(It starts with tasty stuff, but eventually there will be some distasteful stuff. Be prepared.)
Yesterday it was Betty Crocker Fudge Brownies, which drew a giggle from me (because I have a dirty mind), So let’s start with fudge and brownies, the foodstuffs.
In today’s comics feed, a Bizarro on paleolithic heterosexual rituals; and a One Big Happy in which Ruthie reflects on projections of masculinity in men’s clothing:
(#1)
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
A POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) incorporating a pun: Betty Crocker (see below) + cocker spaniel (the dog breed), with Crocker / cocker in the middle.
On ADS-L recently, some discussion of verbings of the noun bro: to bro down, to bro it up, to de-bro. It started on the 27th with Jon Lighter reporting on a recent occurrence of bro down ‘become (male) friends’ on the Fox TV show Sleepy Hollow, in the episode “Heads of State”:
Now that we’re neighbors, we can bro down, hang out, Chill-doh Baggins.
(About video mansex, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
On the 24th, “A day with Danny Vox in the ultimate fantasy t-room”, an appreciation of the actor Danny Vox in Joe Gage’s Titan porn video Mens Room Bakersfield Station (2004), a long and complex production set in a fantasy t-room in the Bakersfield CA bus station. Now some words on Gage and his career in filming mansex.
I posted on him here in a BE FUCKING POLITE t-shirt, giving us the finger. In that posting, I hadn’t identified the model, but now ace mandentifier David Preston has named Daniel M. Sheehan, of the L.A. men’s fashion firm Sheehan & Co., as the hunky silver fox in the photo. As it turns out, the aggression in that photo was entirely mock aggression: Sheehan the man is sweet, earnest, and funny — there are videos on the company’s site — and he describes the photo as “ironic”. Here’s another version of the shirt, fingerless and affectionate (a single red rose symbolizing love), but still oxymoronic (though now the context moves the intensifier fucking in the direction of sexual fucking: towards ‘be fucking politely’):
(#1)
Sheehan seems to have a huge following of women (who presumably fantasize about doing him) and a substantial following of straight men (who presumably fantasize about being him) and a huge following of gay men like me (who can indulge in both fantasies). The FUCKING shirts can be read as aimed at any one of these audiences, or of course all of them.
Now, since I find the man physically attractive and his presentation of self (some compound of macho and gay) equally attractive, six more photos of him and his work.
Two recent One Big Happy strips: one with an outrageous pun from Ruthie and Joe’s father, one with Ruthie once again attempting to engage the neighbor boy James on his grammar:
(#1)
(#2)
If you’re a bit puzzled by James’s “Ain’t nobody going!” in #2, you have a right to be.
For Fuck-You Friday, a supremely hunky high-macho silver fox, who came to me on my Pinterest feed this morning under the title Bearded Vagabond:
Linguistic interest: just the oxymoronic slogan BE FUCKING POLITE. The injunction to be polite, with the impolite modifier fucking in it. Plus, of course the finger
(About men kissing and how people interpret such acts. There will be references to man-on-man sexual acts, so you should be prepared to exercise some judgment.)
A kiss is not just a kiss; it’s almost always something else as well. Sticking to the topic of men kissing men, we’ve got MSMs (“men who have sex with men” — but identify as straight) who sometimes won’t kiss men; and then we’ve got people who are offended and disgusted just at the sight of same-sex kisses, especially between men, and lash out in various ways, from having them banned from public view to verbally abusing the kissers to physically attacking them. These two reactions spring from two different views of same-sex kissing: for MSMs, who want “just sex”, kissing can be problematic because it isn’t sex, it’s affection and love, and emotional intimacy is not what they’re in the market for; while for enraged objectors, same-sex kissing is a sex act, and doing it in public is having sex in public, which is offensive, simply unacceptable.
Then there are people like me, for whom images like this —
(#1)
— are deeply satisfying, because we see the kiss as embodying both loving affection and sexual connection, while not being in itself a sex act. Two responses, together: “Awww, so sweet!” and “Wow, that’s hot!”