It could just be a card from one baseball fan to another, one of those topical greetings that the card companies specialize it:

But in fact it’s from my New York Times carrier to me (a gentle Christmas Money solicitation, a different sort of specialized message — with the text “Joy & Peace / Hoping we will bring you better news this Holiday Season!”), and it’s not (intentionally) tailored to my interests at  all. What makes it comprehensible is the context, here the geographical context: the carrier and the NYT subscribers are all in the San Francisco Bay Area, scene of the San Francisco Giants win in the World Series this fall. For the moment, then, we are all Giants fans.

Note how little it takes to make a baseball into a human head. Actually, anything roughly circular or spherical is easily seen as a human head, face forward, and that interpretation is (literally) instinctual: newborns are drawn to roundish objects as possible faces.

Here it takes only a cap of the right sort to turn the baseball into Santa Claus, and the intense red of the seams on the ball further encourages that interpretation (by a conventional association of the color with the season; at World Series time, the seams would have been orange — again, a conventional association — and the cap would have been a ball cap).

(Then there’s the text. I won’t rehearse the holidays / Christmas / Xmas battles again this year, after some years of discussions in Language Log and other blogs. Here I’ll just say that I’m perfectly happy with Happy Holidays, especially from someone I don’t know at all personally.)

Back to the Giants and the Bay Area. I did in fact get caught up in Giantsmania, for the playoffs and the Series, this year as in 2010. People sometimes express surprise that a gay man would be interested in baseball (or any other strongly masculine-ethos sport), as if getting your Queer Card™ meant you had to cleave only to conventionally faggy tastes, when in fact the Queer Card gives you license to cleave to whatever faggy tastes suit you and to reject whichever imperatives of hypernormative masculinity don’t suit you, while preserving the ones that work for you. Plenty of gay men are enthusiastic sports fans, into football, hockey, basketball, or, yes, baseball; and some are serious players. (Some can segue from the NFL to opera to cooking while cruising in a leather bar. I think that’s just splendid.) Others, of course, think of pro sports as silly, childish, and deeply boring.

In addition, if you’re a gay sports fan, you — along with straight women — can get the extra pleasure of thinking of athletes as sex objects — pieces of meat, as one friend of mine puts it. You can in fact get the double view, identifying with male athletes the way straight guys do and (privately) lusting for them the way straight women do. (A note on the queering of interest in the Giants in my “Halloween Giants” posting, here.)

Now I am not a sports fan in any conventional sense. I don’t have the requisite interest in the fine points of play, the game and player histories, the stats stats stats, and so on. But I support the local guys and I love watching them play. I’m even (slowly) learning more about how baseball works and beginning to appreciate its subtle pleasures. And I especially enjoy the community of local fandom, sharing those pleasures with others.

So now I have the t-shirts –

to go along with my LINGUISTICS t-shirts and my QUEER QUEER QUEER t-shirts.

(I chose not to get shirts for my favorite players — catcher Buster Posey and pitcher Tim Lincecum, in particular — because those were all outrageously expensive. The plain all-cotton number above is quite reasonable in price, and I now have three of them as walk-around shirts for my Palo Alto wanderings in my walker. Oh yes, in total, 9 blocks of walking yesterday; getting stronger.)

Two quick questions:

(1) What song was recorded by both Enrico Caruso and Elvis Presley?

(2) Why is question (1) especially relevant today?

Answers after the jump.

(1) “Santa Lucia”.

A digitally remastered version of a Caruso recording from 3/20/1916:

And Elvis, from Elvis for Everyone (1965, almost 50 years later):

(2) Today is St. Lucy’s Day.

So you’re asking, how does St. Lucy get into the song? Well, indirectly: the song is about the beauties of the Neapolitan waterfront district, Borgo Santa Lucia, which was named in honor of the saint.

I am beyond being able to judge the musical merits of the song; it’s been a favorite since my childhood and is just so suffused with warm feelings that I can’t look at it dispassionately. In the 3rd or 4th grade my class had a book of folk songs for children, several of which were big hits with us kids, so we asked to sing them again and again, no doubt driving the teacher to distraction: among them, “The Erie Canal”, the Philippine folksong “Don’t You Go to Far Zamboanga”, and “Santa Lucia”. We were taught the first two lines in Italian –

Sul mare luccica l’astro d’argento.
Placida è l’onda, prospero è il vento

(“On the sea glitters the silver star / Gentle the waves, favorable the wind”) and the whole thing in some English translation.

The song has an interesting history, bound up with Italian unification and independence. From Wikipedia:

Santa Lucía es el 13 de Diciembre Santa Lucia is a traditional Neapolitan song. It was transcribed by Teodoro Cottrau (1827–1879) and published by the Cottrau firm, as a “barcarolla”, at Naples in 1849. Cottrau translated it from Napuletano into Italian during the first stage of the Risorgimento, the first Neapolitan song to be given Italian lyrics [so English translations are two languages away from the original]. Its transcriber, who is very often credited as its composer, was the son of the French-born Italian composer and collector of songs Guillaume Louis Cottrau (1797–1847).

The Neapolitan lyrics of “Santa Lucia” celebrate the picturesque waterfront district, Borgo Santa Lucia, in the Bay of Naples, in the invitation of a boatman to take a turn in his boat, to better enjoy the cool of the evening.

And that brings us to Saint Lucy and the day of observance for her, which is celebrated in the shortest days of the winter, celebrated by lighting up the darkness:

Saint Lucia’s Day (sometimes Lucy for short) is the Church feast day dedicated to Saint Lucy and is observed on the 13th of December. Its modern day celebration is generally associated with Sweden and Norway but is also observed in Denmark, Estonia, Italy, Latvia, Finland, Hungary, Malta, Bosnia, Bavaria, Croatia, Slovakia, Spain and St. Lucia, West Indies. In the United States it is celebrated with cookies on the mantel in states for a large number of people of Scandinavian ancestry, often centered around church events.

