… 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.
Two 6/22 cartoons
June 19, 2026“I am a male corn actor”
June 19, 2026(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, …)
My ball, their flange
June 18, 2026Just 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).
Happy Birthday, Mr. President
June 17, 2026(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.
A salve for anxiety
June 16, 2026(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.
Key lime cheese ball
June 15, 2026(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.
Two laughs-out-loud and a shiver of self-recognition
June 13, 2026Cartoons 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!
Hot news
June 12, 2026A busy two days, with an avalanche of fresh things to post about, but all of it overshadowed by the hot news that I have found a place to live in. For complex reasons, it’s not technically an assisted living facility, but an independent living facility (think: retirement community); and for even more complex reasons, it’s a 2-bedroom (and 2-bath) unit for the same price as a 1-bedroom (so that fitting the crucial books I need into the place is now trivially easy, and I can also swing the finances, which would have been daunting). And it’s in a neighborhood just south of Stanford (and the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, where all my doctors are), one I’m familiar with. Gigantic piles of financial and business transactions for my daughter Elizabeth to negotiate now. But I’m all a-quiver.
Stunned by signage
June 9, 2026The 6/1 Zippy strip celebrates a vibrant life on the side of the road, in drive-in joints offering comfort food and in flashy highway motels, in the lost days of mid-20th-century America (think HoJo’s clam strips):
(#1) Stunned by signage: an octogenarian’s bulletin from the golden days; the cartoonist Bill Griffith was born in 1944, I was born in 1940, so this was the time of our youth
Remembrance of lost time: L-Ken’s Drive-In Restaurant in Colonie NY (a northern suburb of Albany, the state capital) was demolished on 4/20/17; the Tucson Inn, in Arizona’s second city, was demolished in April 2025. Both were famed for their neon signs (cartooned above).
I’m a big gooner
June 8, 2026(plenty of raunchy sex talk, not for kids or the sexually modest)
(#1) That’s gooner ‘someone who masturbates a lot, enthusiastically’ — one of a family of senses for this noun — and it’s a fair cop (on the song, see the footnote at the end of this posting)
But that’s not how I got wrapped up in goonerology (and what Mickey Dolenz sang in 1966 — back in pre-gooner days — was, of course, I’m a believer). That I blame on the Peachy Kings 30%-off Memorial Day sale on (100% polyester) mesh football jerseys with sexual or sexualized identity labels on them, among them:
(#2) At $40 a pop; the labels include GOOD BOY [Boy for Daddy], EVIL GAY, TRASH [‘slut’], STUD, HO HO HO [with ho(e) ‘slut’ (etymologically ‘whore’)], PORN STAR, DEMON TWINK, WOOF, SIR — and, as above, GOONER
Now, it turns out that a sexual verb goon, agent noun gooner, and activity noun gooning are all, according to Merriam-Webster online, recently coined (with goon‘s first known uses from about 2005). As is common with recent coinages, especially of markedly slangy or taboo nature, these items are highly variable in their reference (people play with them), taking in a range of uses — in this case, at least 5 distinguishable uses, all having to do, in some way or another, with masturbation. The result is that I have no idea of what a guy would intend to convey by wearing the shirt in #2. (I am a gooner-3 and gooner-4, definitely not a gooner-1 or gooner-5, and will disavow gooner-2.)