A Benjamin Schwartz cartoon in the latest (February 13th/20th) New Yorker:

The German folk tale of Snow White provides the basis for this name play, though the published version of the story by the Brothers Grimm didn’t name the dwarfs who help Snow White. The modern names entered pop culture with the 1937 Disney animated film. At which point they provided an inventory of names to play with (supplementing another source of pop culture names, the names of Santa’s eight reindeer from “A Visit From St. Nicholas”).

The first five of Schwartz’s dwarfs continue the tradition of naming them for physical, personality, or behavioral characteristics, but with more modern vocabulary (I’m especially fond of Crunchy, as in crunchy granola, and Skeezy). The last two, Jayzy and Emojy, bring us firmly up to date.

Jayzy is the image of the rapper Jay Z (complete with his NY Yankees cap. From Wikipedia:

Shawn Corey Carter (born December 4, 1969), known professionally as Jay Z, is an American rapper, businessman, and investor. Formerly known as Jay-Z, he is one of the best-selling musicians of all time, having sold more than 100 million records, while receiving 21 Grammy Awards for his music.

And then Emojy, with an emoji-colored face.

(Very little of linguistic interest, beyond a penis joke in Spanish and a note on grammatical gender. Otherwise, it’s the massive Latino musclehunk “The Marvel” on display.)

From my regular correspondent RJP this morning, a (broken) link to a Facebook video by The Marvel (posting as maravilla3x). I persevered and found a working Facebook link, which FB seems now to have taken down as too racy: it shows a naked Marvel sitting up in bed humping a big heart-shaped box of Valentine’s chocolates, then taking the cover off and eating chocolates from the box while revving up the tempo and intensity of his pelvic thrusts towards climax (at which point the tease is cut off). However, The Marvel has resourcefully put the video on YouTube, and you can watch it there.

A still from the video, close to the cut-off point:

(#1)

The caption (I translate from the Spanish): “Who wants chocolates? Your Valentine’s present.”

Some things to note: the truly gigantic upper arms; the shaved armpits, the big-assed tattoos.

That degree of muscle development, like a really big dick, is out of my personal arousal zone and into the zone of abstract size awe: something remarkable to observe, but not something I’m interested in engaging with carnally. (Yes, I understand that many other fags find The Marvel’s body deeply, deeply moving.)

The shaved armpits just mark him as a bodybuilder; on his FB page he identifies himself as an “NYC Fitness Model”, and the videos and photos there include a fair number of him doing weight training (but also a huge number of flagrantly sexual displays, aimed at women but surely snaring an audience of admiring gay men as well; in interviews, the man says he’s straight but welcomes followers of all kinds). As for the armpit hair, I’m really into that and miss it in serious bodybuilders.

The ornate, intense tattoos will be better visible in photos to come.

On the Marvel’s FB page we learn that his real name is Franyely Lora, born 9/3/93, and that he began to take an interest in music at an early age and had a talent for it. On the evidence of the photos, he seems to be a keyboardist.

[Added 2/13: Some postings about him say tha he’s a singer and also that he’s worked as an underwear model for Calvin Klein.]

Linguistic note: Maravilla is a fairly common Hispanic surname (I have friends with this name). But Spanish is a language with grammatical gender, and the noun maravilla ‘marvel, wonder’ is of fem. gender grammatically, even when it’s used to refer to a man. That’s why The Marvel is (in Spanish) La Maravilla (with the fem.sg. definite article la rather than the masc.sg. el).

(He could have chosen the pseudonym El Maravilloso ‘the marvelous (one) [masc.]’, but maybe he though that was just too long, or that nouns are somehow “stronger” than adjectives.)

More images of La Maravilla, two from a huge number in which the man is posed as an underwear model. “Buenos Dias”, with his morning coffee, in a minimal brief:

(#2)

And “Buenas Tardes”, with an afternoon moose-knuckle (also showing off his pecs and abs):

(#3)

A sex-play bonus on his FB page:

(#4)

The main part of the title, up to the last word, I would translate roughly as ‘What your (female) friend needs, to calm that pelvic heat’ (calor pélvico is an entertainingly roundabout way of referring to female arousal). Now that last word might remind you of English penicillin (the drug), but the name of the drug in Spanish is penicilina, while the last word in the title is pretty clearly pene ‘penis’ plus some diminutive derivational material: what the woman needs for the fire in her genitals is a dick (and here’s a toy one). Well, that’s how I read it.

Meanwhile, enjoy those Valentine chocolates.

On the eve of the holiday, we come to same-sex kissing in public (in the flesh or in photos distributed publicly), which I maintain is, these days, still almost always a political act (and to my mind an admirable one) — protesting homophobia, the denial of lgbt rights, and homo-hostility of all sorts. (The exception is in kissing in the few safe spaces allowed to us, and even then photos might become truly public.) These protests can be carried out by warm and gentle strategies, like Neil Patrick Harris and his husband David Burtka performing their genuine pleasure in each other as a persistent campaign of adorable public affection, a campaign carried out on behalf of lgbt people everywhere. Or the protests can be more pointed and defiant (examples to follow), but again the protestors are acting on behalf of the community, not just themselves. Some of us in fact feel that we have a moral responsibility to act in this way, especially if we can do so without much loss to ourselves and have social capital (reputation, celebrity, authority, whatever) we can draw on: if not us, then who?

A serious lead-in to something I take great pleasure in seeing: men kissing men, women kissing women. And since tomorrow is Kissing Day…

The Valentine’s Kiss Photo Challenge. An event carried out on the GayCities site for several years. Guys (mostly young) submit photos of themselves, which the site then promotes. Three diverse examples here. First, a couple in a shot the site labeled “Beef Tongue”:

(#1)

The t-shirt is a tribute to a different holiday: “I’m Not Santa But You Can Sit on My Lap”.

(#2)

Originally shot in a protest context, on Christopher St. in NYC.

(#3)

Black angel and white angel. My sources give no reading for flagging rainbow on the right, as here. Receptive partner for anything?

International. Now a diverse assortment of protests from around the world, not all specifically for VDay.

(#4)

Female couples in Kosovo, where this display apparently elicited significant hostility.

(#5)

Record long VDay kiss by a Thai couple (50 hours, 25 minutes)

(#6)

Kiss-in in Cartagena, Colombia, demonstrating after the massacre at the Pulse club in Orlando FL

(#7)

And a mass VDay kiss-in in Picadilly Circus, London. Note three-way on the upper right.

From Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky on Facebook yesterday, a chocolate cupcake for Valentine’s Day (which is also, significantly, Elizabeth’s birthday), with white frosting and a blue frosting design on top of that:

(#1)

Ah, you say a penguin, on ice, with a message of love (those hearts). Note that, thanks to me, penguins are a big thing in my family.

Elizabeth boldly denied the Penguin Interpretation — well, with a  Magrittean disavowal (Ceci n’est pas une pipe):

This is not a penguin.

But then she added an alternative, the Rocket Interpretation:

A rocket. With heart-shaped windows.

But wait! There’s more!

First, the Rocket Interpretation shoots us into penis territory, since rockets and rocket ships are potent phallic symbols. If we take the hearts into account, it’s a love rocket, woo woo.

And then there’s a third view, which I championed. Rotate the image in #1, to get the hearts right side up, and you get:

(#2)

Ah, a fish: the Fish Interpretation. Specifically, a love fish, or even (as I suggested) a Lovefish, in fact, for reasons that will soon become clear, H.P. Lovefish.

These three interpretations will lead us far afield.

Penguin. Penguin love and penguins in love are familiar topics on this blog (see the Page on penguin postings for some links), so I’ll skip past these topics to get to the Antarctic connection, which led Steven Pemberton on FB to turn to H.P. Lovecraft and his novella At the Mountains of Madness, set in Antarctica (where (most of) the penguins come from). From Wikipedia on the writer:

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (… August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) was an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. He was virtually unknown and published only in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, but he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors in his genre. … Among his most celebrated tales are “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, both canonical to the Cthulhu Mythos. … He subsisted in progressively straitened circumstances in his last years; an inheritance was completely spent by the time that he died at age 46.

And on the novella:

At the Mountains of Madness is a novella by horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in February/March 1931 and rejected that year by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright on the grounds of its length. It was originally serialized in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of Astounding Stories. It has been reproduced in numerous collections.

The story details the events of a disastrous expedition to the Antarctic continent in September 1930, and what was found there by a group of explorers led by the narrator [evidence of ancient extraterrestial astronauts!], Dr. William Dyer of Miskatonic University. Throughout the story, Dyer details a series of previously untold events in the hope of deterring another group of explorers who wish to return to the continent.

(#3)

So maybe we should think of #1 as depicting an Antarctic descendant of ancient extraterrestrials — from a Lovecraftian point of view, rather uncharacteristically lovable, but still unearthly.

Love rocket. Several of the first FB commenters who opted for the Rocket Interpretation went right to a game item in World of Warcraft (note the fortuitous warcraft / Lovecraft echo here), the Big Love Rocket:

(#4)

It’s pink (symbolizing femininity, cuteness, homosexuality, and the color of an engorged penis all in one package), it’s a rocket (the phallus), and you can ride it (riding imagery to come below).

On the game, from Wikipedia:

World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) released in 2004 by Blizzard Entertainment. It is the fourth released game set in the fantasy Warcraft universe, which was first introduced by Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994.

A love rocket as an explicitly sexual image is all over the place. Here’s the mock-Victorian composition “Love Rocket” from pointedly gay artist Felix d’Eon / D’Eon:

(#5)

(I won’t digress on d’Eon here, but he deserves a posting of his own.)

Then there are musical uses of the compound love rocket. Two examples: from Chris Brown and from Steel Panther recording as Danger Kitty.

Chris Brown’s song “Love Rocket” is sexy and engaging. It was written for a woman to sing, but Brown released his own version of the song in 2009 (leaving the lyrics untouched), setting off speculation that he was gay:

(#6)

You can listen to the song here. The crucial lyrics:

Wanna take a, a little ride
On your rocket yeah yeah your rocket
… Let me hop on your love rocket

Brief biographical note on Brown:

Christopher Maurice “Chris” Brown (born May 5, 1989) is an American singer, songwriter, and dancer. Born in Tappahannock, Virginia, he was involved in his church choir and several local talent shows from a young age. (Wikipedia link)

Steel Panther is something else:

(#7)

You can listen to the track here (it’s really really noisy). On the band, from Wikipedia:

Steel Panther is an American comedy rock/glam metal band from Los Angeles, California, mostly known for their profane and humorous lyrics, as well as their exaggerated on-stage personae that parody the stereotypical 1980s “glam metal” lifestyle.

GDoS has the following love X compounds used metaphorically for ‘penis’:

love bone, love dart, love gun, love muscle, love pump, love rod, love staff, lovesteak, love stick, love torpedo, love truncheon, love warrior

but not love rocket. However, the compound is widely attested in porn. Two examples:

GotPorn: filling that ass up with a love rocket of his [gay porn] (link)

Curvy Teen Bimbo Rides A Love Rocket [straight porn] (link)

Small digression on crotch rocket in gay porn. The compound has been used several times, but matters are complex, because of the compound crotch rocket ‘dirtbike, sport(s) bike’ (referring to a motorcycle: the image is that on such a bike, you have a rocket between your legs). Gay porn uses combine the motorcycles and gay sex:

Mustang gay porn Crotch Rocket

Jock gay porn video The Crotch Rocket (Colby Jansen and Tyler)

Titan DVD Crotch Rocket: The Best of Trenton Ducati

The last is especially interesting. From my 2/16/13 posting “Crotch Rocket”, the title has

Phallic word play, but there’s more, since a crotch rocket is also a type of motorcycle.