In traditional celebrations, Saint Lucy comes as a young woman with lights and sweets. It is one of the few saint days observed in Scandinavia. In some forms, a procession is headed by one girl wearing a crown of candles (or lights), while others in the procession hold only a single candle each. (link)

Diwali has already gone past (last month), and Christmas, with its own candles, is still to come. Now the Hanukkah candles are burning, and here comes the figure of a girl representing St. Lucy, with a crown of candles in her hair — a custom that has always made me profoundly edgy, flame-wary.

But there are sweet breads, in particular saffron bread, and cookies to allay the anxiety. And we seem to get through the occasion every year without setting the world on fire.

The time of darkness is also the time of rebirth, turning the corner. That’s part of the symbolic value of Christmas (something you can appreciate even if your religious beliefs don’t fit the rest of the season). In California, of course, the rebirth comes with the rains, when the golden brown of the grasses on the hills bursts into the yellow-green of new growth. (This renaissance was very early this year, but it’s satisfyingly dramatic whenever it happens.)

And in my little urban garden, along with St. Lucy comes the blooming season of the cymbidium orchids (a stand of patio plants that were gifts from me to Jacques over the years). This year the first appearance was of greenish-yellow flowers, with white ones about to open up, just outside my window. (One after another, the plants will bloom, until it gets hot — early June, usually, when they become foliage plants until winter comes again.)

From Janis Ian’s blog, passed on to me on Facebook by John Lawler on the 14th:

Taijitu meets Magen David, oh happy day.

The handmade sign purporting to be from an official national organization that you’ve never heard of should set off suspicions, and the Snopes site treats the thing as Undetermined as to truth, but likely to be based on a cartoon by playwright David Mamet in the on-line magazine Tablet for 12/22/10:

No one has yet found evidence of the existence of the CRAUS.

Behind the cartoon lies the stereotype of Jews as patronizing Chinese restaurants on Christmas (a holiday celebrated by neither the proprietors nor the patrons, as Snopes observes), and the stereotype comes from the fact that in a great many places Chinese restaurants were among the very few businesses open on Christmas.

(The other major option for going out for meals on Christmas is hotels, almost all of which feel obliged to provide travelers with meals even on holidays.)

As I’ve noted in this blog in earlier years, it has been my custom for some time to have dinner — a midday meal — on Christmas (and Thanksgiving, and other holidays) at Tai Pan, the local Hong Kong-style Chinese restaurant, which is open every day of the year, including holidays, for lunch (and dim sum) and dinner — and which is just wonderful. Usually this is a family affair (as it will be this year), sometimes taking in friends as well as me, my daughter, son-in-law, and grand-daughter. Sometimes it’s been just me and a friend. Sometimes I’ve been alone, but still in a familiar and welcoming place.

On Thanksgiving this year I hadn’t been out of the hospital long enough to manage a meal out, but Ned Deily went and got take-out for the two of us, one of our favorite lunches from Tai Pan:

Vermicelli Singapore Style [that's "Chinese vermicelli" -- bean thread -- prepared with shrimp and a light curry sauce]

Crunchy String Beans with Minced Pork

We hadn’t had this meal in a long time, and it struck us both as good enough to weep with pleasure over. Not just very good food, but a crucial piece of return to normal life.

(It’s Christmas Adam today, as several friends have pointed out: the day that immediately precedes Christmas Eve. Yeah, yeah, guffaw, guffaw.)

The world of Christmas songs (other than standard hymns and carols) can be roughly divided into three parts, according to content and purpose:

Jesus-y Christmas songs, in which the Christmas Child plays a central role (more on these below);

well-meaning non-Jesus-y Christmas songs, emphasizing family, friends, and warm feelings about the season, but making no commitment to the birth of Christ or indeed to his existence (“White Christmas”; “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting…)”, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, etc).;

gag Christmas songs, which are basically meant to be awful but entertaining (“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”, “All I Want for Christmas Is a New Front Tooth”, “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer”, etc.)

Aesthetic judgments work differently in these three domains, as well as in the domains of standard hymns and carols; even if you consign all gag Christmas songs to Music Hell (as I would certainly do) and run screaming from them when they appear in public places, you might still want to make discriminations in the other categories. Some instances are more vicious than others.

In particular, there is plenty of room to view some Jesus-y Christmas sings as thoroughly regrettable, despite their earnest pretensions. This brings me to “The Little Drummer Boy” vs. “Do You Hear What I Hear?”, in a tight and hard-fought competition for  Most Regrettable Jesus-y Christmas Song.

Endless numbers of people have fallen to the floor in apoplexy over the maddening “Drummer Boy”, with its

pa rum pum pum pum

refrain. From Wikipedia:

“The Little Drummer Boy” (originally known as “Carol of the Drum”) is a popular Christmas song written by the American classical music composer and teacher Katherine Kennicott Davis in 1941. It was recorded in 1955 by the Trapp Family Singers and further popularized by a 1958 recording by the Harry Simeone Chorale. This version was re-released successfully for several years and the song has been recorded many times since.

In the lyrics the singer relates how, as a poor young boy, he was summoned by the Magi to the nativity where, without a gift for the infant Jesus, he played his drum with the Virgin Mary’s approval, remembering “I played my best for Him” and “He smiled at me”.

Other candidates for Jesus-y annoyance: “I Wonder As I Wander” (link), especially if John Jacob Niles himself is singing, “I wonder as I wander out under the sky / How Jesus the Saviour did come for to die”; “It’s Christmas Day”, written recently by Scottish songwriter Dougie Campbell for children’s choir (where the kids earnestly chirp the chorus, “It’s Christmas Day all over Earth / Let the bells ring out for Jesus’s birth”); and “Do You Hear What I Hear?”, whose textual problems begin to make an appearance in the Wikipedia entry:

“Do You Hear What I Hear?” is a Christmas song written in October 1962 with lyrics by Noël Regney and music by Gloria Shayne. The pair were married at the time, and wrote it as a plea for peace during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

… The song describes how word of the birth of the baby Jesus is relayed to higher upon ever higher authority. The message originates with the Night Wind, which whispers it to a small lamb. The lamb reports the message to his shepherd boy, who in turn conveys the news to the king. The king eventually spreads the message to the “people everywhere.” In each verse, the message is slightly modified, in a similar fashion to the game of Telephone.

