of (a very very long time ago) taking visiting friends on various tours of SF and Stanford. One of the SF tours involved a bit of Columbus Ave, then up Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower, and a tour of it, then down Telegraph Hill via the Filbert Steps to Ghiradelli Square, for coffee at a Hungarian Cafe overlooking the Square below. Sometimes museums were involved.

Mike offered to give me a tour of his candy operation, which I would have loved to do. I like seeing how work is done, how people get into their jobs (how do you get to be a fudge-maker?), what they think of those jobs, how they integrate their jobs with the rest of their lives. Some of this is an old professional interest in life histories, some just an interest in people. I mentioned knowing Studs Terkel to Mike, and Terkel’s book Working, but it seems Mike’s too young to know anything about those things.

(I told Mike that when I was a newspaper reporter, my father got it, but he was utterly baffled by a life of research and writing in linguistics and even more by the life of a university professor.)

But there’s no way I could visit Z.C. I can barely get two blocks with my walker these days. I ask people to tell me about places, send me pictures, let me travel through them. That will have to do.

Fudge stuff. Two relevant postings of mine for Team Fuck:

— in my 1/31/17 posting “fudge”: on the noun fudge, roughly ‘nonsense’, as in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Trial by Jury; on fudge as a euphemism for fuck; and on taboo fudge ‘shit’

— in my 2/1/17 posting “fudge II”: more anal and fecal allusion

And that’s today’s news for Team Z, Team Savory, and Team Fuck.

(Racy-raunchy topic, probably not to everyone’s taste, but not actually into sexual organs or man-on-man sex.)

From the annals of commercial naming: today’s entertaining ad flashing by me on Facebook, for Leather Daddy cologne:

(#1) [ad copy:] “Dominate your day with a scentsational blend of Leather, Scotch, Vanilla, & 18 Erotic Spices ”

A narrowly targeted product with a carefully chosen name: not just leather, referring to a scent widely perceived as both erotic and highly masculine (so used in colognes and after-shaves from all the high-end men’s fragrance companies — Tom Ford, Ralph Lauren, Cartier, Fendi, John Varvatos, Giorgio Armani, Christian Dior — and plenty of others besides); but leather daddy, evoking the BDSM world of rough, commanding daddies (in their leather gear) and their subservient boys. That’s Way Gay that you’re soaking in, Blanche.

(Note the photographer: allthingsgayandleather is (according to his Instagram page) an “Aspiring Photographer / Barista Day Job” based in California.)

The scent of leather. From my 4/10/22 posting “Further annals of remarkable commerce”, about Fort Troff’s Leather Scented Oil and a device for sniffing it into both nostrils at once:

The scent of leather is attractive to most people, seriously erotic for many people (of various sexualities), and intimately linked to raw animal maleness for some (and culturally associated with BDSM practices, horses, much more). So it’s worked into tons of body fragrances and other scenting products (you can buy leather-scent spray for automobiles, for example).

Nevertheless, recreational leather-scent sniffing isn’t a practice familiar to me; I think you should assume that the leather oil is just a screen for poppers [inhaled volatile fluids used to enhance sexual encounters].

Meanwhile, in the world of fragrances for men, the classic American leather scent is named English Leather (and was previously called Russian Leather; now, Tom Ford offers a fragrance called Tuscan Leather; where are the fragrances Kentucky Leather, Preakness Leather, and Belmont Leather? Or just American Leather?) From the Dana Classic Fragrances, Inc. site:

English Leather was originally created in the 1930s by the Vienna-based MEM company. Because the scent was similar to what Russian saddlers used to tan leather, it was originally called “Russian Leather”. In 1949, the scent was introduced in the United States as “English Leather” because of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. This rich, sensual scent is the signature fragrance for those bold enough to express their own unique style.

(#2) Fragrance Category: Citrus • Aromatic • Woody; Top Notes: Italian Bergamot, Kaffir Lime; Mid Notes: Leather, Oakmoss, Vetiver; Base Notes: Sandalwood, Cedarwood, Musk

Vibrant citruses highlight this full-bodied complex of aromatic woods and mosses. The distinctive Leather signature is expertly woven throughout. Classic and authentically masculine. Pair with the After Shave and be one man with one great scent! Wear English Leather or Wear Nothing at all!

