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Regional potato chips
Today’s bon appétit top story, “Regional Potato Chips You’ve Never Heard Of”: (#1) Frito-Lay may rule most supermarket snack aisles, but once upon a time, regional potato chips dominated the American...
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Audiences
Two recent cartoons, a One Big Happy in which the grandmother copes with black street speech with an app for her audience; and a Doonesbury in which marijuana companies tailor their products and their...
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Dressing for June
(Not much about language. Warning: eventually there will be hunky young men wearing virtually nothing.) As part of the run-in to Pride Month, the Out Magazine June-July issue has a page on clothes for...
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Light, and sometimes mixed
It started with Chris Hansen posting this London bus ad on Facebook: (#1) On the bus: IT’S SMOOTHIFIED. WE’RE AMERICAN. WE CAN MAKE UP WORDS. NOW IN THE UK So: about the morphology; about the...
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Not until you’ve fried it
Caught on a local tv station, an ad for Spam: (#1) An easy pun — fried for tried — on a formulaic expression, Don’t knock it until / ’til / till you’ve tried it. In service of an exhortation to enjoy...
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Distracting moments in gay male erotica
(Warning: kinky mansex territory, so NSFW and not for kids or the sexually modest.) The header on a Facebook posting by Michael Palmer, which took me to the BareTwinks site and scenes like ths one:...
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Sales talk
Yesterday’s Bizarro, another exercise in what you have to know to understand what’s going in a cartoon: (#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this...
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The terrible truth about bubble wrap
A Joe Dator cartoon in the June 19th New Yorker: (#1) which will lead us to today’s Mother Goose and Grimm: (#2) Along the way we’ll visit the naugas and their hides. Daddy, where does bubble wrap come...
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Brewster Rockit to the rescue
[revised version] From David Preston, yesterday’s Brewster Rockit comic strip, in a male character attempts to mansplain mansplaining to Pamela Mae Snap (aka Irritable Belle): (#1) (Note strategic use...
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Ostentatious euphemisms
A recent tv commercial for Jack Link’s beef jerky builds up to the punch line, the claim that the jerky beats the snack out of other snacks ostentatiously using snack as a euphemism for shit....
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Ovaltine mornings
On Facebook, from several sources, these vintage ads for Ovaltine, notable (these days) for their use of the adjective gay ‘light-hearted, carefree’: (#1) (#2) Two things here: the lexical items gay;...
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Getting into harness
(Men’s underwear, bodies, and fetishes, so not to everyone’s tastes.) The Daily Jocks ad from the 19th displayed this vision from Cellblock 13 / CellBlock 13 / Cell Block 13 (plus my caption): (#1)...
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Billy the Berlin Barboy
(The underwear and men’s bodies thing again, plus gaydolls and some homoerotic art. Outrageous enough that it won’t be to everyone’s taste.) Daily Jocks sale on the 8th offering the Barcode Berlin...
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Skinless wieners
Passed on to me by Arne Adolfsen, this vintage ad (from the 1940s, for what was then the Visking Corp.): (#1) Skinless wiener is pretty much immediately risible, because it’s bound to bring...
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Bluto says: join or else
Aggressive days in the men’s underwear world, in my adaptation of a Daily Jocks ad from the 11th. There will be hot men in their underwear, suggestive captions, and a certain amount of syntax,...
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Turkey Perky Jerky
Yesterday morning, foraging in the Whole Foods around the corner for something to take as a food contribution for the annual Palo Alto all-day shapenote singing (we eventually settled on some truly...
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Solid Chet and lean Bo
Underwear ads again (from today’s Daily Jocks sale), with captions from me. Men’s bodies, mansex allusions, not for everyone. (#1) Sweat with me, baby Solid Chet the gym jock Sweats hard Lick the salt...
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A processed food flavor
That’s from the NYT on the 17th (on-line), Frank Bruni’s op-ed column “Will Pumpkin Spice Destroy Us All?”: (#1) In the labyrinth of pumpkin spice It’s invention run amok, marketing gone mad, the...
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Revisiting 10: Dare, sweet spice
Once more unto the pumpkin spice, dear friends, once more. We’ve been there twice already in the past week, on the 20th in “A processed food flavor” (about pumpkin (pie) spice, hereafter ps) and on the...
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Annals of advertising: the new normal for noses
A new tv commercial for Naväge (sometimes just Navage) touts it as just the thing for current times: Now is the time to make good nasal hygiene the new normal. The commercial doesn’t seem to be...
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