The actor who uses the stage name Trenton Ducati is a motorcycle enthusiast, and Ducati is a brand of motorcycle.

Love fish. The fish-with-hearts image in #2 took me to the compound love fish, or Lovefish as a proper name, and then to the fanciful H.P. Lovefish (a play on H.P. Lovecraft, as above). And that took me to HP Sauce. From Wikipedia:

HP Sauce is a brown sauce originally produced by HP Foods in the United Kingdom, now produced by the H. J. Heinz Company in the Netherlands. It was named after the Houses of Parliament. It was the best-selling brand of brown sauce in the UK in 2005, with 73.8% of the retail market.

HP Sauce has a tomato base, blended with malt vinegar and spirit vinegar, sugars (molasses, glucose-fructose syrup, sugar), dates, cornflour, rye flour, salt, spices and tamarind. It is used as a condiment with hot and cold savoury food, and as an ingredient in soups and stews. It is also popular in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

(#8)

Meanwhile, Love Fish or Lovefish has been used as the name of fish restaurants and fish markets around the world. (Presumably, you could splash some HP Sauce on those fish.)

Of all of these, maybe the most intriguing is a pair of restaurants named love.fish in suburbs (Rozelle and Barangaroo) of Sydney NSW:

(#9)

The restaurants insist on using fresh Australian seafood and local produce and on other green practices. Trendy, but the food looks wonderful.

Today’s Bizarro:

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

Another bash at the hieroglyph-emoji relationship. For discussion, see my 10/28/16 posting “Emoji days” (with two cartoons on the subject), where I note that emoji are primaily ideographic / pictographic, while hieroglyphs are primarily linguistic (representing specific words or phonological material).

(Obviously, there will be a lot of dick talk here, but of the art-historical and art-critical variety, rather than the sexual-arousal variety.)

On Facebook, art historian Reuben Cordova writes:

I’m giving a lecture: “The Penis in Art. A Short History, From the Greeks to Today.” Any suggestions?

and offers as an example this ancient Greek vase with the image of a naked woman carrying a gigantic penis on it:

(#1)

(Such images appear to fall under the Fine Art Exemption for body display on Facebook, and presumably Google+ and WordPress as well. The point presumably being that the penis images on display are not of actual human bodyparts, but are fantasy creations.)

Naked men are all over ancient Greek art, and ancient Roman art as well. A few more examples, then a pile of links on this blog and AZBlogX to phallic art, and a sampling of modern penis art not already covered in my blogs.

A note on Cordova. From his amazon.com author page:

Ruben C. Cordova is an art historian, curator, and photographer. He holds a BA from Brown University (Semiotics) and a PhD from UC Berkeley (History of Art). Cordova has taught courses treating Art History, Film, and Museum Studies at UC Berkeley, UT Pan American, UT San Antonio, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of Houston. He has curated or co-curated more than 20 exhibitions featuring Latin American, Latino, and Chicano Art. As a photographer, his primary interest is Day of the Dead and his work has been featured in 40 exhibitions. … His future books will treat the artist Mel Casas, Day of the Dead in Mexico and the US, and Frida Kahlo.

The glories of Greece. These include herms (or hermai) like these:

(#2)

Archaic herma of Hermes

(#3)

Herm with an inscription linking it to the Hermes Propylaios by Alcamenes

From Wikipedia:

A herma (Ancient Greek: ἑρμῆς, pl. ἑρμαῖ hermai), commonly in English herm, is a sculpture with a head, and perhaps a torso, above a plain, usually squared lower section, on which male genitals may also be carved at the appropriate height. The form originated in Ancient Greece, and was adopted by the Romans, and revived at the Renaissance

… In ancient Greece the statues had an apotropaic [‘supposedly having the power to avert evil influences or bad luck’ (NOAD2)] function and were placed at crossings, country borders and boundaries as protection, in front of temples, near to tombs, in the gymnasia, palaestrae, libraries, porticoes, and public places, at the corners of streets, on high roads as sign-posts, with distances inscribed upon them. Before his role as protector of merchants and travelers, Hermes was a phallic god, associated with fertility, luck, roads and borders. His name perhaps comes from the word herma referring to a square or rectangular pillar of stone, terracotta, or bronze; a bust of Hermes’ head, usually with a beard, sat on the top of the pillar, and male genitals adorned the base. The surmounting heads were not, however, confined to those of Hermes; those of other gods and heroes, and even of distinguished mortals, were of frequent occurrence. In this case a compound was formed: Hermathena (a herm of Athena), Hermares, Hermaphroditus, Hermanubis, Hermalcibiades, and so on. In Athens, where the hermai were most numerous and most venerated, they were placed outside houses as apotropes for good luck. They would be rubbed or anointed with olive oil and adorned with garlands or wreaths. This superstition persists, for example the Porcellino bronze boar of Florence (and numerous others like it around the world), where the nose is shiny from being continually touched for good luck or fertility.

In Roman and Renaissance versions (termini), the body was often shown from the waist up. The form was also used for portrait busts of famous public figures, especially writers like Socrates and Plato. Sappho appears on Ancient Greek herms, and anonymous female figures were often used from the Renaissance on, when herms were often attached to walls as decoration.

(Hat tip to Arne Adolfsen.)

The Secret Erotic Art of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The title of a 6/24/14 blog posting by Barbara Weibel, with a number of remarkable illustrations, including these enormous erect penises, mounted on walls to ensure fertility:

(#4)

Postings on my blogs on phallic art:

a Page “clothed/unclothed” on postings about male photographers concealing or revealing the penis in their work

on 5/20/11: “Saint Sebastian:”: #3 Keith Haring work with penis

on 5/23/11: “Another Flandrin pose”, with a link to an AZBlogX posting on the pose

on 9/14/11: “The news for penises”, with its 5th section on phallic art, with a link to an AZBlogX posting on Jos Karis’s penis art, plus two Baroque penis compositions, my “Dick Bouquet” collage, and a Benetton montage of genitalia

on 1/20/13 on AZBlogX: “Dick aversion”, with 11 examples of art works displaying penises

on 1/21/13: “Horror of the penis”, following up on this AZBlogX posting:

Hard cocks are apparently by definition inflammatory and cannot be displayed with serious artistic intent. There’s a small list of exceptions to this generalization: in particular, folk art, comic and fantasy art, and (overlapping with these categories) art showing erect penises *detached* from a body (here we sing King Missile’s 1992 song “Detachable Penis”). The remaining examples seem subject to constant pressure to re-label them as pornography rather than serious art.

plus a bibliography of books on male art (art with some homoerotic content or tone) in my library

on 1/22/13: “Porn / art”: art or porn? in male photography

on 3/22/13: “Surrealists”: Paul Cadmus and his male nudes

on 5/23/13: “Annals of phallic animation”: a flying penis monster from the 14th century

on 10/2/13: “Male nudes”

on 11/24/14: “Phallic art”, linking to artwork on AZBlogX

on 12/27/14: “Set of three”: Orlan painting of a male nude, reproduced on AZBlogX

on 1/13/15: “Bernard Perlin”: an much given to drawing male nudes

on 7/11/15: “Outrageous art”: Frankenchrist image on AZBlogX

on 9/24/15: “Another medieval penis monster”

on 1/17/16: “A remarkable website”, on photographer Bob Mizer, with full-frontal nudity on AZBlogX

on 5/17/16: “Joe Dallesandro”: photos of JD, with explicit images on AZBlogX

on 7/25/16: “George Platt Lynes and Jared French”, with male nude photos by Lynes on AZBlogX

on 8/22/16: “The Fine Art Exemption”: Michelangelo’s David on the cover of the NYT Magazine

on 8/26/16: “Two impressively eccentric artsts”, section on Lynda Benglis and her bronze phallic smile

on 8/26/16: “Sylvia Sleigh’s male art”, with a link to genitally nude paintings on AZBlogX

on 9/23/16: “News for penises and their simulacrea”:

Two new annoyances with the Penis Ban on WordPress, Facebook, and Google+. In two recent postings on AZBlogX: “Bear poets in 1963” on the 20th, with a Richard Avedon photo of poets (and lovers) Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg, in which Orlovsky’s (flaccid) penis is not at all the focus of the piece, but is important to its interpretation; and “Voluntary cuckoldry” on the 21st, with a striking graphic illustrating the roles of the three characters in such a relationship, a graphic with two stylized penises in it, one flaccid and one erect…

In both cases, the penises are central to the composition, and not as objects of veneration or erotic triggers; my fondness for cocks in these functions is well-known, and though in principle I think that that more open carnal sexuality would be a good thing, I’m willing to keep such images in a protected place. But in these two cases, I bridle at the Penis Ban.

Nevertheless, this blog is extremely important to me, so I don’t want to do anything that would threaten it. But I can still complain.

In contrast to the two problematic images I just described, consider another image, from an article in Le Soir on the 20th, “D’immenses graffitis de sexe choquent à Bruxelles” [‘Huge sex graffiti shock in Brussels’], an image that was quickly posted on Facebook: [#1, a giant penis image]

on 10/24/16: “Naked boys playing at liberty” in photographs, with a link to genitally nude photos on AZBlogX

on 11/9/16: “Eliding the black penis”: balloon male genitalia

on 12/31/16: “Surrealists, but especially Jess”: #5 Narkissos by the artist Jess

Modern times. From Bob Russell in response to Cordova’s request, this instance of a Magrittean Disavowal (which I’ve posted about several times; it all started with a pipe, but it’s gone in lots of directions, here to a wooden penis):

(#5)

Russell gave no source for the image, and I haven’t been able to track it down: Google Images unhelpfully thinks it’s a picture of bread, and searching on the text didn’t get me a source for #5, though it did net this version in chalk:

(#6)

This from Robyn Gallagher on Flickr, taken 12/10/06 in Auckland NZ. Gallagher’s comment: “They’re right. It’s not. Outside the Stamford Hotel on Albert Street.”

Searching on “penis in art” brought several more entertainments. This jar of pickled penises, for example, Mary Ellen Croteau’s Men I Have Known:

(#7)

Penis art by women (like #7) is sometimes playful but often edgy. A SheRa magazine posting by Charlotte Heather on 1/7/15, “Dick Pics: Art and the Penis”, offered four examples of “some female artists working on or around the penis”, starting with this whimsical composition by Freudenthal & Verhagen:

(#7)

Freudenthal & Verhagen are a Dutch duo who’ve been working as a photographic and creative team for over 20 years. Both Carmen Freudenthal (photographer) and Elle Verhagen (stylist) graduated from Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 1988 and began working together shortly after [laergely in commercial art]. Since, this provocative pair have developed a shamelessly edgy style. (link)

Then Louise Bourgeois and her Janus Fleuri:

(#8)

From Wikipedia:

Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (… 25 December 1911 – 31 May 2010) was a French-American artist. Best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the subconscious. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.