The song diverges from the Biblical account in one particular. According to the Gospel of Matthew, Herod the Great (king at the time), far from welcoming news of the child’s birth, ordered Jesus killed, forcing Jesus, his mother Mary, and Joseph to flee. At the same time, it is never specified in the lyrics that Herod is meant to be the king in question, nor that the events are necessarily taking place in Judea. Also, it is never stated that the shepherds saw a star, only the magi.

Quinn Cummings (hat tip to Elizabeth Daingerfierld Zwicky here), in her 12/6 blog posting on the song, is forthright:

Listen to What I Say

It’s taken a while, and Saint Nick knows there were a few contenders, but in the end, there is only one Worst Christmas Song:

“Do You Hear What I Hear”

She goes on to do a line by line analysis of the song, looking at every detail of the text (similes, capitalization, the whole thing), finding the entire song wanting. It’s wicked(ly) funny.

The Christmas Eve Bizarro:

A cartoon clearly meant for me, in my guise as Underwear Guy.

A cartoon from New Yorker cartoonist Ed Frascino on a Calvin Klein theme:

The Frascino introduces the truncated expression Calvins ‘Calvin Klein underwear, specifically briefs’ (in the sense of briefs that encompasses a wide range of non-boxers men’s underwear). The expression seems to be invariably plural, though underwear is a mass noun (and so singular) and brief has a use as a type-referring count noun, which can then be singular (Here’s a brief you might like, even Here’s a Calvin Klein you might like, but not, I think, *Here’s a Calvin you might like): He was wearing only Calvins, but not *He was wearing only Calvin (meaning underwear, not a fragrance) or *He was wearing only a Calvin.

Plural Calvins has a robust life; just google on {“in his Calvins”}, and you’ll get a whole series of men in Calvin Klein briefs, from models that CK has contracted with to guys who are probably angling for a contract to just ordinary guys. I’ll give a little photo-montage in a moment, but here I note that for the moment Calvins seems to have firmly maintained its brand-name associations and so far avoided genericide, in which the expression would get used for briefs of any brand (and ultimately suffer lower-casing).

The photos begin with the great Underwear God Mark Wahlberg. From AZBlogX on five underwear models:

Mark Wahlberg began his public career at age 13, as one of the founding members (along with his older brother Donnie) of New Kids on the Block, but soon abandoned bubblegum pop for something rougher, Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, as a sneering rapper. Calvin Klein saw the erotic potential in the kid, and sold a ton of underwear through him. Here’s Marky Mark in two CK boxer-brief guises, the nasty in-your-face rapper doing a crotch grab (all the photo lacks is him giving us the finger) and the cute guy with the hot basket (and smiling).

My X Blog piece also shows CK model Travis Fimmel as an Underwear God. Later CK gods have included retired Swedish footballer Fredrik Ljungberg:

and Beninese-American actor and model Djimon Hounsou:

and now Twilight actor Kellan Lutz:

Plenty of hot images of a brooding Lutz available on the web. I like this one for its approachability.

And then there’s Brazilian model Thiago Ximenes (Mister Brazil 2012) jammin’ in his Calvins:

As far as I can tell, Ximenes is still a free agent, but I’d vote for him if CK is taking a poll. (CK might possibly insist on better-defined abs.)

So that’s Christmas Eve in the comics. Coming soon: Zippy weirdness for Christmas Day.

(Holiday silliness, gender and sexuality, but not much language. Risqué but not actually X-rated.)

For the sixth day of Christmas, Daddy Kissing Santa Claus. I’ll get to that soon, but first a few of this year’s crop of hot guys in Santa gear (but minus Daddy).

Last year I posted (in “Late entries in the gay Santa sweepstakes”, here) two particularly steamy images: a photo of a guy advertising for the gay hook-up site Squirt (not a lot of subtlety there, but the name is informative) and a Tom of Finland drawing of one of his hypermasculine characters pulling on his big black Santa boots. Photos for this year: Hunky Santa in his furs and Underwear Santa:

Plus a drawing of Condom Santa (an image from the London design firm Sonar) — hunky hairy Santa with his bag full of condoms (be safe at Christmas):

And then from real life, a photo from one of the Santa Speedo Runs, charity events held in various North American cities (among them, Albany, Annapolis, Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Madison, San Francisco, Tampa, and Toronto), plus (at least) London. Runners are both male and female, gay and straight, of all ages and body types, but concentrated heavily among the really fit, like these two men in Boston:

(Something for enthusiasts of smooth male bodies.)

On to Daddy and Santa Claus (and Gay Santas in general). The dreadful novelty Christmas song, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” was bound to spawn a same-sex counterpart. And here’s one version, from the cover of the most recent TLA Gay Video catalogue:

Good kid! Maybe Santa will bring you a second Daddy. Or stick around to take on the task himself.

A greeting card version from Zazzle:

Note that Daddy’s getting his hand into Santa’s pants. Sex is entering the picture. One step further, with Santa kissing a young man who’s probably not anybody’s father or father-equivalent (but might conceivably be Daddy to a Boy, though your first guess would be that if he’s into roles, he’s a Boy). Take me Santa, pant, pant:

It’s a short step to the seamier side of gay sex, encouraged by the ambivalent feelings so many people have towards department-store Santas, who function both as benevolent figures and as potential Dirty Old Men. Here’s DOM Santa, trolling for t-room sex at the urinals (link):

And that brings me to a piece of music I haven’t been able to find a performance of: the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies’ “Butch the Gay Santa Claus” (on the Kevin & Bean album Santa’s Swingin’ Sack, which has some other tracks that might be of interest to students of deranged Christmas music):

Butch The Gay Santa Claus, filled with Christmas cheer
Butch The Gay Santa Claus, his beard tickles your ear
All the children at the mall wait for their surprise
It’s not just Rudolph’s nose that’s red when they sit on his thighs
Oh

He squeezes down your chimney, greased up with frankencense
With bulging gifts for little boys leave dangling ornaments
Butch The Gay Santa Claus, filled with Christmas cheer
If you’re very good he might come more than once this year
More than once this year
More than once this year
(lyrics link)

The Cherry Poppin’ Daddies are a swing band, specializing in songs that regularly veer into “dirty” territory (website here, Wikipedia page here). Frequently not for the kiddies.