(My dad’s after-shave when I was a kid, so I can’t judge it rationally; as far as I’m concerned, it smells like solid nice guy.)

The Leather Daddy. Two views from many. First, from my 9/19/17 posting “Disney meets Tom of Finland” (about depictions of Disney’s Seven Dwarfs as muscle daddies), Tom of Finland leather daddies on the cover of a ToF documentary:

(#3)

And then, in an image from the Dark Entries site, a leather daddy in a harness and assless chaps, with a boy at his feet:

(#4) [seller’s description:] Oversized postcard Leather Daddy Contest Postcard at CHAPS at 375 Eleventh St [San Francisco], (the current DNA Lounge) one of SOMA’s [the South of Market district’s] infamous leather bars, opened in the Fall of August 1983. Looking For the Leather Daddy illustration by Robert Uyvari.

In my (admittedly rather limited) experience of actual leather daddies, their smell of choice is raw male sweat and not any sort of commercial fragrance, even one called Leather Daddy.

Facebook ads alert me to the fact that the Mid-Autumn Festival is fast coming — mooncakes! mooncakes! time to get your mooncakes! —  and that it’s on the early side this year — Saturday 9/10 (with the holiday extending over the next two days) — so comes just a few days after my 82nd birthday, Tuesday 9/6, which this year is the day after the American end-of-summer holiday Labor Day (also a MascMeatHol, that is, masculine meat holiday, though this posting will be meatless).

I have decided to more or less wrap most of  these things together into a Moon Over Palo Alto event, with red bean mooncakes (no yolk) that I have already ordered, on a day during the 9/3-9/10 period (day, time, and place still to be determined) in honor of 1982, which has lots of good associations, including red bean mooncakes (acquired in San Francisco’s Chinatown that spring for Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky’s 17th birthday, Valentine’s Day regularly coming close to Lunar New Year — another mooncake holiday).

What I’m about to acquire:

(#1) A box of 4 Imperial Palace red bean mooncakes (no yolk); the red beans in question (here, in the form of a sweetened paste filling the mooncakes) are not the red beans of the New Orleans dish called red beans and rice, and the objects called mooncakes are (full-)moon-shaped but are not in the CAKE category of foodstuffs (instead, they’re in the PIE category)

Background: the Mid-Autumn Festival and mooncakes. From Wikipedia:

The Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as the Moon Festival or Mooncake Festival, is a traditional festival celebrated in Chinese culture. Similar holidays are celebrated in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and other countries in East and Southeast Asia.

It is one of the most important holidays in Chinese culture; its popularity is on par with that of Chinese New Year.

… The festival is held on the 15th day of the 8th month of the Chinese lunisolar calendar with a full moon at night, corresponding to mid-September to early October of the Gregorian calendar. On this day, the Chinese believe that the moon is at its brightest and fullest size, coinciding with harvest time in the middle of Autumn.

Lanterns of all size and shapes, are carried and displayed – symbolic beacons that light people’s path to prosperity and good fortune. Mooncakes, a rich pastry typically filled with sweet-bean, egg yolk, meat or lotus-seed paste, are traditionally eaten during this festival.

Red beans. First, the red beans in the mooncakes. From NOAD, with an illustration from the Goya Foods company:

(#2) [the company’s puffery, from its website:] The premier source for authentic Latino cuisine, Goya Foods is the largest, Hispanic-owned food company in the United States. Founded in 1936 by Don Prudencio Unanue and his wife Carolina, both from Spain, the Goya story is as much about the importance of family as it is about achieving the American dream.

noun adzuki (also adzuki bean): 1 a small, round dark-red edible bean. 2 the bushy leguminous Asian plant that produces the adzuki bean. Vigna angularis, family Leguminosae [AZ: now Fabaceae].