And Yayoi Kusama’s Violet Obsession:

(#9)

From the MOMA site:

[Kusama] affixes sewn-and-stuffed phallic protrusions to everyday objects — ladders, shoes, furniture — which she then arranges in installations, some room-sized. Violet Obsession is a monumental Accumulation: a rowboat with oars, electric purple and covered in irregular oblong forms.

Finally, Kirsten Fredericks:

(#10)

A knitwear designer for 12 years, Kirsten Fredericks decided to turn a craft deemed very feminine on its head by crocheting and knitting a bunch of penises. She does all shapes, sizes, colors, and personalities (from SheRa)

Bonus. A bit of language art, a prick ambigram:

(#11)

Reversible word readable upside down. This ambigram shows how the CK letter combination becomes a P after a 180° rotation. In slang language, a prick is a penis, and is also a term used for a worthless asshole. (Wikimedia link) [designed 10/10/16 by Doxoc]

From Wikipedia:

An ambigram is a word, art form or other symbolic representation whose elements retain meaning when viewed or interpreted from a different direction, perspective, or orientation.

Douglas R. Hofstadter describes an ambigram as a “calligraphic design that manages to squeeze two different readings into the selfsame set of curves.”

… The earliest known non-natural ambigram dates to 1893 by artist Peter Newell. Although better known for his children’s books and illustrations for Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll, he published two books of invertible illustrations, in which the picture turns into a different image entirely when turned upside down.

Another item from my blog backlog file, this time a delightful (and informative and perceptive) piece in the Economist’s special year-end issue (of 12/24/16), “Mankind in miniature: A simple, oddly modern, oddly mystical machine”, illustrated here:

(#1)

A hand-carved little man

The piece (unsigned, as is standard in the Economist) begins:

The clothespeg [AmE clothespin] has an ancient look. The simplest sort, with rounded head and body carved from a single piece of wood, might have come from an Egyptian tomb or a Mesoamerican midden. Their shape is vaguely anthropomorphic, like a forked mandrake root (“dolly peg” is the name in commerce), suggesting an offering to the gods of fertility, or of nature. It would be no surprise to find one in an Iron Age settlement, still attached to an Iron Age loincloth.

Odd, then, that the first such peg is not recorded until the early 19th century.

I enjoyed “Mankind in Miniature” so much that I was tempted to post the whole thing here, but I’ll pare it down some, summarizing a few bits in square brackets. The tale contnues:

The Roman soldiers at Vindolanda, on Hadrian’s Wall, did not peg up the thick socks for which they wrote desperate letters home; Lady Macbeth’s maid did not peg up the damp, still-spotted gown. Even Samuel Pepys did not expect to see his shirt, soused after a session at the Cock in Fleet Street, tethered with small wooden clips to a line. Instead, the clothespeg came only just in time to pinion Shelley’s tear-stained handkerchiefs from the wild west wind.

Before this, it appears, drying garments were simply hung over a line (as painted on a wall in Pompeii), or spread out on grass, as shown in illuminated manuscripts of surprisingly tranquil and unsteady laundry days. For John Clare, the peasant-poet of industrialising England, hedges were as likely to be blowing with underwear as with the blossoms of the sloe or the wild cherry. The fierce spines of the blackthorn or hawthorn held a petticoat as well as anything.

Some say fishermen first thought up pegs, to clip their nets to the rigging. But only one name emerges from the sea-fog, that of Jérémie Victor Opdebec, who took out a patent for the dolly peg in 1809, and of whom nothing else is known. He sounds Belgian. According to a charming fake biography by a mid-20th-century French cabaret group, Les Quatre Barbus, he had a scientific bent from boyhood, inventing devices to de-pip currants and to muzzle ants, but it was the desperate sight (and the faint song) of too-light lingerie fluttering perilously on the line that inspired his biggest brainwave.

Time, and the market, were just about ripe for him. People were cramming into cities, the drying grounds and hedges were receding, and clotheslines criss-crossed like cats’ cradles between slum windows. Besides, once the nifty little device became common, uses far removed from laundry could be found. When Charles Dickens suffered a seizure, a clothespeg was thrust between his teeth to stop him biting his tongue. In Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women”, Amy slept nightly with a peg on her nose to try to make it thinner (a method tried, too, by Diane Keaton). Cartoon characters found them a hands-free way of keeping nasty smells at bay. They are now used to keep food fresh and tablecloths flat, clip gels or diffusers to film lights, correct the hang of curtains, hold lit matches longer, squeeze out the last bit of toothpaste from a tube; in short, for so many essential tasks that humans may well wonder how they ever managed without them.

[At the time, clothespins were hand made, from native woods, typically by gypsies (aka Travellers). But then along came industrialization, and soon virtually all clothespins were factory made.]

(#2)

The factory-made clothespin, as turned into wall art for Pottery Barn 

… [Then the metal spring:] It could be argued — and still is — that a metal adjunct is not an invention, merely a modification. Nonetheless David M. Smith’s “new and useful or improved … spring clamp for clothes lines” (1853) made him the inventor of the modern articulated peg. His design, as he described it in almost erotic detail, featured two levers conjoined with a spring so that “the two longer legs may be moved toward each other and at the same time move the shorter ones apart”, in harmonious opposition. His last diagram showed Opdebec’s design, “the common wooden clothes pin in common use”, as he scornfully described it. It was inferior because it had to be pushed on garments like a prong. By contrast, his own peg delicately clipped them to the line.

Inevitably that too was improved, by Solon E. Moore in 1887, with a “coiled fulcrum” of wire.

(#3)

The Smith-Moore clothespin

… By the early 20th century the equivalent of 500,000 board-feet of lumber (perhaps 700 tonnes) a year, in the form of sawmill waste, were being pulled from the Green Mountains to make pegs at a rate of more than 20,000 a day.

[Eventually plastic clothespins mostly replaced the wooden ones, though wood has apparently become fashionable again.]

(#4)

Plastic clothespins

The Smith-Moore peg is a triumph of design, equally pleasing when mini (to clip a sprig of lavender to a martini glass, or a favour to a wedding menu) or when maxi, as in Claes Oldenburg’s 14-metre-high steel “Clothespin” in Philadelphia. In 150 years, this item has not been improved on.

(#5)

… This apotheosis of the peg began in a fittingly ordinary way. In 1967, as he left one day for the airport, Oldenburg [the Swedish-born American sculptor] slipped a clothespeg into his pocket. As his flight approached Chicago shortly afterwards, he held up the pin against the skyscrapers below and thought it could vie with them. Sketches followed, in which colossal pegs of “a certain Gothic character” stood with their heads in windblown clouds. Yet the more he considered the two leaning parts, joined by metal rings, the more Oldenburg compared them to Brancusi’s cubist stone lovers in the Philadelphia Art Museum. (“Cpin=kiss”, he scribbled on the print.) From this thought, sown in the public consciousness, flowed a dozen others. The immense clothespin, according to the city’s boosters, links Philadelphia’s colonial heritage to its difficult present; it reflects the city’s efforts to close the gap between rich and poor; and in its evocation of simple, domestic things it brings all men and women together.

Chief in the mind of the sculptor remained the simple thought of two lovers embracing. The same idea seems to have drifted through Smith’s mind as he wrote his patent proposal, and through the minds of many pegmakers, dealing with the simple spring and return of a piece of cloven wood. From this elemental urge to get together sprang all humankind — with its triumphs, its failures, its endeavours and its ingenuity.

This morning, another visit (with Juan Gomez) to the cactus and succulent garden at Stanford, which has been made very happy by all the rain we’ve been getting (it’s been wreaking havoc all over northern California, but it’s made the cacti and succulents thrive). I’ll post separately about two plants that especially attracted our attention, but this posting is about some plants I came across while I was scouring the net to find the ones we saw.

The problem here is that there are no labels on anything in the garden, nor does there seem to be a website listing the plants there, so I was reduced to searching on descriptions (in my own words) of the plants we saw. This led me to an assortment of extraordinary plants that were nothing like the ones we saw. Including two phallic blossoms, each in consort with testicular structures: two plant packages from the British Arbtalk discussion forum site (for arborists), supplied by member bob in 2007, a man who seems to have an eye for these things. One is an evergreen, one a cactus.

(bob didn’t identify either of them, so for the moment they’re mystery plants.)

The evergreen. A flower stalk, and two cones:

(#1)

The cactus. A truly startling cactus, with a substantial flower stalk (looking red and inflamed), complete with the counterpart of a urethral meatus:

(#2)

The base (the main structure of the cactus), playing the testicular role, looks a lot like a barrel cactus, but this isn’t the way they bloom.

Among the stand-out cactuses at the Stanford cactus and succulent garden these days: the wonderfully named Cephalocereus senilis (very roughly, ‘old man candle-head’). One of a large set of stand-up, erect cactuses that pretty much inevitably count as phallic symbols — in this case, with the added attraction of lots of wispy white hair. A codgerie of shaggy men:

This is a gathering of old men, as in the tv movie. From Wikipedia:

A Gathering of Old Men is a 1987 American television drama film directed by Volker Schlöndorff and based on the novel of the same name.

A bigoted white farmer is shot in self-defense on a Louisiana sugarcane plantation. A group of old black men come forward en masse to take responsibility for the killing.

It’s also a minyan (there’s a tenth man off to the left of this shot). On the noun minyan from NOAD2:

a quorum of ten men (or in some synagogues, men and women) over the age of 13 required for traditional Jewish public worship

(One of the great things about shaggy cactuses is that you can’t determine their race, ethnicity, or religion.)

I prefer to refer to such a group with the portmanteau codgerie (codger + coterie). On the two parts (from NOAD2):

often derogatory an elderly man, especially one who is old-fashioned or eccentric

a small group of people with shared interests or tastes, especially one that is exclusive of other people

And then on the plant, from Wikipedia:

Cephalocereus senilis (old man cactus [or shaggy man cactus]) is a species of cactus native to Guanajuato and Hidalgo in eastern Mexico. It is threatened in the wild, but widespread propagation and popularity in cultivation have reduced the demand on wild populations.

Cephalocereus senilis is a tall, columnar species with clusters of stems that may grow to 5–15 m tall; the individual stems are usually unbranched, being unable to withstand the weight of side branches adequately. The most striking feature is the shaggy coat of long, white hairs suggestive of unkempt hair on an old man. The coat is a particularly striking silvery white on the young cactus; as the plant ages the stem begins to lose its covering. The flowers are red, yellow, or white, though the plant may not flower until 10–20 years old.

The hairs are modified spines and they make many a plant appear almost snow-white; they serve to protect the plant from frost and sun. However, the hairs are only the radial spines of the cactus; they conceal formidable sharp yellow central spines that belie the inoffensive appearance of the hairy covering.

Note: the old guys might look innocuous, but they’re formidably prickly.

(Frank talk about the male body, but no sex in this particular posting. Use your judgment.)

Four body items that have come my way recently: bouncing penises and testicles (and other intimate views of the body) in a new computer game; mussels as vaginal symbols; axillary delights; and anal art.

This is Part I: Dangly Bits.

(Hat tip to Kim Darnell.)

Not the danglers of dangling modifiers, though that’s a topic close to my heart (revisited just yesterday), but another set of danglers that I fancy.

From the PC Gamer site on January 31st, “Conan Exiles has an ‘endowment’ slider and genital physics” by Christopher Livingston:

Note: this [PC Gamer] post contains several animated gifs of dongs and testicles from Conan Exiles [set in the world of Conan the Barbarian], and those dongs and testicles are bouncing around all over the place, and changing sizes. There’s some pretty extreme taint and buttcrack on display as well. Okay? Okay.

