The Bare Boys

On AZBlogX, a set of images from pornographer Sean Cody, from the video Bareback Fuckfest, with a quartet of cute guys displaying their bodies as a group and then stills from the video, which is focused on one of the four getting fucked by the other three (with the usual assortment of other gay sex acts involving all four of the men. Here, a few words about Sean Cody and a reminder about the verb bareback.

Not your typical pornstar

Over on AZBlogX there’s a piece on gay pornstar Dale Cooper (who took this name from agent Dale Cooper in the tv series Twin Peaks). A man of many talents. He writes for the Huffington Post on (mostly) gay matters, Here’s HuffPo’s blurb on him:

Dale Cooper is a sexual health educator, a social worker for HIV/AIDS clients, a porn performer, and a fundraiser for sexual health causes and affordable housing. He continues to study how gay sexuality has been affected by the Internet, and maintains a web presence at www.daledoesporn.com.

There’s plenty of shots of Cooper genitally nude and engaging in hard-core gay sex acts on AZBlogX. For this blog, here’s a nice head, armpit, and torso shot of him, with his engaging smile:

 (#1)

Verbing garbage

A message from Ken Callicott:

In the 1986 film “Never Too Young To Die”, the hermaphroditic rock star villain, Velvet Von Ragnar (played by Gene Simmons) killed a henchman, then said something like “Garbage that” or “Garbage him”.  I don’t recall ever having heard ‘garbage’ used as a verb.

At first I thought garbage here was a euphemistic replacement for fuck (based on semantics rather than phonology), but now that I look at the actual quote, I see that we’re dealing with a simple verbing here.

(And the movie looks like a hoot.)

This week’s best title in an academic journal

In a mailing from the Association for Psychological Science, an abstract for this fascinating-sounding article (by Yigal Attali) in Psychological Science (April 29, 2013):

Perceived Hotness Affects Behavior of Basketball Players and Coaches

Ah, you ask, whose perceived hotness? And perceived by whom? Many people think that basketball players are hot hot hot, and I assume the players know this, so it might well affect their behavior.

Oh, not that kind of hot. [Emily Litella mode] Never mind.

hairy Harry and the asparagus

Today’s Rhymes With Orange, with a portmanteau:

  (#1)

That’s despair + asparagus. This is a stretch as a portmanteau for me, because the accented vowels in the two contributing words are distinct for me: [e] in despair, [æ] in asparagus. For me and some other American speakers — and for virtually all English speakers outside of North America. But for other Americans, the vowels are quite close (with [ɛ] in asparagus) or identical (with [e] in asparagus). This is merry-Mary-marry territory.

Three penultimate comments

Comments on my posting on penultimate (in penultimate Frisbee) took three directions: a comic association with antepenultimate; complaints about a relatively recent non-standard use of penultimate (to mean ‘absolutely final, absolutely the best’); and complaints about using ultimate and unique and other so-called “non-gradable” adjectives as gradables (modifiable by degree adverbials).

Briefly noted: endorsements for skills or expertise

LinkedIn tells me every so often about endorsements I’ve received for skills or expertise, from friends, colleagues, former students, and readers of my blogs (about 30 of them so far). For:

Teaching, Linguistics, Academic Writing, Research, Computational Linguistics, Higher Education, Natural Language Processing, Courses, Text Mining, Theory, University Teaching

Teaching figures prominently. I must say that’s gratifying.

I’m not at all sure what these endorsements mean, but it’s always nice to be recognized for your abilities and accomplishments.

 

Annals of innuendo and ambiguity: from 10PerCent

In my e-mail today, a sale on gay greeting cards from the 10PerCent company. Reproduced here are the fronts of four birthday cards, starting with a phallic number (with an ambiguity inside), going  on through two that look more promising (until you get to the sexual ambiguity inside) and one with the ambiguity on the front (and an innuendo inside).

Briefly noted: the shalom of curse words

On an Inside the Actors Studio show I saw this morning with Billy Crystal as guest, host James Lipton asked the standard question, “What is your favorite curse word?” To which Crystal replied:

Fuck. Fuck is the shalom of cursewords.

– meaning, that, like shalom, fuck is enormously versatile, a claim that Crystal then illustrated by reeling off a long string of uses, all of which were of course bleeped.

(On the versatility of fuck, see Jesse Sheidlower’s The F Word.)

Passions

Today’s Dilbert:

Wally is conflating passion ‘enthusiasm, zeal’ (as in “passion is necessary for success”) and passion ‘love or desire’ — probably with malice aforethought.