Return with me now to the eye-winking faux-innocence of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”. The nutshell description from Wikipedia:

“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” is an American Christmas song with music and lyrics by Tommie Connor.

The original recording by Jimmy Boyd, created on July 15, 1952 when he was 13 years old, reached No. 1 on the Billboard pop singles chart in December 1952, and on the Cash Box chart at the beginning of the following year. The song was commissioned by Saks Fifth Avenue to promote the store’s Christmas card for the year, which featured an original sketch by artist Perry Barlow, who drew for The New Yorker for many decades.

The song describes a scene where a child walks downstairs from his/her bedroom on Christmas Eve to see his/her mother kissing “Santa Claus” (persumably his/her father in a Santa Claus costume) under mistletoe.

The grating little-boy voice of Jimmy Boyd contributes a lot to making this a supremely repellent Christmas song. Here it is, awful words, saccharine musical arrangement, and that dreadful voice, all together (maybe I should note that I was myself 12 the Christmas this song swept the charts, and I took it as a personal affront):

Everybody and their cousin did cover versions. Ultimately we get a Daddy variant, in one or the other of two approaches, the first illustrated by Dr. Demento’s version (and also seen in Kip Addotta’s cover):

Here, when the clothes start coming off, it turns out that Santa Claus is just Mommy in disguise. Heteronormativity is saved. Queers cry “Cheat! Cheat!”

It was left to RuPaul to cast heteronormativity aside and treat Daddy’s dalliance with Santa as a steamy moment on the down low, right there by the sacred Christmas tree, where Mommy might have walked in on the scene:

Bless you, RuPaul.

The idea of a gay Santa hasn’t struck everyone as an entertaining, if not actually positive, development. Here’s a dyspeptic cartoon on the topic by Ken Pyne in the Punch of 12/2/81 (back in ancient times when there still was a Punch):

(The CND was the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.) A sour blast at multiculturalism, lefty politics in the U.K., and the dreadful spectre of Political Correctness.

Today begins one of the twelve years of the Chinese lunar calendar (observed beyond the boundaries of China, of course): the year of the serpent, or snake, one of the two notably phallic years on the calendar (the other is the dragon; I am a dragon). Many many images, ranging from the traditional to the cute. Here’s one combining the snake image with the name of the year in Western script:

It’s a big thing in this part of the world.

The Cantonese wish for prosperity in the new year: Gung1 hei2 faat3 coi4. Usually rendered as Gung hay fat choi in English transcription, though there are a great many variant spellings.

May you have a prosperous new year. And the pleasure of snakes, as they suit you.

The 14th was Pi Day — for the mathematical constant whose decimal expansion begins 3.14 — and my grand-daughter’s school broke out in wild celebrations of π (hey, it’s a Montessori school), including π-themed costumes. Very sweet.

This moved me to consider another irrational constant, Euler’s number e, the base of natural logarithms: 2.718… That would make February 7th E Day.

(e, π, the imaginary unit i — the square root of -1 — and negative numbers come together in Euler’s identity, e^πi  = -1)

Then there’s the golden ratio ɸ, whose expansion begins 1.61… — so that Phi Day would be January 6th, otherwise known as Epiphany or Twelfth Night.

(I note that a fair number of people have reinterpreted Pi Day as Pie Day and celebrated the occasion with the baking and eating of pies.)

Today is Maundy, or Holy, Thursday, a lead-in to Easter Sunday (commemorating the Last Supper), and marshmallow came up yesterday in my posting on abutilon, so it’s time for a posting on Peeps, a confection associated with Easter. An array of these marshmallow candies:

  (#1)

(The yellow chick was the original Peep.)

(My friend Chris Ambidge has long vocally detested Peeps; “No more fucking peeps” is his slogan. That means, of course, that people are always annoying him with Peepsiana.)

Peeps have come up on this blog twice: in connection with a Bizarro cartoon (here) and with a Ceci n’est pas une peep parody of Magritte (here).

The Peeps story on Wikipedia:

Peeps are marshmallow candies, sold in the United States and Canada, that are shaped into chicks, bunnies, and other animals. There are also different shapes used for various holidays. Peeps are used primarily to fill Easter baskets, though recent advertising campaigns market the candy as “Peeps – Always in Season”, as Peeps has since expanded to include Halloween, Christmas and Valentine’s Day. They are made from marshmallow, corn syrup, gelatin, and carnauba wax.

Peeps are produced by Just Born, a candy manufacturer founded in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, by Russian immigrant Sam Born. In 1953, Just Born acquired the Rodda Candy Company and its marshmallow chick line, and replaced the painstaking process of hand-forming the chicks with mass production. The yellow chicks were the original form of the candy — hence their name — but then the company introduced other colors and, eventually, the myriad shapes in which they are now produced.

People have been endlessly inventive with Peeps. Here are two cakes featuring them — one with bunnies and a white frosting, one with chicks in a sunflower pattern and fudge frosting:

  (#2)

  (#3)

And there are Peeps dioramas. In fact, there are contests for them. From one of these contests, Let Them Eat Peeps:

  (#4)

And a darker number, this Peeps parody of Kill Bill (link from Tim McDaniel on the newsgroup soc.motss a few years ago):

  (#5)

Peeps are long-lived, but they do eventually get somewhat stale. From Wikipedia again:

Peeps are sometimes jokingly described as “indestructible”. In 1999, scientists at Emory University jokingly performed experiments on batches of Peeps to see how easily they could be dissolved, burned or otherwise disintegrated, using such agents as cigarette smoke, boiling water and liquid nitrogen. In addition to discussing whether Peeps migrate or evolve, they claimed that the eyes of the confectionery “wouldn’t dissolve in anything”. Furthermore, a similar joke website claims that Peeps are insoluble in acetone, water, diluted sulfuric acid, and sodium hydroxide (the web site also claims that the Peeps experimental subjects sign release forms). Concentrated sulfuric acid seems to have effects similar to the expected effects of sulfuric acid on sugar.