We got an early look today at Conan Exiles, Funcom’s open world survival game, soon to arrive in Early Access. And with Conan comes a delivery of fresh meat. In the character creation menu, players can choose the level of nudity they want: none, partia— downstairs is covered but tops are topless — or full. You’re also treated to an ‘endowment’ slider.

For players who choose a female body, the endowment slider predictably adjusts breast size. For the male body, it adjusts dong size. If you’ve opted for the Full Monty, sliding it back and forth quickly is more than a bit mesmerizing, and I find it nearly impossible to do so without hearing a slide-whistle in my head. [AMZ: Enormously funny.]

Feeling comfortable with the video game nudity you just looked at? Then there’s good news: there’s a lot of it in Conan Exiles. Seeing as how you begin your adventure naked in a desert, you’ll have plenty of time to admire your character’s nude-as-hell bod as you attempt to make your way to safety.

What’s more, Conan Exiles has a ‘Vanity Camera’, toggled by pressing V, which lets you examine your character from all angles. This is about the point in the game where you’ll notice the dong-and-sack physics, provided by the Unreal 4 engine. Have a look. [Serious point here. Achieving realistic package motion in a moving figure is a serious AI challenge, which requires study of the way these things work with real bodies.]

If you’re asking, the answer is yes. Yes, I did very nearly die of dehydration (in the game) while making gifs of my character’s flopping pouch and jiggling wang. I can’t help it! Physics [is]  fun, cocks and balls are utterly ridiculous, and you just don’t see them together in games that often. So I jumped, and squatted, and lurched, and ran, and turned, and hunched, all while taking in the majesty of a physics-enabled package.

The animations are silly, and hypnotic.

The topic of this posting lies somewhere in the intersection of technology, movies, and the comics, with some art (and of course pop culture) thrown in — in the place where animation lives.

(Some frank discussion of the female body, with a racy food photo. Use your judgment.)

A photo on Facebook from John Dorrance, with the comment “These things are obscene”:

Well, they’re striking vaginal symbols (vulvar symbols would be more accurate anatomically, but just think of this commonplace use of vagina as metonymic).

Before I go on with this, I should point out that I’m a long-standing mytilophile, a lover of mytilids (mussels, in the family Mytilidae), or in street talk, a mussel fag (forgive the play on muscle fag, which I am not)  — see my 11/1/15 posting on mussels, with some foody photos — but many people find the creatures uncomfortably, um, life-like, and that includes some gay men like JD (I note that gay men are often charged with hostility towards women, and sometimes that’s a fair cop, but JD’s not in that crew); some straight women; and, yes, some lesbians (one of whom confessed as much in a comment on JD’s posting).

The problem with symbolic genitals that are edible is that the more realistic they look, the more uncomfortable a diner is likely to find them. I am extraordinary well-disposed towards penises, especially up close and personal, but truly realistic edible penis-simulacra would give me pause: eat dick is, after all, figurative.

While I’m playing around with language: to use a common vulvarity, I think I deserve some points for vaginality.

First encountered on Pinterest this morning, what is apparently a new rage in texties: jokes told by a cute husky pup (rather than, say, a llama, a penguin, an eel, or Ryan Gosling), for example this one:

(#1)

(Texty is my name for things that combine the features of slogans — as on e-cards — and cartoons; they are essentially joke delivery systems supplied with some visual background. When the visual background is a fixed image, re-used on many occasions, with a creature or person presented as telling the joke, then the custom has become for the texties to be referred to as meme. In this case, the (cute) husky pup meme. The jokes can be of any sort; many of them are hoary japes rather than fresh cleverness.)

Before I say more about the texty in #1, notes about the actual joke (which was new to me, but probably not to the world). Getting the joke depends on your knowing the Swiss flag:

(#2)

(An especially simply flag design, also one of only two official flags for a nation-state that’s square, rather than rectangular, in shape.)

Once you’ve got #2, you’ll recognize the white cross as a plus sign, which will lead you to another use of the noun plus. From NOAD2:

an advantage: knowing the language is a decided plus

And a big plus is even more of an advantage than just a plus.

Back to #1. From one of many sites spreading cute husky cubs, Dose of Funny, deliriously maintaining that “15 Pun Husky Meme Jokes are Insanely Cute”:

The pun husky meme is one of the best memes to be created in the last year. It’s simple, it takes three photos of an adorable husky pup who is playing with his little husky toy … The first [panel] is him talking, then the second photo is the punch line, and the last photo is the kicker of the little husky pup laughing at the joke… Once you see it, you’ll know why the hilariously cute pun husky meme is just the best of them all. The basic premise is you can tell any sort of corny (but still funny!) joke and if you have it coming from an adorable husky, then it’s not corny anymore, but it’s super cute. Sort of like the lame joke eel, but much, much cuter.

It’s all in the cuteness. Husky pups beat joke eels hands down. Here’s the eel doing racy jokes:

(#3)

(#4)

The joke eel excels at snarkily sophomoric, but the husky cub has the market on cute cornered.

Today’s Bizarro:

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)

To understand this cartoon at all, you need to recognize the figure at the door as Mr. Potato Head, and you need to know the following fact about this character, from #2 in a posting of mine on 5/11/14, where I quote Wikipedia saying that Mr. Potato Head is

a plastic model of a potato which can be decorated with a variety of plastic parts that can attach to the main body. These parts usually include ears, eyes, shoes, a hat, a nose, and a mouth.

Ok, plastic body parts. But there are some not on that list.

Then you need to add in Mr. Potato Head’s reference to his urologist. On urology, from Wikipedia:

Urology (from Greek οὖρον ouron “urine” and -λογία -logia “study of”) … is the branch of medicine that focuses on surgical and medical diseases of the male and female urinary tract system and the male reproductive organs.

So what does Mr. Potato Head have in his hand, for his trip to the urologist? Plastic genitals, penis and testicles, for the specialist to check out. It’s so much easier when everything is detachable.

From a posting by Randy Murray to the Facebook page‎ “THE ERRORIST MOVEMENT – Correct grammar, with humour”, where he comments, “apostrophes mean so much”:

(#1)

At first glance, this ad would seem to fall into four big topic areas on this blog: dubious commercial names; It’s All Grammar; vulgar slang; and phallic play (in particular, word play). To which I add: the conventions on the form of hashtags, e-mail addresses, and web addresses (URLs). But first, I have to tell you that this particular Dick’s Pizza is a fabrication.

(Hat tip to Michael Palmer.)

dickspizza.ca. It’s in Toronto ON, but it’s not an actual functioning pizza parlor. From Adweek on 8/18/16, “SiriusXM Created a Restaurant Called Dick’s Pizza Just to Make Tons and Tons of Penis Jokes: Fake ad and storefront promote comedy contest” by Patrick Coffee:

“Nothing livens up a party quite like a big serving of Dick’s.”

At least that’s the promise of Dick’s Pizza, an unfortunately named and even more unfortunately fictional restaurant created by agency Taxi Toronto for internet radio service SiriusXM.

It almost feels like the brief for this viral play was, “How many penile jokes can you make in one minute?” And the answer is “a great many,” because the resulting ad [viewable on the Adweek site] is bulging with innuendo

There’s more to it than a series of juvenile jokes from a man named Richard Long. In fact, Taxi created the campaign to promote the client’s second annual Top Comic, a contest in which would-be Canadian standup stars compete to win $25,000 and a chance to perform at the Top Comic Finale in September.

Dubious commercial names. A compendium of examples in a 3/22/16 posting, noting

dubious commercial names, ranging from the flagrantly transgressive to the winkingly suggestive to the possibly innocent in intent.

(There’s an inventory of postings, with links, in a 6/10/16 posting.)

The Dick’s / Dicks / dicks in #1 lies squarely in the flagrantly transgressive camp, thanks in part to the lack of apostrophes in all but the logo and the uniformity of case everywhere — either all upper-case or all lower-case — so that the sexual slang dick and the male proper name Dick aren’t distinguished in print (as they are not in speech).

Though men with the nickname (or legal personal name) Dick suffer from a certain amount of joking about their name (see the phallic play section below), and a few insist on being called Richard, Rich, Rick, Richie, or Ricky, most just sail on in life under the name Dick and everyone gets used to it. Some of these men have pizza parlors named after them, and that doesn’t seem to be an issue. A few examples from various parts of the US: Papa Dick’s Pizza in Horseshoe Bend AR, Dick’s Pizza and Pleasure in Milwaukee WI. Dick’s Pizza Palace in Muncie IN, Mountain Dick’s Pizza in Jay VT.

But if you say “Dick’s Pizza” in a jokey voice and with a smirk, then we’re into dick talk.

It’s All Grammar. The Errorist FB page proclaims that it’s all about finding and correcting errors in grammar, but as usual, there’s some question about what counts as grammar for him. People who write two dick’s (with an apostrophic Pl) or his dicks size (with an anapostrophic Poss) surely don’t think that the numeral two requires a Poss form for its head noun — instead, it requires a Pl form — or that a determiner NP (like his dick) has to be in its Pl form — instead, it has to be in its Poss form.

No one’s unclear about the relevant principles of English grammar here. But lots of people are sometimes confused about how to spell the Pl and Poss forms, or (quite often) hold erroneous beliefs about how these forms are to be spelled. There are errors here, sometimes iadvertent, sometimes advertent, but they are spelling errors, akin to spelling definate rather than definite, or seperate rather than separate.

So the question is: Does Randy Murray think that spelling errors count as errors in grammar? If not, then #1 doesn’t belong on the ERRORIST page, but on a page devoted to spelling mistakes (surely there are many of these). If so, then he’s just another one of the It’s All Grammar crowd.

From a 7/10/04 posting of mine to Language Log:

To PITS, People In The Street, “grammar” embraces pretty much everything having to do with language, spoken or written, so long as it’s regulated in some way: syntax, morphology, word choice, pronunciation, politeness, discourse organization, clarity and effectiveness, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, bibliographic style, whatever.

— an idea pursued futher in a 2/22/12 posting “It’s All Grammar” on this blog:

why do people think of such a diverse collection of phenomena … as constituting a natural category?

The short answer: they all involve aspects of language or language use that (some) people object to and so would (literally) regulate; they are domains of linguistic peeve-triggers. But otherwise there’s no common thread, and it’s a serious confusion to treat them as deeply similar. Meanwhile, there is a place for a term denoting ‘the system of regularities connecting the phonetics and semantics of a (variety of a) language’ [this is what linguists call a grammar]. If you really have to have a term for the great grab-bag of linguistic peeve-triggers taken together, I suggest garmmra.

Garmmra is a giant complaint space, not itself a system of regularities.

Here I lapse into Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 29, even though it’s not strictly relevant:

Man: (… sees a door marked complaints; he goes in) I want to complain.

Man in charge: You want to complain … look at these shoes … I’ve only had them three weeks and the heels are worn right through.

Man: No, I want to complain about …

Man in charge: If you complain nothing happens … you might just as well not bother. My back hurts and … (the man exits, walks down the corridor and enters a room)

Man: I want to complain. (‘Spreaders’, who is just inside the door, hits man on the head with a mallet) Ooh!

Spreaders: No, no, no, hold your head like this, and then go ‘waaagh’! Try it again. (he hits him again)

Man: Waaghh!