Then, red beans and rice, from Wikipedia, with an illustrative can of red kidney beans (again from Goya Foods):

(#3)

Red beans and rice is an emblematic dish of Louisiana Creole cuisine (not originally of Cajun cuisine) traditionally made on Mondays with red beans [AZ: the red kidney bean is a variety of the common bean, Phaseolus vulgaris], vegetables (bell pepper, onion, and celery), spices (thyme, cayenne pepper, and bay leaf) and pork bones as left over from Sunday dinner, cooked together slowly in a pot and served over rice. Meats such as ham, sausage (most commonly andouille), and tasso ham are also frequently used in the dish. … The dish is now fairly common throughout the Southeast. Similar dishes are common in Latin American cuisine, including moros y cristianos, gallo pinto and feijoada.

[Bonus note. On the cartoonist Wayno of the Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strips that I frequently post about here: Wayno provides vocals / harmonica / ukulele to The Red Beans & Rice Combo (a “trio serving up New Orleans R&B, rock & roll nuggets, with a jazzy dash of Tin Pan Alley and humor” in the Pittsburgh PA area).]

Mooncakes. Lexicographic background from NOAD:

noun cake: [a] an item of soft, sweet food made from a mixture of flour, shortening, eggs, sugar, and other ingredients, baked and often decorated: a carrot cake | [as modifier]: cake pans | a mouthful of cake. [b] an item of savory food formed into a flat, round shape, and typically baked or fried: crab cakes | buckwheat cakes. [c] a flattish, compact mass of something, especially soap: a cake of soap.

Mooncakes are cake-shaped things (NOAD sense c), but they are, in the world of CAKE-PIE foodstuffs, clearly among the PIE foodstuffs (pastry shell and top, with filling, in this case a sweet filling). See my 5/3/18 posting “CAKE-PIE II” on the categories CAKE and PIE (as distinct from things called in English cakes and pies).

82. About 1982, 40 years ago.

In my life. I spent the academic year 1981-82 as a Fellow at CASBS, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, on the foothills above Stanford, during which time (among other things) I became a great fan of red bean mooncakes, so easily available in San Francisco’s Chinatown. About that year at CASBS, from my 2/23/08 Language Log posting “In memoriam Gardner Lindzey” (director of CASBS from 1975-89):

I was a fellow at CASBS in 1981-82 [I was 41 at the time, young for such a fellowship], a year in which there was a “special project” on Meaning and Cognition, whose core members were Jon Barwise, Manfred Bierwisch, Robin Cooper, Hans Kamp, Lauri Karttunen, and Stanley Peters. There were also colleagues and research assistants who were not fellows but participated regularly in project meetings; in addition to me, these included Edit Doron, Elisabet Engdahl, Rich Larson, John Perry (who had been a fellow in 1980-81), Ivan Sag, and Hans Uszkoreit (this is far from a complete listing). Semantics was clearly the center of the project (Barwise and Perry’s Situations and Attitudes came out of CASBS activities), but the participants ranged over syntax, philosophy, mathematics, and computer science as well, and the project was followed by the founding of the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford (which in the summer of 1984 sponsored research by, among others, Gerald Gazdar, Ewan Klein, Geoff Pullum, Ivan Sag, and me) and then [in 1985] by the creation of the undergraduate interdisciplinary program in Symbolic Systems (roughly, cognitive science) at Stanford.

I rented a small apartment over the garage in a larger faculty house on the Stanford land (in the “faculty ghetto”). The main part of the house was rented by another CASBS fellow, the urban sociologist William Julius Wilson (see his Wikipedia entry here) and his family. Thus affording me an opportunity for a personal and academic friendship that affected my own thinking deeply. I also developed such friendships with social historian Tamara Hareven (her Wikipedia entry here) and psychiatrist Isaac Marks (specializing in the treatment of obsessions and phobias) (his Wikipedia entry here). And was considerably affected by presentations by and conversations with the philosopher Philippa Foot, psychologists of vision Dorothea James and Leo Hurvich, sociologist Charles Perrow, biologist George Williams, anthropologist Patty Jo Watson, philosopher (and novelist) Richard Watson, psychologist of text comprehension Walter Kintsch, psychiatrist Robert Wallerstein, mathematical biologist Joel E. Cohen, and social constructionist Thomas Luckmann. Plus of course all those Meaning and Cognition folks. Wow.