This debate was featured in an episode of the sitcom Malcolm in the Middle (“Traffic Jam”), in which Francis, insisting the “Quacks” (as they were called) would dissolve in his stomach rather than expand, takes up the dare to eat 100 of them, doing so, but getting very sick in the process.

There are a fair number of sites devoted to exploding or melting Peeps in a microwave.

Not only are we in the Easter season, we’re also in the middle of Passover (March 25 – April 2), so the question of whether Peeps are kosher for Passover comes up. The answer is definitely not, but at least one confectioner has leapt to the challenge:

I was really excited, in a silly way, to find out that Lieber’s Candy of Brooklyn makes kosher for Passover marshmallow bunnies and duckies – just like Peeps, only no gelatin! (I found the photo here–go give the kosher food detective some love!) I had this great idea to commission someone to make us an Easter basket with all kosher-for-Passover candy to photograph and feature on our site. In order to be kosher for Passover, candy can’t be made with corn syrup, and there are other kashrut rules about ingredients that apply to foods year-round that also apply on Passover. (link)

Lieber’s candy:

   (#6)

Presumably, they replaced not only the gelatin but also the corn syrup.

There is some controversy about gelatin (an animal product that might include pork in its sources) being treif, but it’s safer to just avoid it:

One of the main methods of avoiding nonkosher gelatin is to substitute gelatin-like materials in its place; substances with a similar chemical behaviour include food starch from tapioca, chemically modified pectins, and carrageenan combined with certain vegetable gums — guar gum, locust bean gum, xanthan gum, gum acacia, agar, and others. Although gelatin is used for several purposes by a wide variety of manufacturers, it has started to be replaced with these substitutes in a number of products, due to the use of gelatin also being a significant concern to vegans and vegetarians. (link)

As for corn syrup:

Corn products, along with legumes & rice, are considered kitniyot — foods that are similar enough to chametz grains [the five grains wheat, barley, spelt, rye, and oats, which yield leavened foods] that they are prohibited [during Passover]. Only Ashkenazic Jews (Eastern European descent) avoid kitniyot. Sephardic Jews are free to consume it. (link)

Other sugars can be used instead. I don’t know how close the result of these substitutions is to true Peeps, but then I don’t care for Peeps to start with.

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

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

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

On the Society for Pure English, from the Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language, ed. Tom McArthur (1998):

A reforming society founded in England in 1913 by a number of writers and academics on the initiative of the poet Robert Bridges. The outbreak of the First World War impeded its development, but between 1919 and 1946 it carried on a campaign against what it regarded as degenerate tendencies within the language, mainly through a series of 66 Tracts, for many years printed and distributed by Oxford University Press. The terms pure and tract indicate the quasi-missionary approach adopted by Bridges and his associates.

Hudson University, whose motto is Lex et Ordo, figures often in the tv series Law and Order.

But Lamarck and Lysenko are giveaways just on their own.

For the day on Wordnik, the piece “Dupes, Gulls, and Schnooks: The Words of April Fools” by Angela Tung.

Today is what I have come to think of (thanks to my friend Robert Coren) as Spoonerism Day, in honor of the famous (and undoubtedly apocryphal) transposition from Rev. Spooner himself: my queer dean for my dear Queen. But what’s the connection to April 30th?, you ask.

Two things: April 30th is the birthday of Robert’s and my friend Dean Allemang, and Dean is out and queer (though not, in my opinion, a queen); and it’s Queen’s Day in the Netherlands. Well, today it’s Queen’s Day for the last time (for a while), since the Queen abdicated today, in favor of her son Willem-Alexander.

From Wikipedia:

Koninginnedag … or Queen’s Day is a national holiday in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Celebrated on 30 April (the 29th if the 30th falls on a Sunday), Koninginnedag is Queen Beatrix’s official celebration day. Though Queen Beatrix was born on 31 January, the holiday is observed on 30 April as it was the birthday of her mother and predecessor, Juliana. Many of the traditional activities are held outside, and observing the holiday in April makes suitable weather more likely.

In 2014, the holiday will become known as Koningsdag … or King’s Day following the investiture of Willem-Alexander as king of the Netherlands on 30 April 2013. Koningsdag will be celebrated on 27 April, Willem-Alexander’s birthday. However, the first Koningsdag will be held on 26 April 2014 because 27 April is a Sunday.

The abdication story, from the Metro (UK):

Queen Beatrix steps down as Willem-Alexander becomes first Dutch king in 100 years

Her eldest son Willem-Alexander has ascended to the throne, ending his mother’s 33-year reign after she signed the official act of abdication at the Royal Palace in Amsterdam.

The 75-year-old appeared visibly emotional as she signed the document, but she smiled warmly after greeting thousands of orange-clad well-wishers who waited for the royal family to appear on the palace balcony.

Forty-six-year-old father-of-three King Willem-Alexander is the first Dutch king since Willem III died in 1890.

His popular Argentinean-born wife becomes Queen Maxima, while their eldest daughter Catharina-Amalia, nine, becomes Princess Orange and first in line to the throne.

On Facebook, Sally Byers reminds me that  today is a Fibonacci day: an M/D/Y (in US notation) in which M + D = Y (5/8/13: 5 + 8 = 13) and M and D are successive Fibonacci numbers (starting from the pair of integers 1, 1). This is the fifth Fibonacci day in this century — 1/1/02, 1/2/03, 2/3/05, 3/5/08, and now 5/8/13. It’s also the penultimate Fibonacci day in this century: 8/13/21 will be the last, and then no more (since there’s no 13th month).

More days: triangular days, in which M, D, and Y are successive triangular numbers: in this century, 1/3/06, 3/6/10, 6/10/15, 10/15/21, and then we run out.