Spreaders: Better. Better. But ‘waaaaaghh’! ‘Waaaagh’! Hold your hands here …

Man: No!

Spreaders: Now. (hits him)

Man: Waagh!

Spreaders: That’s it. That’s it. Good.

Man: Stop hitting me!

Spreaders: What?

Man: Stop hitting me.

Spreaders: Stop hitting you?

Man: Yes.

Spreaders: What did you come in here for then?

Man: I came here to complain.

Spreaders: Oh I’m sorry, that’s next door. It’s being hit on the head lessons in here.

Man: What a stupid concept.

Vulgar slang. This is the usage label NOAD2 gives for dick ‘penis’. As I’ve posted elsewhere, I think this label is no longer accurate: dick and cock are simply informal slang terms for the penis, everyday alternatives to the medical/technical label penis and the literary-toned phallus (and an assortment of euphemisms and playful synonyms).

On the other hand, in collocations with other bits of sexual slang, dick can certainly be vulgar — and eat dick ‘fellate’ (which figures prominently in #1)  is one such collocation. So #1 manages to talk dirty by pretending to be merely erroneous spelling.

Phallic word play. The great vehicle for word play on the name Dick was Richard Milhous Nixon, Tricky Dick, who was, among other things, a notable dick / dickhead ‘a stupid, irritating, or ridiculous person, particularly a man’ (NOAD2) — specifically, an irritating, meanspirited paranoid. If you disliked Nixon, you used his name against him; if you supported him, you used his name against his opponents, as in these (unofficial) campaign buttons from his 1972 presidential campaign against George McGovern (for the presidential term that was cut short by Watergate):

(#2)

(Apparently, similar buttons were created for Nixon’s unsuccessful 1960 campaign against John F. Kennedy.)

And then, eventually, came the 1999 comedy movie Dick, discussed on this blog on 7/21/15. About Tricky Dick, played by Dan Hedaya (scruff-jowled, scowling) in an inspired piece of casting.

Meanwhile, there’s the sperm whale Moby-Dick of Melville’s novel. The novel was written well before dick ‘penis’ became current, but sperm whales do have huge (retractable) penises, about 2m (6.5ft) long, and whale penises do get some coverage in the book, so Moby-Dick and his penis have become subjects for cartoonists. Two items (whose sources I haven’t tracked down):

(#3)

(#4)

On the sperm whale, from Wikipedia:

The sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus), or cachalot, is the largest of the toothed whales and the largest toothed predator.

… From the early eighteenth century through the late 20th, the species was a prime target of whalers. The head of the whale contains a liquid wax called spermaceti, from which the whale derives its name. Spermaceti was used in lubricants, oil lamps, and candles. Ambergris, a waste product from its digestive system, is still used as a fixative in perfumes.

On-line conventions: hashtags, e-mail addresses, web addresses. The image in #1 contains both the hashtag #dickspizza and the abbreviated web address (URL) dickspizza.ca. Either one gets you to Dick’s Pizza, the Top Comic site on Sirius XM. Now, hashtags, e-mail addresss, and web addresses are allowed to have (some) parts with characters other than plain Latin letters (lower-case a-z, upper-case A-Z) and digits (0-9) and to distinguish case, but some systems don ‘t tolerate much beyond the basic characters and are insensitive to case (though hashtags begin with #, domain names (after the @) in e-mail addresses can have a hyphen in addition to letters and digits, and path names in URLs will have a period), so the custom has grown up for actual usage to revert to the plainest possible styles: all lower-case, with no special ASCII characters — in particular, no apostrophes — and no spaces.

The hashtags #Dick’s Pizza, #Dick’sPizza, #DicksPizza, and #dickspizza will (in principle) all get you to the racy Dick’s Pizza Twitter page, but usual practice is to go for the last, because it’s the simplest to type — a practice that eliminates the distinction between the common noun dick and the proper name Dick and the distinction between Pl and Poss forms of these nouns. (Similarly, #Je Suis Charlie, #JeSuisCharlie, and #jesuischarlie will, in principle, all get you to the Charlie Hebdo Twitter page, but amost everyone uses the last.) This custom has nothing to do with ordinary spelling; it’s all about on-line conventions. But it helps to set up the Dick’s Pizza joke.

There are similar restrictions (in many systems) on the names of image files. Here’s a full view of the Toronto storefront (note the bonus sexual word plays in DICK’S COMING SOON and DING DONG! WE DELIVER):

(#5)

The name of the image file is DicksStorefront.jpg. On my system, the apostrophic Dick’sStorefront.jpg is unacceptable, as is a version with a space: Dicks Storefront.jpg. On the other hand, the system is case-sensitive: DicksStorefront.jpg, Dicksstorefront.jpg, dicksStorefront.jpg, and dicksstorefront.jpg are not equivalent.

I set it off with my 3/11 posting on “Ejaculatory pop”, about the vivid ejaculatory V and N pop. On ADS-L the next day, Larry Horn cracked:

And it does add a whole new perspective on that hanky-panky between monkey and weasel in the neighborhood of that mulberry bush…

And then the discussion branched into dispute over what the right words were for the nursery rhyme/song “Pop Goes the Weasel” and what the words meant (everybody wants texts to tell coherent stories, and that applies even to nursery rhym — despite their frequent bizarrenesses). There’s a nice Wikipedia page on the subject, which is good on the variant words and on the interpretations, most of which are ingenious inventions.

There are two constants in all of this: the title “Pop Goes the Weasel” and (with only slight variations) the tune:

(#1)

Everything else is variable, though a monkey opponent of the weasel eventually became another constant.

Notes of the weasel, first from Wikipedia:

In English-speaking areas, weasel can be a disparaging term, noun or verb, for someone regarded as sneaky, conniving or untrustworthy. [AZ: Presumably, from the ability of weasels, and ferrets, to get into and out of narrow, tight spaces (they are slippery creatures); and because of the reputation of weasels as predators of poultry.] Similarly, “weasel words” is a critical term for words or phrasing that are vague, misleading or equivocal.

And from A-Z Animals (very lightly edited):

Within their territory, weasels [genus Mustela, including also stoats/ermine, ferrets, polecats, and minks] are known to make nests in crevices, tree roots and abandoned burrows which are lined with grass and fur and are where the Weasel is able to safely rest. Weasels are incredibly strong and powerful for their size and are able to catch and kill animals that are much larger than themselves, before carrying it back to their burrow. In order to make sure that they have the best view of their surroundings, weasels are known to sit up on their hind legs exposing their white underside. [AZ: note that they pop up out of their nests and also pop up on their hind legs to survey their surroundings.]

The weasel is an everyday wild creature in the UK and North America, but the monkey is an exotic; it’s symbolic of playfulness, high spirits, energy, curiosity, unpredictability — and also of blackness (and otherness). Meanwhile, “The signifying monkey is a character of African-American folklore that derives from the trickster figure of Yoruba mythology” (link).

An Anthony Newley riff on the song, from the Monte Carlo Show on tv (broadcast from Monaco in the US in 1980, in the UK in 1981 and 1982), can be viewed here. (Notes on this version will appear below).

From the Wikipedia entry, with some comments of mine:

“Pop! Goes the Weasel” is an English nursery rhyme and singing game. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 5249. The jack-in-the-box children’s toy often plays the melody.

There are many different versions of the lyrics to the song. In England, most share the basic verse:

Half a pound of tuppenny rice,
Half a pound of treacle.
That’s the way the money goes,
Pop! goes the weasel.

… The song seems to have crossed the Atlantic in the 1850s, where U.S. newspapers soon afterwards call it “the latest English dance”, and the phrase “Pop! goes the weasel” soon took hold. The remaining words were still unstable in Britain, and as a result some of the U.S. lyrics are significantly different and may have an entirely different source, but use the same tune. The following lyric was printed in Boston in 1858:

All around the cobbler’s house,
The monkey chased the people…
In 1901 in New York the opening lines were:
All around the chicken coop,
The possum chased the weasel…

The most common recent version was not recorded until 1914. … American versions often include some of the following:

All around the mulberry bush,
The monkey chased the weasel.
The monkey stopped to pull up his sock, (or The monkey stopped to scratch his nose)
Pop! goes the weasel…

[AZ: Note the nose, which often serves as as phallic symbol – beak in the Newley version – plus Newley’s final double entendre “Would you excuse me for a minute; I’m just going to pop my weasel”]

Contemporary verses in the United States include these:

All around the mulberry bush, (or cobbler’s bench) (or carpenter’s bench)
The monkey chased the weasel.
The monkey thought ’twas all in good fun, (or ’twas all in good sport) (or that it was a joke) (or it was a big joke) (or twas all in fun)
Pop! goes the weasel.

[AZ: Still another version, with a variant in the Newley clip:

Every night when I go out the monkey’s [Newley: weasel’s] on the table.
Take a stick and knock it off.
Pop goes the weasel.]

… Perhaps because of the obscure nature of the various lyrics there have been many suggestions for what they mean, particularly the phrase “Pop! goes the weasel”, including: that it is a tailor’s flat iron, a dead weasel, a hatter’s tool, a spinner’s weasel used for measuring in spinning, a piece of silver plate, or that ‘weasel and stoat’ is Cockney rhyming slang for “throat”, as in “Get that down yer Weasel” meaning to eat or drink something. An alternative meaning involves pawning one’s coat in order to buy food and drink, as “weasel” is rhyming slang for “coat” and “pop” is a slang word for “pawn”

… Other than correspondences, none of these theories has any additional evidence to support it, and some can be discounted because of the known history of the song. Iona and Peter Opie observed that, even at the height of the dance craze in the 1850s, no-one seemed to know what the phrase meant.

Notes on the word pop (unlikely to have been ejaculatory in the original, but always available for double entendres). Of all the entries in NOAD2, the most relevant one is:

adverb pop: with a light explosive sound: the champagne went pop.

(because of the syntax, with the sound-reporting verb go, as in He went “Waaah” or “Waah!” went the naughty boy.)

The remaining possibly relevant entries for the verb pop:

1 [1a] [no obj.] make a light explosive sound: corks popped, glasses tinkled, and delicate canapés were served; [1b] [with obj.] cause (something) to burst, making a pop: they were popping balloons with darts; [1c] (of a person’s ears) make a small popping sound within the head as pressure is equalized, typically because of a change of altitude; [1e] [with obj.] heat (popcorn or another foodstuff) until it bursts open; [1f] (of a person’s eyes) bulge or appear to bulge when opened wide, especially as an indication of surprise.

2 [2a] [no obj.] go somewhere, typically for a short time and often without notice: she popped in to see if she could help; [2b] [with obj.] put or move (something) somewhere quickly: he popped his head around the door

4 [with obj.] informal take or inject (a drug): people who obsessively drink and pop pills.

5 [with obj.] Brit. informal pawn (something).

have (or take) a pop at: informal, chiefly Brit. attack physically or verbally.

pop the question: informal propose marriage.

pop up: appear or occur suddenly and unexpectedly: these memories can pop up from time to time [AZ: used especially of a jack-in-the-box]; Computing (of a browser window) appear without having been requested, especially for the purpose of advertising. [AZ: not relevant to the nursery rhyme, but entertaining because of its metaphoric connection to the earlier uses]

Yesterday on ADS-L, John Baker summarized the state of pop-weasel-monkey affairs as he saw them:

Probably the “weasel” doesn’t mean anything, in any reasonable objective sense.  “Pop Goes the Weasel” emerged in late 1852 and was an immediate international sensation, starting in Great Britain and quickly moving to Australia and America.  There is some evidence that initially it did not have words, other than the title.  There was broad and early confusion as to its meaning, even as more verses were being written and becoming popular.  This suggests that someone came up with a nonsense phrase, “pop goes the weasel,” that matched up to a key portion of the music, then other people wrote words to accompany it.

