9/8 , and it’s Antonin Dvořák’s birthday (in 1841); see my 1/27/24 posting “Spillville”, about Spillville IA and the Czech composer, with this note:
let me recommend the Wikipedia article on Dvořák, for its detailed telling of a remarkable life, of great talent, a lot of pluck, a fair amount of luck, generous humanity, and the benefit of champions, advocates on your behalf (in this case, primarily Johannes Brahms)
(with a reminder that tomorrow, 9/9, is Negation Day, on which we protest, in German: Nein! Nein!)
But now for something completely different, from the Gay & Fabulous site (brought to my Facebook page all the way from Oz by Ruth Lawrence this morning):
(#1) I truly appreciate the pun in Queerios — and I’m all for queer visibility (I’m the guy with several different t-shirts proclaiming QUEER AS FUCK, after all) — but I’m going to have to protest that General Mills, which makes Cheerios, markets Fruity Cheerios, while Kellogg’s makes Fruit Loops, so that the admirable coinage Queerios smells like the offspring of an illicit union between the Montagues and the Capulets (or in the corporate world of ingestibles, Pepsi and Coke, or Burger King and McDonald’s)
What’s for breakfast? Fruity toroidlet cereal! Highlights from previous postings on this blog.
— in my 3/12/16 posting “Sweet nothings: candy, cereal, advertising”, taking off from a One Big Happy strip in which Ruthie protects her candy, “new Gummy Giggles with 75% more fruity flavor”, and then focusing on Kellogg’s Froot Loops, as here:
(#2) A package, complete with toucan; note the appeal to the “natural fruit flavors” of the cereal
— from my 3/12/16 posting “Fruit loops”:
My posting on breakfast cereals for kids and the way they are marketed focused on Kellogg’s Froot Loops, an extraordinarily sweet cereal in the shape of small rings (or loops), whose rhyming name was chosen to suggest, mendaciously, that the rings are made from fruit, or at least fruit juice — but in a spelling that avoids making such a claim explicitly; the spelling is not merely orthographically playful (as commercial names often are), but deliberately misleading.
Meanwhile, fruit loop came to have at least two slang senses, both distinctly North American and, apparently, neither current before (roughly) 1950: ‘a crazy or foolish person’; and, incorporating the slang slur fruit for a gay man, ‘locker loop’ (a feature of certain men’s shirts, also known slurringly as fag tag or fairy loop).
— from my 11/18/17 posting “Fruity Fruit Froot”, on fruity stuff, including Fruity Cheerios:
(#3) A package of General Mills’s Fruity Cheerios, along with its chocolate stablemate, both of them providing big sugar kicks
xx