(Underwear and raunchy innuendo, with a jock harness bonus, and some language stuff, but, yes, men’s bodies, so not to everyone’s tastes.)
The latest Daily Jocks offering, with my caption:
(#1)
Lukas and the Back Alley Boys
Return this week for a
Short engagement,
Featuring old favorites
— “Butt Up, Baby”, and
Fresh stuff
— “Pullin’ My Pants Down For You”,
Soon to be released on their
Ballsy new album
Silly Love Songs
National Coming Out Day was largely a day of personal remembrance for me this year — see my posting here — so I missed a bit of significant lgbt news, with a local twist even. It came to me circuitously, via the (closed) Facebook group Our Bastard Language, in a posting by Lauren Hall, originally on October 11th (NCOD itself), where Lauren reported the Think Different poster she’d seen on Market St. in San Francisco that day. One shot among many available (this one just a bit off Market, but in a famous spot):
(#1)
A variant of Apple’s Think Different ad campaign of some years back, with a silhouette of Squire GrabPussy (as the President-Elect was then) instead of a semicircular bite out of the apple, and with the bands of the Pride Flag instead of Apple’s rainbow colors:
(#2)
Today’s Daily Jocks ad (for Pump! underwear), with my caption:
Once fully inflated, the
Figure needed foot weights for
Stability, then was disposed as an
Adornment for the trophy room,Inspiration for the men on the team.
(The cartoonist Cameron Harvey. There are a surprising number of Cameron Harveys around.)
Recently seen here: a CH cartoon on emoji and hieroglyphics, from the 4/27/15 New Yorker. Now three more, not especially language-focused, but all wryly bookish. Another in the New Yorker (8/3/15):
(#1)
And then two more, published elsewhere.
Today’s Zippy has Little Lulu’s sidekick Thomas “Tubby” Tompkins traveling across worlds to race to the Central Diner in Peekskill NY — the Sunset Diner of Tubby and Lulu’s 1950’s cartoon childhood:
(#1)
(Wilbur van Snobbe and Iggie Inch are, of course, two more Little Lulu characters.)
[11/12/16: Update on the NYTMagazine/Wesley Morris matter. By the time I got around to looking for Morris’s excellent piece “Last Taboo” on-line, my searches were shunted to another Morris piece, “Uncommon Ground” (to appear in print tomorrow). I posted about this; Ned Deily discovered that though he had been able to get to “Last Taboo”, he was now also diverted away from it; and Ned unearthed the Wayback Machine evidence for the piece on-line earlier. At least one reader reported no problem with the links, and not long after I posted, things were fixed for everyone. Alarm no more.
Meanwhile, I tried to get in touch with Morris about the problem, but saw no way to do it. Ned, ever helpful, reported that the NYT had a page listing Morris’s articles for them, and on it there was an Email Author button. So there was; it doesn’t give you an address, but directs messages to Morris out of public view. Unfortunately, the software returned the message
We could not process your request, please try again later. Sorry for the inconvenience.
— 25 times over two days. My patience is now officially exhausted. To hell with it.
Score card: one software glitch fixed, one apparently still flourishing.]
Now, back to my previous posting.]
A remarkable long piece in the New York Times Magazine Culture issue on October 30th, by film critic and general cultural critic Wesley Morris, “The Last Taboo: Why American pop culture just can’t deal with black male sexuality”, on the elision (or, alternatively, mythologization) of black male sexuality. In a supremely ironic development, the text of Morris’s piece has itself been elided from the public record (no doubt by massive incompetence rather than malevolence): links on the NYT site (and, as far as I can tell, on all sites that refer to “The Last Taboo”) take you not to this article but to another, racially and sexually irrelevant, Morris piece, “Uncommon Ground: Our New Urban Oases”, on elevated railways turned into pedestrian parks, which is identified as being from the NYT Magazine’s Culture issue (puzzlingly dated October 27th), but it’s not in that issue.
I’ll start by showing you scans of the title pages of “The Last Taboo”, just to show you that I’m not making this up, and then go on to quoting at some length from Morris’s text, which I have spent a very long time typing in by hand.
A visit to the Gamble Garden in Palo Alto yesterday, where fall plants like chrysanthemums are on display, winter vegetables like lettuces and bok choy / pak choi are flourishing, and most of the garden is in transition. Several striking plants in the Mediterranean gardens, including two that are of note in the fall and winter: Drimia maritima (the sea squill, though it really should be known as the rat poison plant) and Iris unguicularis (the Algerian or winter iris).
In line with my recent posting on vases for phallophiles, now a little planter for the same audience. Sold on Etsy last year, link sent to me on Facebook by Emily Rizzo, photo below:
Explanation from the site:
MRandMAsCeramiCrafts: This listing is for our regular size 04 bisque ready to paint clown cactus planter standing approx. 8 inches tall by 2 inches by 2 1/2 inches across with a shipping weight of 2 lbs.
The inside has been clear glazed so all you have to do is paint and plant! The finished planters are shown so you can see how they could look when finished.
I suppose you could call this a “crotch planter”. Pretty much anything you plant in it will appear to be coming out of the clown’s crotch — but some plant choices, like the blooming cactus here, mimic a penis more successfully than others.
Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
A penguin selecting a wardrobe, from five identical choices. The giggle is that the black and white appearance of the penguin is actually a suit that it puts on. From Wikipedia:
Black tie, sometimes known by its French name cravate noir, is a semi-formal dress code for evening events and social functions derived from British and American costume conventions of the 19th century. Traditionally worn only for events after 7 p.m., black tie is less formal than white tie but more formal than informal or business dress. In the United States, the gentlemen’s form of black tie attire is often referred to as a tuxedo.
And in slang, as a penguin suit.