If there is a meaning, it probably has something to do with money.  A number of the key verses refer to money, frequently including the key line, “That’s the way the money goes.” [AZ: which I’ve largely sidelined here, in favor of the pop connection]

Wikipedia suggests the possibility of a connection to a spinner’s weasel:  “A spinner’s weasel consists of a wheel which is revolved by the spinner in order to measure off thread or yarn after it has been produced on the spinning wheel. The weasel is usually built so that the circumference is six feet, so that 40 revolutions produces 80 yards of yarn, which is a skein. It has wooden gears inside and a cam, designed to cause a popping sound after the 40th revolution, telling the spinner that she has completed the skein.”  Interesting, but I suspect it’s no more than a coincidence.  I think the protagonist is generally understood to be a male cobbler, not a female spinner.

Since then, other posters have deepened the historical background considerably, especially in connection with the dance with which things seem to have started.

Bonus. In searching for illustrations for this posting, I stumbled upon this cartoon, which turns on the fact that Spanish papas con chorizo ‘potatoes with chorizo [sausage]’ fits the crucial (tetrameter) line of the song just as well as pop goes the weasel:

(#2)

(The style is familiar, but I haven’t identified the cartoonist.)

While there is a possible double entendre here, I doubt that anyone would get it: papas con chorizo is a hearty Mexican breakfast dish (essentially chorizo hash; add an egg on top), familiar and homey:

(#3)

(Talk of sexual bodyparts and sexual acts, but with symbols rather than pictures of carnal reality.)

From the NYT‘s Fashion & Style section on the 14th, “Gaymoji: A New Language for That Search” by Guy Trebay, with the hot gay news from West Hollywood CA:

You don’t need a degree in semiotics to read meaning into an eggplant balanced on a ruler or peach with an old-fashioned telephone receiver on top. That the former is the universally recognized internet symbol for a large male member and the latter visual shorthand for a booty call is something most any 16-year-old could all too readily explain. [Maybe most any 16-year-old, but not a lot of older people; see below.]

As with most else in our culture, demographics define the future, particularly those describing an age cohort born with a smartphone in hand. That, at least, is the calculation being made by Grindr, the successful gay meeting app with ambitions to overhaul itself as an internet commons for a generation of young lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their pals.

And so, starting this week, Grindr will offer to users a set of trademarked emoji, called Gaymoji — 500 icons that function as visual shorthand for terms and acts and states of being that seem funnier, breezier and less freighted with complication when rendered in cartoon form in place of words.

One of the new emoji,  an image of semen / ejaculăte — jizz, spooge, cum, cream, spunk, etc.:

(#1)

Each emoji is a pictographic symbol, with a conventional name — usually, a description of the thing depicted — and a physical form (with a corresponding Unicode coding). I don’t know the names for Grindr’s gaymoji, but earlier emoji (released over a number of years) have names and forms collected in inventories you can find on-line. The names and forms don’t tell you, however, how the symbols are used to convey meaning. There are widely agreed-on meanings for some, but there are alternative forms for some uses, and alternative uses for some forms, considerable variation in local usage, and often creative deployments of emoji among small groups, and these usages are constantly in flux. You can think of the sets of emoji as like sets of slang vocabulary.

For sexting purposes, various emoji with relatively literal uses have become widespread conventional symbols for bodyparts and acts. For some time, the Eggplant emoji has been the conventional penis symbol, although recently it’s been challenged by two other emoji, Banana and Hot Dog. We’ll see plenty of Eggplants below, but here are the other two:

(#2)

(#3)

Then, there’s the Peach emoji, usually representing a butt or bottom (either buttocks or anus), but also sometimes used as a vaginal symbol, where it’s now in competition with the Taco emoji:

(#4)

Peaches are to come.

Specifically for the anus, there’s the Doughnut (or more outrageously, the Chocolate Doughnut) and the OK Symbol. For the testicles, Grapes. And for the breasts, Cherries. (There are other alternatives.)

The full range of penis emoji covers pretty much everything phallic, in addition to  eggplant/aubergine, banana, and hot dog: corncob, burrito, baby bottle, rocket, lipstick, unicorn, rooster (that is, cock; but the rooster is also used as a wake-up call), electric plug (can also convey ‘hook-up’), snake, mushroom, cactus, lollipop, joystick, elephant (can also convey ‘you’re not saying something that needs to be said’), gun (can also convey ‘insults fired’), soft ice cream, dagger, chili pepper, cricket bat, and field hockey stick. Three of my favorites from this set, Baby Bottle, Electric Plug, and Elephant:

(#5)

(#6)

(#7)

Back to the NYT story:

“Almost 20 percent of all Grindr messages” already use emoji, its creative director, Landis Smithers, said. “There’s this shift going on culturally and we need to follow the users where they’re taking us.”

That is, toward a visual language of rainbow unicorns, bears, otters and handcuffs — to cite some of the images available in the first set of 100 free Gaymoji symbols. An additional 400 are there for the unlocking by those willing to pay $3.99 to own digital icons arranged in categories like Mood, Objects, Body, and Dating and Sex.

The company’s founder, Joel Simkhai, said that in his own communications on Grindr he had often felt the need for emoji that were not previously available.

“Partly, this project started because the current set of emojis set by some international board were limited and not evolving fast enough for us,” said Mr. Simkhai, who in certain ways fits the stereotype of a gay man in West Hollywood: a lithe, gym-fit, hairless nonsmoker who enjoys dancing at gay circuit parties. “If I wanted to say something about going dancing, I would always have to use the red-dress dancing woman. I thought, ‘Why isn’t there a guy dancing?’ It was weird to me that I always had to send that woman in the red dress.”

Among the pitfalls Grindr faces by introducing a set of icons to represent a group no longer easily defined is that by replacing one set of hoary stereotypes, it may be introducing others just as clunky and unfortunate.

“One problem is, you have this common language that’s not being organically created by marginalized people,” as were secret hankie or hatband codes once used to signal identity in the era of the closet, said Doug Meyer, an assistant professor in the department of women, gender and sexuality at the University of Virginia. “The corporate element is a new part of this. Having a common corporate language created to benefit a business ends up excluding a lot of people and creating very particular and normative ways of thinking about sex.”

The point is not altogether lost on Mr. Simkhai, who noted that at a recent birthday celebrated just before he inaugurated the Gaymoji, he was given the bad news by colleagues that, at 40, he might have aged out of his own app.

As if to emphasize that assertion, a reporter combing through the new set of Gaymoji in search of something that would symbolize a person of Mr. Simkhai’s vintage could find only one.

It was an image of a gray-haired daddy holding aloft a credit card.

Ah yes, Grindr’s users tend very strongly to the young and fit, most of whom believe themselves to be butch, so the new gaymoji have little place for older men, bulkier men who don’t identify as bears, or fems. As far as I can tell, the only Grindr gaymoji for the extravagant amongst us is the Kiki character, seen here in a collection of new emoji:

(#8)

Row 1, emoji 3. From Wikipedia:

A “kiki” (alternately kiking or a ki) is a term which grew out of Queer Black /Latino social culture – loosely defined as an expression of laughter or onomatopoeia for laughing, which extended to mean a gathering of friends for the purpose of gossiping and chit-chat, and later made more widely known in the song “Let’s Have a Kiki” by the Scissor Sisters. [2012] [Scissor Sisters videos can be viewed here and here]

The Kiki world is extravagantly gay, also full of drag displays and general genderfuck. But the emoji that you’d expect to be used by guys who want to convey that they are noticeably gay — the Fire emoji, a picture of a flame, used for things that are “hot” in any of a number of senses

(#9)

— has sometimes been pressed into service to convey ‘flamer, flaming faggot, fem’, though (so far as I can tell) only in a negative way, to convey rejection (as in the old sex ad abbreviation NFF ‘no fats or fems’), with a red diagonal or cross over the flame, or in combination with a rejection emoji, Restriction or Cross Mark:

(#10)

(#11)

Row 1, emoji 4 in #8 has the Peach + Telephone combination mentioned in the NYT piece, conveying ‘booty call’. And in row 1, emoji 2, Banana + Hammock, referring to a men’s garment that cradles the man’s junk as in a sling, pushing it forward to show it off — as in a classic Speedo, so is often used to convey “Speedo swimsuit’. And in row 1, emoji 5, (Rainbow) Unicorn Head, which could be treating the unicorn merely as a magical gay creature; or could convey horniness (with the unicorn serving as a phallic symbol); or, remarkably, signify a bisexual woman available for three-way sex with a couple (why a unicorn? you ask — because such women are as rare as unicorns, to the point of non-existence).

The last two emoji in row 2 are clever ways of conveying ‘bottom’ (receptive) vs. ‘top’ (insertive) roles in anal sex, via a guy in the bottom vs.top bunk of a bunk bed.  In older systems of emoji, this “flagging” of bottom vs. top roles (managed in hanky and armband codes by displaying colors on the right vs. left side of the body) was achieved by down vs. up symbols: a down arrow or finger pointing down vs. an up arrow or finger pointing up (unfortunately the arrows can also be used to convey disapproval vs. approval or ‘no’ vs.’yes’).

Another display of Grindr gaymoji:

(#12)

Among other things, lots of eggplants and peaches. Also, in row 1, emoji 3, two guys in a men’s room stall, signifying tearoom / t-room sex. Meanwhile in row 3, Egglant + Ring used to convey ‘cockring’, Eggplant cock with a Prince Albert piercing, and Eggplant + Knife and Fork to convey ‘eat cock’.

Somewhat older intriguing emoji include Wind-Blowing Face:

(#13)

and Cheese Wedge:

(#14)

#13 conveys oral sex. #14 is sometimes described as a picture of a “hunk of cheese”, so that it could in principle convey ‘hunky man’ (the Grindr gaymoji include much more direct representations of such guys), but I don’t know if it’s been used that way.

Two gaps: hardly any semantics, hardly any syntax. The ordinary presentations of emoji for sexting give the visual forms and their names (or a description of the pictographs), but are remarkably coy about assigning meanings to them for use. This is like a slang lexicon without definitions. I’m not on Grindr — I don’t think I could get away with being a participant-observer (as I have been in looking at a number of other sexual practices of gay men), nor do I think it would be ethical for me to pretend to be guy looking for hook-ups on Grindr, in order to collect a corpus of emoji as used in actual interactions — so what I can glean about meaning in use is second-hand and imperfect (and mostly sanitized for presentation in newspapers, magazines, and blogs). It is clear that, as with slang lexical items, there’s a tremendous amount of variation here, and that the ways people use the emoji are enormously context-dependent. But I don’t have a grip on the variables, so I can only make some suggestive observations.