And square days, in which M, D, and Y are successive square numbers: 1/4/09, 4/9/16, 9/16/25, and again we run out.

And cubic days, in which M, D, and Y are successive cubic numbers: 1/8/27, 8/27/64, and that’s the end.

Meanwhile, there are arithmetic days, in which the differences between M versus D and D versus Y are constant. A lot of these, for instance 11/12/13 (difference of 1), 9/11/13 (difference of 2), 7/10/13 (difference of 3), 5/9/13 (difference of 4).

And geometric days, in which the ratios between M over D and D over Y are constant — as in 3/6/12 (ratio of 2), 2/6/18 (ratio of 3), 1/4/16 (ratio of 4).

And exponential days, in which the exponents of M on D and D on Y are constant (D = M^x and Y = D^x): for instance, 2/4/16 (exponent of 2), 3/9/81 (exponent of 2).

So today (5/8/13) is a Fibonacci day and tomorrow (5/9/13) is an arithmetic day. Lots of special.

Every day, San Francisco radio station KALW announces notable events for that day. Yesterday (May 13th) we were told that it was National Apple Pie Day (other sources agree with that; almost every day is devoted to some food or another) and also Blame Somone Else Day. An entertaining idea. Unfortunately, I can’t find any source that says Blame Someone Else Day comes on May 13th.

Quite a few sources — for instance, the Holiday Insights site — say the holiday comes on the first Friday the 13th of the year. This year that’s in September, and in any case yesterday was a Monday, not a Friday.

Other sources — for instance, this Bizarre January Holidays site — name January 13th as the day for blaming others. (January 13th is also National Peach Melba Day and Make Your Dream Come True Day.)

Perhaps there’s someone out there who thinks that a blaming day comes around every month, on the 13th.

A cartoonish slogan for the day, whenever it comes:

And a penguin cartoon too:

Somehow May came to an end without my realizing that it was National Masturbation Month (and, in fact, without my realizing that there was such a celebration). From Wikipedia:

National Masturbation Day (NMD) is an annual event celebrated on a day in May to protect the right to masturbate. The first National Masturbation Day was observed in 1995. …  Alongside NMD, the month of May is celebrated as the National Masturbation Month.

  (#1)

The Wikipedia piece continues:

The NMD is organized to protest against social stigma against masturbation. Sexologist Carol Queen, an organizer of the NMD, argued, although 90% of men and 65% of women in North America masturbate regularly, masturbation is viewed negatively in contemporary culture and deliberately excluded from the formal education system. According to Queen, “We gave our heads a shake and said it’s about time we fought back. That’s when we founded National Masturbation Day.”

The NMD in the United States was being organized from its beginning primarily by the San Francisco-based sex toy retail chain Good Vibrations [with which Queen is associated] and its supporters.

On Queen:

Carol Queen is an American author, editor, sociologist and sexologist active in the sex-positive feminism movement. Queen has written on human sexuality in books such as Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture. She has written a sex tutorial, Exhibitionism for the Shy: Show Off, Dress Up and Talk Hot, as well as erotica, such as the novel The Leather Daddy and the Femme. Queen has produced adult movies, events, workshops and lectures. Queen was featured as an instructor and star in both installments of the Bend Over Boyfriend series about female-to-male anal sex, or pegging. (link)

In related news:

In May 1995, San Francisco–based sex toy shop Good Vibrations declared May to be “Masturbation Month”. Since then, it has encouraged people to get sponsors as a fundraiser for charities with a sex-positive focus.

In 1999, the Masturbate-a-Thon was originated by the collective Open Enterprises, which operates Good Vibrations. The slogan “Come for a Cause” was coined by Rachel Venning, the founder of the sex toy shop Babeland, formerly Toy in Babeland, which has branches in Seattle, in Brooklyn, and (two) in Manhattan. The Masturbate-a-Thon was built up by Good Vibrations, which encouraged other modern sex-toy businesses — such as Babeland; A Woman’s Touch, in Madison, Wisconsin; Toronto’s Come as You Are; and Boston’s Grand Opening — to hold events coinciding with “masturbation month” (May in the United States).

  (#2)

Events have also been held in Europe.

Now on attitudes about masturbation. From a posting of mine about wank:

In BrE, the derived noun wanker (and its abbreviated variant wank) has both the transparent sense ‘one who masturbates’ (attested from 1950) but also the sense ‘an objectionable or contemptible person or thing’ (both variants attested from the early 1970s, but surely earlier).

And along with these linguistic usages go two long-standing social attitudes (connected to one another) about masturbation. I’ve written several times about the idea that masturbation is unproductive sex, which leads to a thicket of metaphors about various activities (judged to be unproductive) as equivalent to masturbation [mental masturbation is an especially common collocation]. And then there’s the bad end of jacking off, reported by the OED under the heading of wanker’s doom, in its wanker entry:

One who masturbates; wanker’s doom, disability caused by excessive masturbation.

Jacking off makes you grow hair on your palms, makes you blind, makes you go crazy. (What you need is vaginal intercourse, preferably with your wife.) The idea is that masturbation is not only unproductive, but unnatural, against God’s will, hence dangerous and destructive. Fucking your wife a lot is good, indeed what God wants, but jacking off a lot is dangerous craziness. I think *that’s* craziness.

June 16th (today’s date) is a triple occasion: Bloomsday, the anniversary of the Zwicky – Daingerfield wedding, and my stepson Kit’s birthday. This Sunday is also Commencement Day at Stanford and Father’s Day.

Bloomsday. From Wikipedia:

Bloomsday is a commemoration and celebration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce during which the events of his novel Ulysses (which is set on 16 June 1904) are relived. It is observed annually on 16 June in Dublin and elsewhere… The name is derived from Leopold Bloom, the Ulyssean protagonist.

The wedding anniversary. Ann and I were married 51 years ago today. (Postings about the occasion here and here.)

Weddings are an occasion for pairing family names, in wedding announcements in newspapers. Nothing special in Zwicky – Daingerfield, beyond the oddness of the two names. But sometimes you get an unfortunate combination of names, as in a set of wedding announcements Gregory Ward passed on in e-mail on the 5th.