In the summer of 1982, I was Associate Director and Visiting Professor in the Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America (a big summer school), at the University of Maryland, College Park, where I taught the two courses Phonological Analysis and Analysis of Speech Errors.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky was at that Institute as a student (in the summer between graduating from high school and starting college at Ohio State), where she was able to officially take the Introduction to Linguistics (not taught by one of her parents), as part of a cognitive science program she was constructing for herself at Ohio State (combining philosophy, linguistics, computer science, and psychology). She and I had rooms in a co-op co-ed dorm that was a UMCP sorority rented for Institute participants that summer.

In the greater world. Among the events of 1982: Michael Jackson’s album (and video) Thriller; the movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial; the Falklands / Malvinas War between Argentina and the UK; the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC.

But back to the Mid-Autumn Festival and mooncakes. Postings on this blog, with visuals:

— in my 9/24/18 posting “Sleep on, harvest moon”, on these two things, with the illustration:

(#4) Mooncakes (with yolk — of a salted duck egg) and tea

— in my 9/13/20 posting “Mid-autumn memento mori for the times”, Stephanie Shih’s digital still life combining elements from Western and Eastern (especially Chinese) painting traditions, both located in mid-autumn times:

(#5) In the middle of the foreground, a plate of mooncakes

And, finally, back to Moon Over Palo Alto. My mooncakes arrive tomorrow (they’ll certainly keep until actual Mid-Autumn Festival; I ordered them right away because stocks vanish as the holiday approaches).

My original inclination was to order from Kee Wah bakery, a reputable Hong Kong company that has a US subsidiary in Monterey Park, Los Angeles, but they were already out of the kind of mooncake I wanted: red bean filling, no yolk. Amazon pointed me to the Imperial Palace brand, for its variety, quality, and price; only after I’d ordered did I wonder about the brand: who made this stuff, and where?

Searching is hell, because Imperial Palace is the name of restaurants all over the world (including one on Washington St. in San Francisco’s Chinatown — a place I’ve eaten at, with considerable enjoyment). But of the brand name Imperial Palace, I find nothing. Stores, including some on the SF Peninsula, carry the mooncakes, but it seems to be just a brand name, not an actual company. I’ll scrutinize the box when it comes, for information about its source.

But then, the Moon Over Palo Alto event. My fantasy would be to enjoy mooncakes and tea with three friends in a lush late-summer garden, at, roughly, teatime. Trying to arrange such an event in the midst of all these holidays, plus people’s work schedules, looks just impossible. But I contemplate a much scaled-back version, involving Elizabeth’s and my standing Saturday breakfast date, 8 am at the Palo Alto Creamery (at High and Emerson), which I can get to using my walker, and which supplies several breakfasts I am very fond of (huevos rancheros con carnitas; three-egg scrambles with sausage, spinach, and cheese; the Northwest Scramble, with smoked salmon and cream cheese) and serviceable black coffee, to which a mooncake could be added as a multi-cultural dessert.

For breakfast on a Saturday (9/3 or 9/10), I might actually be able to find two friends to join Elizabeth and me. But: though I have lots of friends (from all parts of my life) in the Bay Area, only a few of them live within a reasonable distance  of the Palo Alto Creamery, and only a few of those are close-enough friends to invite to an intimate celebration of my 82nd birthday. I am musing.

Today’s Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange strip is a play on specific American tv commercials (with some gentle old-age mockery folded in), so will be baffling to any reader who doesn’t recognize the Kool-Aid Man mascot or know the wall-breaking “Oh Yeah!” tv ads featuring KAM:

(#1) There is, however, a hint to the reader in the “So not kool” (with kool instead of cool) in the title panel; note also the generational disparity reinforced by the GenX so there (see my 11/14/11 posting “GenX so“)

On the mascot, from Wikipedia:

(#2) KAM, away from walls

Kool-Aid Man (sometimes referred to as the Kool-Aid Guy or Captain Kool-Aid in Canada) is the official mascot for Kool-Aid, a brand of flavored drink mix. The character has appeared on television and in print advertising as a fun-loving, gigantic, and joyful anthropomorphic pitcher filled with “The Original Flavor” Cherry Kool-Aid. He is typically featured answering the call of children by smashing through walls or furnishings and then holding a pitcher filled with Kool-Aid while saying his catchphrase, “Oh yeah!” He had a comic series produced by Marvel where he fought evil villains called “Thirsties” and even fought a man engulfed in fire named Scorch. He can also come in many different colors such as red, blue, green, and purple.