There’s an instructive comparison here to another type of system of visual forms with assigned names (and descriptions of the forms), but with what amounts to a semantics for the individual forms, namely phonetic symbols in various schemes of transcription. Pullum & Ladusaw’s Phonetic Symbol Guide (2nd ed., Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996) is an inventory of visual forms, each given a name and a description of its shape — but along with a description of the range of sounds the symbol refers to. Here’s one entry:

(#15)

It gets a name, we get the picture of its shape (and there’s a Unicode coding for the shape) — but we also get a semantics for the symbol (expressed in the technical vocabulary of articulatory phonetics.

For some sexting emoji, we get all of this. For instance, we get the name Eggplant and a picture of its shape (and there’s a Unicode coding for the shape) — and we also get a (rough and skeletal) semantics for the symbol, in an English gloss: ‘penis’. But the semantics is grossly impoverished: any use of the Eggplant emoji doesn’t just refer to a penis, it performs some speech act in which a penis plays a central role: in particular, the user is saying that he loves penises, or that he loves particular kinds of penises (uncut ones, or big ones, etc.), or that he’s offering his penis for sex, or that he’s looking for a penis to enjoy in sex, or that he wants to be gangbanged, or whatever.  To use the Eggplant successfully, you either need more material in your sext, or you need to believe that the person you’re sexting can supply the content of such material from context.

Somewhere in all of this, you need more than just a big bag of emoji, with their referents, floating in space: you need a pragmatics, and you probably need some syntax to organize the emoji into coherent larger units. There are useful emoji for this — for instance, the rejection emoji above, and emoji like Binoculars, conveying ‘looking for’:

(#16)

With some ingenuity, you can slap emoji together to get your hook-up message across. Your task is much like that of  speakers of mutually unintelligible languages who come into contact in a trading context; they come to share at least minimal lexical resources, and have to slap these words together into longer chunks, which (with the aid of gesture and facial expression) they can then use to get simple messages across. The process involves a lot of variability and indeterminacy, though the system can evolve to greater conventionalization and fixity — can move towards something more like an actual language, rather than an improvisational scheme for achieving simple goals.

Communicating via emoji (in sexting or for any other purpose) is different from communicating in a trade jargon context. Emoji texters share a lot of cultural knowledge; if they need to, they can fall back on regular texting in a language they share, or mix emoji and text (for a lot of texters, emoji serve mostly as a commentary on text or an expressive counterpart to it, much like prosody, gesture, and facial expression in speech); they will tend to treat emoji as an arena for playfulness, expressivity, and creativity; and they will see emoji as a medium for achieving great brevity and immediacy.

(Sex acts up the wazoo, so very much not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Passed on by Gregory Ward, this entertaining Onion video “This Day In History: The Invention Of The Handjob”, in which

Handjob inventor Fred Gilgoff describes the inspiration for the two-person masturbation technique [invented this day 60 years ago].

The conceit is that the hand job technque was devised, much in the way that the Heimlich maneuvre was devised, and that before Gilgoff’s great discovery, people had no effective technique for manually getting one another off. (According to the video, the hand job breakthrough was followed by a string of others: the blow job, the rim job, and fisting.)

Well, this is the Onion, so it’s all made up, and it’s preposterous to think that hand jobs and blow jobs have only recently become sexual pleasures; the evidence of art going back to ancient times, in a number of parts of the world, tells us that these two acts (and ass-fucking) go back a long way, no doubt to prehistoric times.

But to talk seriously about these things: the occurrence of sexual acts (like other sociocultural practices) clearly varies in different social groups, at different times and places, and particular acts (like rimming or fisting or urethral sounding) or variants of these acts (like deep-throating in blow jobs, or particular positions for fucking) might be socioculturally quite restricted. Vaginal intercourse is of course a cultural universal — which doesn’t mean that everyone engages in it, in the same way — and same-sex sexual practices, self-masturbation, other-masturbation, sexual kisses, and oral sex are all widespread and can be seen as just items in a big package of sexual practices that have been generally available to people, forever, though not necessarily deployed in all sociocultural contexts, and certainly not in the same way or with the same social import.

That’s all about acts. Then there are linguistic expressions, and here the Onion‘s timeline actually corresponds pretty well to the appearance of the relevant instances of the X job sexual snowclonelet. From my 9/28/13 posting “X job”:

The [sexual X job] compounds are not venerable; they go back only to the middle of the 20th century.

The first OED cites reported there: hand job 1939, blow job 1961, rim job 1969 (with a variant ream job). (That is, roughly 60 yeas ago today.) Now of course, there was a rich collection of vocabulary (ranging from grossly crude to cautiously euphemistic) for talking about these practices before these particular expressions came into vogue. And, more important, a stunning amount of negotiation for sex is managed entirely non-verbally, or by incredibly vague circumlocutions (Wanna play?, Need some company?, Want a buddy to hang out with, etc.). You could, in fact, lead a long, rich sexual life without putting any names at all to what you do. (I’ve remarked several times that even in locations devoted to man-man sex, like the gay baths, a great many men insist that all negotiation over desire and willingness be carried out non-verbally; they might have very specific aims but won’t put them into words (not even a curt Suck my cock!); and they will reject any prospective partner who wants to talk about these matters.)

So: you don’t have to know the words, or (even if you know them) use them, or (even if you use words for talking about the sex) use the X job compounds specifically. You can still give or get hand jobs and blow jobs. Maybe rim jobs too, but sexual ass-licking (though no doubt venerable) seems to be a relatively recent fashion, especially driven by the practices of American gay men from (roughly) the 1940s on, and then canonized in American gay porn, where rimming has been a standard feature of sexual encounters on film at least since the 1970s. (Actual practice is extremely hard to gauge, and the records of lexical usage are very imperfect guides; for what it’s worth, GDoS‘s first cite for anal-sexual rim is from 1949.)

Digression on acts: hand job, rub job, blow job. From a posting earlier today on AZBlogX, on “Hand jobs”:

Hand jobs and frottage (aka rubbing) are the non-penetrative forms of mansex and, as such, are often discounted — treated as mere accompaniments to other sexual acts (it’s common to jack off a guy you’re fucking, for example, but the fucking is the main event; and in group sex in gay porn, a cocksucker will often work a cock in one or both hands, but the blow job is the main event) or foreplay to penetrative sex (rubbing is a common lead-in to fucking, hand jobs to blow jobs and possibly on from there to fucking). There’s an attitude that if nobody takes a dick into his body, it’s not really sex — an attitude that, on the plus side, makes hand jobs and rubbing more acceptable as buddy play (or bro-play), something straight guys could easily get into — just helpin’ my horny buddy out, helpin’ him to get of — without veering into fag territory.

Whether you identify as straight or gay, you can give or get a hand job for its own sake; it’s friendly sex, literally non-invasive, and safe sex (but it is sex, since shooting your load or his is the goal), and it’s easily combined with other kinds of body play, especially kissing. Iif you’re frankly gay, it can be the vehicle for affection, love, and romance. It can be configured as one guy serving another guy’s cock (for pleasure on both sides) or as a mutual exchange (easier to manage than 69ing, because there’s less sense of divided attention: mutual hand jobs are just like jacking yourself off — you use your hand to stroke, you get the pleasurable sensations of being stroked — with the bonus that you get another guy’s body to appreciate).

It’s usually said that to give a really satisying hand job, you should watch how your guy jacks himself off; if you can reproduce his style, then you’re pretty much guaranteed to be doing a good hand job. But his style is whatever he chanced on because it once worked for him as boy, so it’s familiar, but that was years ago, and he might now appreciate novelty instead of familiarity. Guys differ in these things: some need the familiar routine, but others can be pleasantly surprised. Stimulating the glans and frenulum provides the most intense sensations; but fisting the shaft can give a man the feeling of raw power; playing with his balls or asshole can magnify the experience; and there are several satisfying options for moving hand on dick (with two fingers vs. whole fist; up and down vs. rotary; etc.).

At this point, there’s a small terminological issue: how to refer to the participants in a hand job, a guy who jacks another guy off and a guy who gets jacked off by another guy. Jack-off, jerk-off, jerker, wanker, masturbator, etc. all refer to the agent role in masturbation, but don’t distinguish masturbaing oneself from masturbating someone else; and there are no standard terms for the patient role in other-masturbation (though the clunky neologism masturbatee would  serve in a pinch.) Handjobber (with the agent suffix -er) would work as a less clunky neologism for someone in the agent role, and I guess that leaves us with handjobbed or handjobbee for someone in the patient role (English is not rich in lexical items referring to the patient in an two-person act). The crucial fact here is that in a mansex hand job, one guy supplies (metonymically is) the hand, and one guy supplies (metonymically is) the dick — so that when the context is guys and handjobs, the compounds handman and dickman will do just fine.

Images of hand jobs for their own sake have not been common on my blogs, so I then supply five moving shots of hand jobs from gay porn (including mutual masturbation and a hand job in public), plus two Joe Phillips illustrations from The Joy of Gay Sex (showing affectionate mutual masturbation and fucking with a hand job as an extra), and a shot from gay porn showing hand jobs as an extra in a blow job. To these I can add this cover of a book of advice about the art of the hand job (from an Indian book-seller, no date given), directed at women but of course also applicable to men:

(#1)

Discussions and images of frottage, or body-rubbing, are even sparser in writing about mansex, including on my blogs, than similar material about hand jobs. I’ve now provided an AZBlogX posting  “Rub jobs”, with shots of mansex frottage; notes on frot, pectoral intercourse, and slot rubs (the sexual practices and the labels); and notes on labels for participants in these acts.

The four types of mansex involving penises are, in order of ascending potency: rub jobs, hand jobs, blow jobs, and fucking. Rub jobs don’t get a lot of press, and the acts themselves are largely private and uncelebrated; so far as I know, there are no frottage clubs, parallel to the now-widespread jack-off clubs, where men go to jack themselves off in the company of other men similarly inclined and to jack off other men or get jacked off by them.

But rub jobs haven’t gone completely unnoticed on this blog. From an 8/25/14 posting “Cowboy Rub”, on a product of the McCormick spice company:

Not in the OED are sexual senses of the noun [rub], though it has some sexual uses of the verb, in particular the slang intransitive rub ‘to masturbate’ (Farmer & Henley’s slang dictionary in 1903) and phrasal rub up transitive ‘to touch or caress (a person, a part of the body) in order to excite sexually (from 1656) and transitive ‘to masturbate; (also) to rub oneself on a person or thing in a sexually arousing manner’ (Farmer & Henley).

But there’s more, not in the OED. There’s also the transitive verb in rub someone off ‘masturbate someone’ and the plain verb rub (transitive or intransitive) referring to masturbation or frottage. And then the related noun rub ‘act of masturbation or frottage’, notably in the compound Princeton rub (in various slang dictionaries), referring to male-male frottage, especially genital-genital rubbing or intercrural frottage (between the legs) (from lore about sex at Princeton before the days of coeducation).

And (from Urban Dictionary), various uses of dry rub for sex without lubrication, including the Youngstown dry rub ‘intergluteal frottage’ (between the buttocks) (a claimed allusion to practices at Youngstown State Penitentiary in Ohio) and the Alabama dry rub ‘anal sex without lubrication’ (source unclear). More sexual senses of dry rub below.

… Cowboy Rub [has] its (intended) interpretation as something like ‘a rub of the sort that cowboys use on meat’. The ingredients and uses, from McCormick:

Cowboy Rub is a robust blend with coarsely ground peppers, mustard seed and coffee which gives meat a bold and flavorful crust that seals in natural juices.