(Note: some newspapers put the groom’s name first, as the Reading Eagle did with my marriage to Ann, but some put the bride’s name first.)

From Gregory’s e-mail (heavy on double entendres):

Traylor – Hooker, Best – Lay, Hardy – Harr, Wang – Holder, Looney – Warde, Beaver – Wetter, Wendt – Adaway, Filler – Quick, Drinkwine – Layer, Kuntz – Dick, Aikin – Johnson, Peters – Rising, MacDonald – Berger, Wacker – Dailey, Gowen – Geter

Kit Transue’s birthday. The kids are all middle-aged now, sigh.

Stanford Commencement. The main Commencement speaker is New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. After the big ceremony, individual schools and departments have diploma-granting ceremonies, which are always touching events.

A note on errors: I’ve been having trouble typing the word Commencement, skipping from the first E to the third, producing Commencent. See my recent posting on telescoping errors.

Father’s Day. Today’s Zits unites father and son via musical tastes:

In other Father’s Day news, the Men’s Wearhouse has been running an ad for the occasion:

Because no two fathers are alike, right now we’re offering Buy One Get One Free.

which I understood at first hearing to be offering fathers for sale. You can always use an extra dad.

Finally, here’s a photo of my father (and my mother and a very very young me) from 1940:

(In those days, everybody wore hats. Even newborn me.)

Other seasonal events. Other events that sometimes coincide with one or more of these occasions include the San Francisco Free Folk Festival (which this year was on June 8th and 9th), San Francisco Pride (which this year is on the latest possible dates in Pride Month, the weekend of June 29th and 30th), and San Jose Pride (which this year is very late indeed, the weekend of August 17th and 18th).

[Addendum later in the day: Today is Palo Alto World Music Day:

Palo Alto World Music Day is a music festival that takes place every year on Father's Day.  It will be celebrated for the fifth time in Palo Alto on Sunday June 16, 2013 from 3:00 pm to 7:30 pm, on University Avenue  ... and King Plaza (City Hall).

Meanwhile, June 16th is National Fudge Day. And the birthday of Tupac Shakur, Stan Laurel, Geronimo, Joyce Carol Oates, and Nobelist Barbara McClintock, among others.]

In celebration of the resumption of same-sex marriages in California and of Pride Weekend in San Francisco, I offer two takes on rainbow pizza (two out of a huge number you can find on the web), and then, since the second led me to a photo of a young man in rainbow underwear, I offer two more such photos (out of a truly enormous number of these).

Rainbow pizza #1, which gets its colors from its ingredients (a recipe is here):

(#1)

Rainbow pizza #2, with a dramatic use of food coloring, from Amirah Kassem of Flour Shop, profiled on the stylish-things site deuxmoi:

(#2)

On the page with this six-color pizza came this photo of a shirtless (but behatted) deuxmoi guy in a Björn Borg black brief with rainbow waistband:

(#3)

That led me to return to some rainbow underwear for men not pictured in my two Undergear postings, “Gay flags” of 8/6/10 and “Return to rainbow flagwear” of 8/21/10.  From the Dead Good Undies people, the L’Homme Invisible Rainbow V Mini Boxer:

(#4)

The firm provides breathless text describing this item:

This psychedelic men’s underwear is sure to blow your mind! The Rainbow V Miniboxer from L’Homme Invisible is a vivid visual treat – hot pink merges from electric orange to yellow, light lime green, sky blue, blue and back again. The bright white waistband is deep and softly towelled at the inside, care instructions are printed onto the inner rear centre. The Hipster’s super smooth pouch is reinforced with a layer of soft netting and gently contoured for one almighty fit. Shimmering L’Homme Invisible Sexmachine lettering is interwoven into the waistband which dips attractively at the front centre to form a ‘V’ where a waxy ‘V’ shape is sewn just below. Also available as a Thong and Miniboxer in the same brilliant colour offering.

Then from the Fully Briefed firm, this Joe Snyder Expression Boxer in Rainbow:

(#5)

Both #4 and #5 are notable instances of pouchwear as well as rainbow flagwear.

From several sources on Facebook, this Pride/post-SCOTUS image of the Empire State Building:

  (#1)

The old lady (completed in 1931) looks great in rainbow. As, of course, does the current SF City Hall, opened in 1915 after the great earthquake destroyed its predecessor.

This has been a giddy week for LGBT people, especially in California, and I’m on to rainbow everything. Rainbow food, rainbow underwear, rainbow Gromit, and these delights: rainbow dogs, a rainbow kangaroo, and a rainbow moose:

  (#2)

  (#3)

  (#4)

There is, of course, much much more.

Tomorrow is my saint’s day: St. Arnold’s Day, a day of beer.

From Wikipedia:

Arnold (Arnoul) of Soissons or Arnold or Arnulf of Oudenburg (ca 1040–1087) is a saint of the Roman Catholic Church, the patron saint of hop-pickers and Belgian brewers.

Arnold, born in Brabant, the son of a certain Fulbertus, was first a career soldier before settling at the Benedictine St. Medard’s Abbey, Soissons, France. He spent his first three years as a hermit, but later rose to be abbot of the monastery. His hagiography states that he tried to refuse this honor and flee — a standard literary trope (compare Jiménez de Cisneros) —  but was forced by a wolf to return. He then became a priest and in 1080, bishop of Soissons, another honor that he sought to avoid. When his see was occupied by another bishop, rather than fighting, he took the opportunity to retire from public life, founding the Abbey of St. Peter in Oudenburg.

At the abbey, he began to brew beer, as essential in medieval life as water. He encouraged local peasants to drink beer, instead of water, due to its “gift of health.” During the process of brewing, the water was boiled and thus, unknown to all, freed of pathogens. This same story is also told of Arnulf or Arnold of Metz, another patron of brewers. There are many depictions of St. Arnold with a mashing rake in his hand, to identify him. He is honored in July with a parade in Brussels on the “Day of Beer.”

