From Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky (my daughter) on 6/20, completely out of the blue:
Re: Assessment Thursday 10:30: The assessment visit is at the Avant [“a WellQuest Living Community”, offering independent living for seniors in Palo Alto]. All their departments meet you to make sure you’re a fit. I think it takes about an hour. Somebody will take you.
(about the holiday, and masculinity, and enough man-on-man sex to make this posting out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest)
First take: the long pan. From my 6/16/19 posting “On this day in 2019”:
(US) Fathers Day. For some of us, this is a day to remember our fathers with affection. I’m one of the lucky ones; I’ve written about mine several times, most extensively in my 1/30/11 posting “It Gets Better / Wonderful dad”.
It’s also an American commercial holiday that might better be labeled Masculinity Day, aimed at selling things stereotypically associated with high masculinity in either the upper middle class or the working class; elaboration on this point in my 6/10/18 posting “Gearing up for Fathers Day”. [AZ: I am largely alienated from American normative masculinity, have been as long as I can remember, so have gone my own way, on a path of homomasculinity, where both my sociocultural affiliations and my sexual desires take me off the broad highway and into the steamy jungle underbrush]
And then through its role as Masculinity Day and through complex associations involving gay men and fathers, Fathers Day is also a high holiday for gay porn, with at least three different themes: sex between father and son; Daddy-Boy relationships; and sex involving older men — called daddies — especially, very muscular ones. [AZ: of the three themes, only Daddy / Boy works for me, and that’s a recent discovery: in this world of sexual fantasy, despite my advanced age, I turn out to be, as we say there, a very good Boy; there is, apparently, always space for pleasant surprises]
In the New Yorker‘s 6/15/26 issue, a “Talk of the Town” piece “The Boards: Like Willy Wonka” by Zach Helfand on the theatre director Michael Arden experiencing indoor skydiving at a facility in Queens (in preparation for his latest show, “The Lost Boys”, which includes actors in intricate flying sequences). Then:
In his acceptance speech for his first Tony, in 2023, Arden recounted being a bullied queer theatre kid in Texas, and then said, “All I can say is that now I’m a faggot with a Tony.” Post-flying, Arden said, “I was more nervous making that speech [than flying indoors]. That was terrifying.”
In Arden’s I’m a faggot with a Tony, I hear a mixture of urgent defiance and anxious fear that’s familiar terrain — I’m a pussy-boy in the American Academy — that I passed through first as a child.
… from the New Yorker issue of that day: a Liana Finck cartoon on the never-done work of women; and an Ellis Rosen cartoon featuring a fully-accredited monster.
(a note on taboo avoidance and euphemism, but with enough explication of the raw reference of various expressions to make this posting unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
A poster wrote:
I am a male corn actor.
— adding that he had worked in adult entertainment before getting into corn. Just enough background information for me to exclude, oh so reluctantly, a wide range of colorful but unlikely understandings of corn, in favor of its just being an intentional replacement for porn to avoid filters on-line. So: a subtler and harder to detect variant of the well-established filter-avoidance pr0n ‘pornography, porn’: an intentional misspelling of porn (with the middle letters transposed, and the letter o replaced by numeral 0). (The thing is, pr0n stands out as odd, so clever filtering could fairly easily pick it out; the beauty of corn is its utter ordinariness.)
(Now, of course, being the person I am, I am seized with carnal, raunchy, grossly sexual readings of corn on the cob, corn chowder, Children of the Corn, cornucopia, corny jokes, cornflakes, cornfields, popcorn, Cornwall, corner store, cornrow, Jimmy Crack Corn, cornet, acorn, …)
Just 3 days ago (6/15), it was the mantric pleasures of my ball: Key lime cheese ball, Key lime cheese ball, Key lime cheese ball. And then today (6/18), the Pinhead citizens of Dingburg have taken to chanting for their remarkable flange: galvanized steel socket flange, galvanized steel socket flange, galvanized steel socket flange.
Respect their flange! onomatomania, onomatomania, onomatomania!
Coming soon: the steel flange cheese ball, a triumph of textural contrast. Rivaling the US capital’s paint chip algae bloom (Symphony In Blue And Green).
(Significant amounts of sexual crudity, so not for the eyes and ears of kids or the sexually modest)
Niall Maher’s New Yorker daily cartoon for 6/15/26:
(#1) To make any sense of this wonderful cartoon, you need to have detailed knowledge of two different events: from 5/19/1962 (I was just a month away from graduating from Princeton); and from 6/14/2026 (essentially, now), with a glance forward to 7/4 — events celebrating the birthdays of two different US Presidents (John F. Kennedy then, our overlord Grabpussy now), through two different renditions of the song “Happy Birthday”: in 1962, in a potent haze of female sexual desire and sexual desirability (by Marilyn Monroe, in as close to naked as she should get while being in principle fully and elaborately clothed), but in this week’s cartoon, by a muscular machine of male aggression (who doesn’t look at all ready to deliver an adoring serenade to this particular President)
And now: backstory, tons of backstory.
(There will be some man-on-man sex, in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)
From my 6/13 posting “Two laughs-out-loud and a shiver of self-recognition”, about this Sarah Akinterinwa Psychiatrist strip:
The therapist recommends, as a relief from anxiety, the familiar comfort of rewatching the same series until its outcomes feel more knowable than your own: a very common strategy for dealing with the terrible burdens of the daily news — and [a salve for anxiety] I regularly employ
For me, not a joke, but a life strategy.
Emily Menon Bender then wondered what some of my favorites were. Below, with only minor editing, my answer.
(fairly quickly detours into phenomenally raunchy free verse and then swivels again — but in there’s some stuff that’s way out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest)
I was roused from my pastoral torpor this morning by a Facebook ad from the Tastefully Simple® website offering basic preparation directions for Key Lime Cheese Ball Mix. And I immediately fell into a Zippyesque seizure of onomatomania, moved to chanting Key lime cheese ball, Key lime cheese ball, Key lime cheese ball. Then, being the sort of person that I am, I entertained a delightful reverie of citrus-juice-sharp, aged-cheese-ripe testicles and on from there, culminating in that unseemly verse. Then from there I speculated some on why some forms of sensuous pleasure have become particularly poignant for me these days.
Now to spool through all of this. Beginning with the ad.
Cartoons that especially moved me in the latest — 6/1/26 — issue of the New Yorker: two by artists who are old acquaintances on this blog (Drew Dernavich and Frank Cotham), trafficking here in their brands of absurdity (their gags made me laugh out loud); plus one by British cartoonist, illustrator, and writer Sara Akinterinwa (whose work, all recent, explores dating, relationships, identity, politics, and navigating adult life as a young woman of color) that gave me not a great laugh but a shiver of self-recognition: that’s not funny, that’s my life strategy!