You can watch, on YouTube here, a “Classic Kool-Aid Man Commercial Compilation (OH YEAH!)” of wall-breaking sugary goodness:

Kool-Aid Man, the anthropromorphic mascot of the Kool-Aid soft drink, was a well-known American icon in the late 1900s, often the star of TV ads. One of his most well-known acts is breaking through walls with an enthusiastic “Oh Yeah!”, providing children with the sugary drink they love.

In the comics, confronting the Thirsties, from Milwaukee magazine, “Kool Aid Man Through the Years” by Matt Hrodey on 4/12/13:

(#3) [caption:] Earlier incarnations of the Kool Aid drama were sometimes less idyllic in their interactions between pitcher and setting. Here, flying wood hangs in space as an immediate danger, and the Man is holding a smaller pitcher of drink for the kids (one of which has a mustache). Later versions, by allowing the Man’s own contents to slosh over his lip, suggested that the drink would come from the being’s own reservoir of Kool Aid. Refreshing! [AZ: he generously gives of his own essence to provide pleasure to others; Take, drink, this is my blood…]

On other sites, you can find artwork of KAM breaking through Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”, breaking through Wall Street, who knows what else. And on this blog, in my 6/15/16 posting “Cross-commercial fertilization”:

Currently running the rounds on American television, a Progressive Insurance ad (featuring the company’s spokesperson Flo) into which a giant humanoid pitcher of some colored drink intrudes, by crashing through the wall

The old-age cartoon. #1 is not only a KAM cartoon, but also an old-age cartoon, mocking the debilities of old age; note the cane and the need for prune juice to regulate defecation by alleviating constipation. But unlike fatness mockery, effeminacy mockery, redneck mockery, and other humor turning on contempt for the Other, this mockery is gentle, because old age (and its debilities) comes to all of us, should we be so lucky.

But, then, prune juice and constipation. Fruits and fruit juices have a gently laxative effect by supplying fiber (both soluble and insoluble) and sorbitol (which pulls water into the large intestine); fruits that contain sorbitol include apples, pears, grapes, stone fruits (apricots, plums, peaches, etc.), and dried fruit (prunes, figs, apricots, dates, etc.). Stewed prunes and prune juice are especially good sources of sorbitol — at any age, and I think they’re tasty.

But in fact, in the dried fruit world, I’m more of a fig guy than a prune guy. So I can tell you that there is indeed such a thing as fig juice, which you can make yourself or get commercially. I eat 3or 4 dried figs every day (for their taste and texture, not for their medical virtues), but haven’t had the juice for quite some time, and I can’t vouch for this brand, but here it is, from the Innit site: Smart Juice brand fig juice (in a 33.8 oz bottle):

(#4) (Innit provides brand information to “partners in the food, retail, appliance, and technology industries”, also offers recipes and sells products)

A linguistic note. Please don’t tell me superciliously that a fig is not a fruit, but (technically) a flower, an everted flower. Indeed, in the botanical terminology used to name the parts of plants, a fig is a flower, not a fruit. But in the everyday culinary terminology for kinds of foodstuffs, a fig is a fruit, not a vegetable. Are you incapable of handling ambiguity, and of understanding the meanings of words in context? Are you deranged enough to think that a word can have only one meaning? Are you really that pig-headedly uncooperative?

(You will recognize here a counterpart to the unredeemably bizarre claim that a tomato is not a vegetable, but a fruit, as if the word fruit didn’t have an everyday culinary sense as well as a technical use just for botanists. A fair number of (culinary) vegetables are plant parts that are called in (I think badly chosen) botanical terminology fruits: for example, cucumbers, zucchini and other squashes (including pumpkins), bell peppers, eggplants, and, yes, tomatoes. Get over it.)