A five-pack

From recent images sent on by Chris Ambidge, five that could have gone on AZBlogX (though they are not visually X-rated) but would also fit here.

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.

The adventures of AZ

From Stan Carey, this entertaining book cover:

This appears on the Lousy Book Covers site, the motto of which is

Just because you CAN design your own book cover doesn’t mean you SHOULD.

But Stan was attracted to it because of the hero’s name.

Dream weirdness

Today’s Zippy, a bit of weirdness on dreams and their interpretation:

Unusually absurd names, even for Zippy. Well, there is an Old Saybrook station on Metro-North rail, and pinkie and gastric juice are both English expressions (though hard to put together meaningfully). Seth MacFarlane is certainly real –

Seth Woodbury MacFarlane (… born October 26, 1973) is an American actor, voice actor, animator, screenwriter, comedian, producer, director, and singer. He is the creator of the show Family Guy (1999–2002, 2005–present) and co-creator of American Dad! (2005–present) and The Cleveland Show (2009–present), for which he also voices many of the shows’ various characters. (link)

– but, like the other dream ingredients, he seems to just float in from outer space.

 

Captioning: Porn stars at play, with their beetles

On AZBlogX, a set of 29 captioned photos from TitanMen photographer Brian Mills, featuring the studio’s pornstars, all of them displaying their bodies, many of them displaying their dicks as well. Titan is famous for using highly masculine actors, so my captions tend to subvert the supermacho presentations of the men by ascribing silly or stereotypically unmasculine or stereotypically queer interests to them when they’re off the Titan sets. Then each one gets at least one brightly colored beetle from Christopher Marley’s Incredible Insects Sticker Book.

 

The Great Language Change Hoax

On Dennis Baron’s blog The Web of Language for today, “The Great language change hoax”, which begins:

Deniers of global warming, the big bang, and evolution have a new target: language change. Arguing that language change is just a theory, not a fact, they’re launching efforts to remove it from the school curriculum. To support their efforts, they’re citing a new report, “The Great Language Change Hoax,” presented last month at the annual conference of the Society for Pure English in Toronto.

The authors of the study, Jon Lamarck and Tori Lysenko, are cognitive biophysicists at Hudson University who feel that explaining language is best done by scientists who know nothing about language. Linguists, the researchers usually associated with language study, are too close to their subject matter, thus too subjective. “We don’t even like language,” Lamarck told attendees at the SPE conference. “That’s why we can be objective about it.”

The Dingburger bar bat, or barbat

The New Year’s Eve Zippy, with (among other things) a repeated theme of the strip:

The line I’m focusing on:

Do you realize this “discovery” of yours could cause th’ sales of Poindexter bar bats to plummet?!

Poindexter bar bats: Poindexter is just one of those names that entertain Bill Griffith because of the sound; but what about bar bat? Like many things in Zippy, this is surely meant to be absurd but suggestive.

Spam poetry

Inspired by this posting, a bit of light verse:

NOTICE URGENT

You have fail to speak reply,
Yet we ask again again.
We do wonders why oh why
You is silents, strange of men:

Give us now of some account,
WE AWAITS YOUR PROMPT REBOUND.

So demanding, these spamfolk.

The wonders of spam

I get huge amounts of spam, both in e-mail and in blog comments, so I mostly don’t even look at the stuff. But here’s one (lightly edited to remove links) that caught my eye as I was deleting spam from my mail:

The Better Business Bureau has been recorded the above mentioned plaint from one of your users as regards their business relations with you. The information about the consumer’s uneasiness are available at the link below. Please give attention to this issue and notify us about your glance as soon as possible.

We amiably ask you to click and review the [Grievance Report] to respond on this grievance.

We awaits to your prompt rebound.

It has been coming in multiple copies, with small variations in form. The text looks like it’s inexpertly translated from another language, but whether that effect is inadvertent or intentional I cannot tell.

I am, however, considering using “We awaits to your prompt rebound” in my own writing, or possibly working it into a piece of light verse.

Dude Wipes

A few days ago on Facebook, Leith Chu wondered, about Dude Wipes from the Dude Products people:

Why hasn’t anybody mentioned these before? (link)

The Dude Products Dude Wipes Box of 30 [$9.99] on Amazon:

The description on this site:

There is nothing like the feeling of being clean!! After a long training session wipe down with a Dudewipe for a Fresh Scent not a Baby wipe scent. DudeWipes are wallet-sized and perfect for any person who wants to keep up their hygiene no matter where they are or what they’re doing. These wipes are a great complement to toilet paper, pre or post gym clean up, or to simply keep hands, face, and other areas Fresh and Clean. FINALLY!!!!!! A hygiene product that doesn’t smell like a baby.

Is this (to some degree) a serious product, designed to appeal to men who feel the need to assert their masculinity against babies (not to mention the elderly and the infirm, giving three groups who lack manliness and probably also the smell of a man, and of course women, who are totally out of it on both fronts)? There is plenty of male paranoia out there, but the closer you look at the site, the less likely it seems to be serious.