Rub generously on meat before grilling (1 to 2 tablespoons per 1 pound). Great on steak, chicken, pork or ribs.

Of course, cowboy rub could also be a (sexual) act noun, referring to masturbation or frottage the way cowboys do it, or the way it’s done on cowboys. Hence the chuckles.

And on the coinage frot, for one type of rub job, from Wikipedia:

Frot (slang for frottage; ult. from the French verb frotter, “to rub”) is a non-penetrative form of male-male sexual activity that usually involves direct penis-to-penis contact. The term was popularized by gay male activists [in the 1990s] who disparaged the practice of anal sex, but has since evolved to encompass a variety of preferences for the act, which may or may not imply particular attitudes towards other sexual activities. Owing to its non-penetrative character, frot has the safe sex advantage of minimizing the transmission risk for HIV/AIDS

From rub jobs and hand jobs, we get into the big time (penetrative sex) with blow jobs. AZBlogX postings have many dozens of images of cocksucking, which some time ago became America’s great contribution to the culture of mansex: in the U.S., pretty much every gay man, whatever else he might or might not do, sucks cock, and in American gay porn, everybody sucks cock. A lot. American queers got a reputation as passionate, and adept, cocksuckers, and our enthusiasm spread around the world.

Nothing to add on blow jobs here, beyond this piece of symbolic signage:

(#2)

For a blow job, inquire within — meaning either ‘to get a blow job’ (guy in blue) or ‘to give a blow job’ (guy in white). (Or you could go to Blow Buddies in San Francisco, a private club that offers facilities for all manner of safer mansex, but especially blow jobs.)

(There are variants of the sign in which the cocksucker is clearly female, with a pigtail or breasts or both.)

To recap, we now have rub jobs plus the three first items in the Onion‘s faux-news story (d’ya remember the Onion?): hand jobs, blow jobs, and rim jobs.

Back to acts and terms: fisting. The Onion‘s next and last sexual practice was fisting, which is very much a minority taste. From the entries in GDoS for the nouns fist-fuck, fist-fucking, and fisting:

fist-fuck 1 the insertion of the hand (and forearm) into the vagina or anus [first cite 1972 Rodgers Queens’ Vernacular, which means that it’s attested before 1972]

fist-fucking 2 (gay) the insertion of the hand (and sometimes forearm) into the anus of one’s partner for purposes of sexual stimulation (popular in the 1970s but latterly in decline through fears of injury and hence the possibility of spreading AIDS: also found in heterosexual and lesbian sex, where the orifice is the vagina.) [first cite 1977 in an article “Sexual Anarchy” in the magazine Blue Boy]

fisting [first cite 1994 Gary Indana Rent Boy]

Plus the verb

fist-fuck (also fist) 1 (gay) to insert one’s hand (and forearm) into someone’s anus or vagina [first cite 1978 Larry Kramer Faggots]

GDoS has no cites for fist job, though the compound would be relatively transparent and perhaps useful to those who engage in the practice.

On the practice, from Wikipedia:

Fisting, handballing, fist-fucking, brachiovaginal, or brachioproctic insertion is a sexual activity that involves inserting a hand into the vagina or rectum. Once insertion is complete, the fingers are either clenched into a fist or kept straight.

… Fisting’s emergence as a popular sexual practice is commonly attributed to gay male culture, with the additional sentiment that it may not have existed until the twentieth century. … The most famous fisting club in the world was the Catacombs, located in San Francisco, which operated during the 1970s and 1980s. The Handball Express was another such club. Crisco was commonly used as a lubricant, before more specialized personal lubricants became available.

(Once again there’s a small terminological problem in naming the participants. The agent, the person who uses their fist in the act, would of course be the fister, so I suppose that a man who provides his asshole for the act would be the fistee, but the term sounds stylistically discordant to me: the verb fist is slang, the patient suffix -ee rather elevated or technical.)

As for the practice, it requires great trust on the part of the fistee and great care and sensitivity on the part of the fister. It’s an phenomenally intimate sort of encounter, providing the fistee with an extraordinary sense of being filled up (well beyond that in everyday ass-fucking, and probably beyond that provided by all except the very largest of sex toys), perhaps also with the pleasures of submission. (I have not engaged in the practice in either role, nor do I find it alluring, but I have friends who have given and gotten fist jobs, and they speak fervently about their experiences.)

Some will no doubt feel that when he invented fisting, Fred Gilgoff had definitely gone too far.

Two items picked up on Facebook today: the Transgender Pride Flag (following on the death of the designer of the Gay Pride Flag, or Rainbow Flag, Gilbert Baker); and a remarkable bathroom sign that appears to be advertising a toilet for men with gigantic penises.

(#1)

(#2)

Transgender Pride. From Wikipedia:

Unlike within the wider LGBT communities worldwide which have adopted the Rainbow flag, the various transgender individuals, organizations and communities around the world have not coalesced around one single flag design.

… The most prominent of [the alternative flag] designs is known as the “Transgender Pride flag” which is a symbol of transgender pride and diversity, and transgender rights.

The Transgender Pride flag was created by American trans woman Monica Helms in 1999, and was first shown at a pride parade in Phoenix, Arizona, United States in 2000.

The flag represents the transgender community and consists of five horizontal stripes: two light blue, two pink, and one white in the center.

Helms describes the meaning of the transgender pride flag as follows:

“The stripes at the top and bottom are light blue, the traditional color for baby boys. The stripes next to them are pink, the traditional color for baby girls. The stripe in the middle is white, for those who are intersex, transitioning or consider themselves having a neutral or undefined gender. The pattern is such that no matter which way you fly it, it is always correct, signifying us finding correctness in our lives.”

Bathroom signs. I’m pretty sure the intention of the creators of the third symbol in #2 was to offer a room for nursing mothers. But in the very stylized image in #2, the baby looks like a roughly yard-long penis, suggesting that the third bathroom available is for men with unmanageably godlike phalluses.

Announcing: the Amherst Mammoths.

On the Boston Globe site on the 3rd, “After sending Lord Jeff packing, Amherst College picks mammoth as mascot”:

Amherst College announced Monday that it had selected the mammoth as its new mascot, turning to a signature member of the institution’s natural history collection as its new symbol and concluding a lengthy — and at times controversial — debate over how best to represent the selective liberal arts school.

“The word mammoth conjures up an image of a mighty, imposing and fierce animal — the perfect symbol of Amherst’s strength, academically and athletically,” a college spokeswoman said in a statement.

The college, whose Beneski Museum of Natural History has kept a skeleton of a Columbian mammoth since 1925, had decided more than a year ago to do away with its unofficial mascot, Lord Jeff. That name had historical connotations that drew increasing concern around campus. Lord Jeffery Amherst, who commanded British forces in North America during the French and Indian War, supported giving smallpox-contaminated blankets to Indians, historians say.

The mammoth will be the school’s official mascot, a distinction that Lord Jeff never held, and one that will allow it to be featured on sports garb and promotional materials.

Amherst chose the mascot after voting by alumni, students, faculty, and staff. Close to half of the 9,295 votes were cast for the mammoth, school officials said. The vanquished finalists were the Fighting Poets, Purple and White, Valley Hawks, and Wolves.

In the Beneski Museum, the Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) with digitally added Amherst College hat:

(#1)

(Hat tips to Tim Pierce and Michael Palmer.)

The Columbian mammoth in #1 shares the Mammals of the Ice Age space in the Main Hall with an American mastodon (Mammut americanum) and an “Irish elk” (Megaloceros giganteus), the skeleton with the impressive antlers. From Wikipedia:

Megaloceros (from Greek: μεγαλος, megalos + κερας, keras, literally “Great Horn”…) is an extinct genus of deer whose members lived throughout Eurasia from the late Pliocene to the Late Pleistocene and were important herbivores during the Ice Ages. The largest species, Megaloceros giganteus, vernacularly known as the “Irish Elk” or “Giant elk”, is also the best known.

End note: a word about Lord Jeff. From Wikipedia:

Field Marshal Jeffery Amherst, 1st Baron Amherst KB (29 January 1717 – 3 August 1797) served as an officer in the British Army and as Commander-in-Chief of the Forces.

Amherst is best known as the architect of Britain’s successful campaign to conquer the territory of New France during the Seven Years’ War. Under his command, British forces captured the cities of Louisbourg, Quebec City and Montreal, as well as several major fortresses. He was also the first British Governor General in the territories that eventually became Canada. Numerous places and streets are named for him, in both Canada and the United States.

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You can listen here to the Amherst College Glee Club singing the story of Lord Jeff.

Now: Oh Mammoth! Brave Mammoth! / ‘Twas a name known to fame in days of yore. / 
May it ever be glorious 
/ Till the sun shall climb the heav’ns no more.

This is old news, but (I think) evergreen, about the graffiti artist who styles himself as Wanksy (wank + Banksy: on masturbatory wank, see this posting; Banksy is the celebrated British graffiti artist) and identifies himself as a “road artist” — someone whose canvas is the roads of greater Mancherster (England), where he uses yellow chalk to create cartoon penises around potholes. A simple example:

(#1)

The glyph above the chalked penis is the artist’s signature, seen here  more clearly on his Facebook page:

(#2)

from his page:

Wanksy – Road Artist: taking direct action by using art to highlight the dangerous potholes that damage our vehicles and harm cyclists on a daily basis

Another example (at Christmastime):

(#3)

And a before and after:

(#4)

Wanksy’s (two-part) manifesto on his website:

Making the world a better place, one pothole at a time.

Why draw penises on Potholes?

Potholes are dangerous. Not only do they wreck vehicles, cause accidents they also injure cyclists and are a danger to pedestrians.
I highlight dangerous potholes by turning them into temporary works of art, making them more visible and prompting the council to repair them.
The council are not too happy, but all my work is created using non-permanent, chalk based line marker, the same type the council use when doing repairs. The problem is that despite each and every vehicle owner in the land paying road tax, fuel tax and council tax, that money does not seem to be being spent on our roads, or at least not effectively.
I understand the council are stretched and may not have time to highlight big potholes with yellow paint,
but luckily, I do

How do the penises help people?

Do I think my art is offensive? No. I am a qualified artist, the naked body and its anatomy are commonplace in art. The drawings themselves are cartoons, not photographs. Art should provoke a reaction and these pieces do that, generally a positive one.

Potholes are very hard to see you tend to forget about them until it’s too late. But draw a big yellow willy round it, you can’t help but notice them and hopefully avoid it too, saving the vehicle from damage or the rider from injury. Usually the council will either notice it, or it actually gets reported and then gets repaired.
Happy days.

Local officials responded just as you might have expected, treating the penis grafitti as symbolic assaults, as vandalism of public property and as a penis displayed in public. From the Telephraph story:

“The actions of this individual are not only stupid but incredibly insulting to local residents,” a spokesperson for Bury council said. [Bury is a town in Greater Manchester]

“Has this person, for just one second, considered how families with young children must feel when they are confronted with these obscene symbols as they walk to school? Not only is this vandalism, but it’s also counter-productive.

“Every penny that we have to spend cleaning off this graffiti is a penny less that we have to spend on actually repairing the potholes.”

The spokesperson added: “We urge the perpetrator to stop defacing the roads immediately, and ask anyone who sees this sort of criminal damage being carried out to report it to the police and the council.”