Miracles that were reported at his tomb were investigated and approved by a council at Beauvais in 1121; Arnold’s relics were translated to the church of Saint Peter, Aldenburg in 1131. St. Arnold’s feast day is 8 July.

St. Arnold has lent his name to a craft brewery in Houston TX: the Saint Arnold Brewing Company, which bills itself as “Texas’ Oldest Craft Brewery”, honoring the Germanic heritage in Texas.

Hoist one for St. Arnold tomorrow.

… was yesterday. From John Lawler on Facebook, this comment about the Pied Piper of Hamelin and an illustration, originally from Richard Galgano:

July 22 is Ratcatcher’s Day (celebrated on June 26 in Hamelin, Germany)

  (#1)

The summary of the folklore, from Wikipedia:

The Pied Piper of Hamelin (German: Rattenfänger von Hameln) is the subject of a legend concerning the departure or death of a great number of children from the town of Hamelin (Hameln), Lower Saxony, Germany, in the Middle Ages. The earliest references describe a piper, dressed in multicolored clothing, leading the children away from the town never to return. In the 16th century the story was expanded into a full narrative, in which the piper is a rat-catcher hired by the town to lure rats away with his magic pipe. When the citizenry refuses to pay for this service, he retaliates by turning his magic on their children, leading them away as he had the rats. This version of the story spread as a fairy tale. This version has also appeared in the writings of, amongst others, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Brothers Grimm and Robert Browning.

A bit of the (very entertaining) Browning:

Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.

Illustration #1, with some rats, is a recent one. Here’s an older one with a great stream of rats, from a 1902 postcard, along with one version of the Rattenfänger folksong “Wandern, ach wandern” (a more familiar 1912 text by Adolf Kunz begins: “Wandern, ach Wandern durch Berg und Tal”):

  (#2)

And here’s one (by Kate Greenaway, to accompany the Browning poem) with the children:

  (#3)

Now, about the dates (July 22 vs. June 26); these come from two different versions of the story. From Wikipedia again:

[One version] In 1284, while the town of Hamelin was suffering from a rat infestation, a man dressed in pied clothing appeared, claiming to be a rat-catcher. He promised the mayor a solution for their problem with the rats. The mayor in turn promised to pay him for the removal of the rats. The man accepted, and played a musical pipe to lure the rats with a song into the Weser River, where all but one drowned. Despite his success, the mayor reneged on his promise and refused to pay the rat-catcher the full amount of money. The man left the town angrily, but vowed to return some time later, seeking revenge. On Saint John and Paul’s day [26 June] while the inhabitants were in church, he played his pipe yet again, dressed in green, like a hunter, this time attracting the children of Hamelin. One hundred and thirty boys and girls followed him out of the town, where they were lured into a cave and never seen again. Depending on the version, at most three children remained behind. One of the children was lame and could not follow quickly enough, the second was deaf and followed the other children out of curiosity, and the last was blind and unable to see where he was going. These three informed the villagers of what had happened when they came out of church.

… The earliest English account is that of Richard Rowland Verstegan (1548 – c. 1636), an antiquary and religious controversialist of partly Dutch descent, in his Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (Antwerp, 1605); he does not give his source…Verstegan includes the reference to the rats and the idea that the lost children turned up in Transylvania. The phrase ‘Pide [sic] Piper’ occurs in his version and seems to have been coined by him. Curiously enough his date is entirely different from that given above [June 26, 1284]: July 22, 1376; this may suggest that two events, a migration in 1284 and a plague of rats in 1376, have become fused together.

But why did John Lawler, a linguist, bring up Rattenfängertag? Here’s what he said on Facebook (bold-facing added by me):

All syntacticians know today as Pied-Piping Day, the day
in honor of which we should pied-pipe the constituents
with which we start our relative clauses, to amuse those
with whom we are speaking.

Note the verb pied-pipe (a back-formed two-part verb). From Wikipedia on pied-piping:

In linguistics, pied-piping is a phenomenon of syntax whereby a given focused expression takes an entire encompassing phrase with it when it is “moved”. The term itself is due to John Robert [known as Haj] Ross; it is a reference to the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the figure of fairy tales who lured rats (and children) by playing his flute. Pied-piping is an aspect of discontinuities in syntax, having to do with the constituents that can and cannot be discontinuous. While pied-piping is most visible in cases of wh-fronting of information questions and relative clauses, it is not limited to wh-fronting, but rather it can be construed as occurring with most any type of discontinuity (extraposition, scrambling, topicalization). Most if not all languages that allow discontinuities employ pied-piping to some extent, although there are major differences across languages in this area, some languages employing pied-piping much more than others.

The bold-faced expressions above begin restrictive relative clauses. The second and third have Ps fronted together with a wh-word; the alternative is P-stranding:

(the consituents) which we start our relative clauses with
(those) whom we are speaking with

The first is more complicated. Let me eliminate the relative clause embedded within a relative clause and consider instead

(the day) in honor of which we pied-pipe constituents

This has in honor of pied-piped along with which; the stranded-P alternative is

(the day) which we pied-pipe constituents in honor of

We can construct examples in which there are three alternative versions: stranded P, fronted (pied-piped) P, and fronted (pied-piped) NP + P. In a non-restrictive relative clause:

[stranded P] a study, which the details of I do not know
[fronted P] a study, of which the details I do not know
[fronted NP + P] a study, the details of which I do not know

From the Mental Floss site, this set of phallic images:

  (#1)

The first fact:

  (#2)

The longer story, from Wikipedia:

National Ice Cream Month is celebrated each year in July in the United States. President Ronald Reagan designated July 1984 as National Ice Cream Month and July 21, 1984 as National Ice Cream Day with Presidential Proclamation 5219 in 1984. President Reagan recognized the popularity of ice cream in the United States (90% of the nation’s population consumes ice cream) and stated that these two events should be observed with “appropriate ceremonies and activities.” Today, National Ice Cream Month is celebrated each July and National Ice Cream Day is celebrated on the third Sunday in July [this year, 7/21/13], even though the presidential proclamation only mentioned the month and date in 1984.

The day has passed, but there are a few days left for ice cream in July.