The liquor-poker joke

Bravo has been doing re-runs of Inside the Actors Studio shows, several each morning. A few days ago, Mike Myers (actor, comedian, singer, screenwriter, and film producer) was up, so the hour was packed with plenty of good-natured bad taste. A fair amount of time was devoted to Myers’s 2008 comedy The Love Guru, which aroused much critical venom when it came out (I haven’t seen it). Myers was especially pleased with an elaborate double entendre in the movie — the information, or advice:

Liquor up front, poker in back.

(That is, either there is liquor up front — in the front of this place — and poker in (the) back; or you should lick her up front and poke her in back.) Yes, tasteless.

Demonyms

In the letters section of the May 20th New Yorker, this piece:

NEW YORKIANS

In “Draft No. 4,” [April 29th], John McPhee writes that a copy editor sometimes provides a writer with a word like “a rare gold coin.” He recalls how Mary Norris, copy editing one of his pieces, suggested “Mancunians” for “Manchestrians.” McPhee goes on to rank it on a selective list of names for residents of specific locales. Readers wrote in with their own demonyms:

half the Beast, the neighbor of the Beast

At shapenote singing on Sunday (which was Mothers Day), we sang a fair number of songs with mother in their texts. Some are decidedly odd, but one was an old friend, Family Circle (the music is included in my posting on “Come Thou Fount”; “And rejoice, O my mother” is in the chorus). Family Circle is 333 in the Sacred Harp, the book we sing from, and I remarked that this was half the number of the Beast.

Singer Terry Moore was entertained by that, and passed on to me a song by folksinger Mark Graham entitled “The Neighbor of the Beast”. The singer tells “a story that the Bible never told”, about living on a winding road in The City (the one that has 12 gates to it), at number 667 — the neighbor of the Beast. Yes, the Beast with seven heads (now with a kid, little 333). The Beast is an annoying neighbor, playing Motorhead and Judas Priest at high volume into the night and consorting with the Whore of Babylon; the singer wonders why the guy can’t sometimes play some decent country music.

African ice rats

In the May 4-10 2013 NewScientist, a piece on the “Rat with two faces”", beginning:

Beneath the snow of South Africa’s Drakensberg and Maluti mountains, African ice rats huddle together in burrows for warmth. When they reach the surface, though, it’s a different story.

More band names

Commenting on Facebook on my note about the punk band Pissed Jeans, Chris Ambidge mischievously asked about the names Manly Panda and Bitch Bovine (half-rhyming and alliterative, respectively) — mischievously, because the names are soc.motss pseudonyms for Chris and Michael Palmer, respectively. Apparently, though, the names haven’t been taken for band names.

How do I know this? Well, there’s a database.

Brief mention: punk band name news

Found by accident, the punk band Pissed Jeans:

Pissed Jeans are an American noise rock/hardcore punk band from Allentown, Pennsylvania. [AZ side note: I was born in Allentown PA.] The band claims to play “loud, heavy, noisy, punk rock” and is influenced by 1980s hardcore punk and post-hardcore bands. The band have released several 7″ singles and four albums, and are currently signed to Sub Pop.

The members of Pissed Jeans all attended Nazareth High School and initially planned to use the name Unrequited Hard-On before settling on Pissed Jeans. As [band member] Matt Kosloff explains,

The idea was to start a different kinda Punk band focused on dead ended carnal cravings, sexual depression … that sort of thing. Mainly we just wanted to bludgeon the listener will dull, monotonous droning rock music that just sucks the energy out of you, the musical equivalent to watching a toilet flush.

The attractions of vulgarity never pale.

(If you’re looking for actual pissed jeans — the are lots of images and videos on the net — you’ll need to find indirect ways to call up the stuff or be willing to wade through pages and pages of refereces to the band.)

Nick Danger: an appreciation

My iTunes woke me this morning with “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye” (from Firesign Theatre’s How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All (1969)). It’s packed full of playfulness, silliness, and absurdity, much of it linguistic.

Konigsburg, Rowling, and pen names

From the NYT on April 23rd0, “E. L. Konigsburg, Author, Is Dead at 83″ (by Paul Vitello):

E. L. Konigsburg, a children’s author and illustrator who twice received the nation’s highest award in children’s literature [the Newbery Medal] — she won it in 1968 for her second book, edging out the runner-up, which was her own first book — died on Friday [April 19th] in Falls Church, Va.

Two things: a note on the pleasures of her most famous book, and a note on her pen name.

oobleck

Following on my posting about Shel Silverstein, on to another children’s book author, Dr. Seuss, this time through an article in NewScientist (print edition of April 20th): “Miracle mix looks like liquid but shatters like glass” by Lisa Grossman, beginning:

Walking on water is possible – just as long as it contains corn starch. Now it seems this miracle mixture, dubbed oobleck, can also shatter like glass. Knowing how and why could help guide its use in soft body armour and car suspensions.

Oobleck gets its name from the artificial gloop that falls from the sky in the Dr Seuss book Bartholomew and the Oobleck. It has a split personality because the corn starch exists as a solid suspended in liquid water. Gently poke real-life oobleck and your fingers easily slip through, but slap it and it suddenly stiffens.

On the porn watch: from facial hair to sex in suits

Recently on AZBlogX, five postings on items from gay porn — with little (but not entirely zero) linguistic interest. Note: all with descriptions and photos of flat-out gay sex, so not for the kiddies or the sexually modest.

4/25/13: On the facial hair watch: Lots of facial hair in the cast of TitanMen’s After Hours, ranging from the scruffalicious (see postings on this blog on facial scruffiness) to the clearly (but neatly) bearded. Facial hair is in, dudes!

4/25/13: More toys: Adam Killian and Rod Daily in the Lucas film Toy With Me, together enjoying a double-headed dildo. (Looking ahead to the next posting: Daily’s genitals are somewhat lighter in color than the skin on the rest of his body.)

4/25/13: Rafael Alencar: On the handsome Brazilian pornstar Alencar, whose genitals are notably darker in color than the skin on the rest of his body. Some discussion of this phenomenon, with one site offering this circular explanation:

Question: Why is the penis darker in color than the body? [This assumes, incorrectly, that the phenomenon is general.]
Answer:  … The technical answer is that the skin of the penis has more of the pigment melanin than other skin.

4/26/13: Anthony, Saint, Stallone: On the TitanMen compilation flick Hung: The Best of David Anthony. Ten men in six scenes, including the wonderfully named Christopher Saint (oh, St. Christopher!) and, oh my, Fabio Stallone. (David Anthony, on the other hand, has one of those porn names that is so averagely masculine that you have trouble remembering it.)

4/26/13: Sex in suits: On the recent Lucas film Undress For Success, with five scenes of men in and out of business suits (in pairs) having their way with one another. Something for students of clothing as display and for students of b and t roles in sexual relationships. Plus a French pornstar with the stage name Will Helm.