It began on Facebook with a short video of two young Japanese women rocking on their shamisens (3-string lutes); you can watch the video here. A screen shot from their performance:
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I shared the video with Kim Darnell, who sent me in exchange a rave review of the animated feature film Kubo and the Two Strings (also featuring a shamisen), which I was able to watch, transfixed, on Netflix.
Today’s Rhymes With Orange takes us to Camp Slowly and the slow snail cartoon meme (which has come up here a couple of times), plus the slow turtle cartoon meme (which is also venerable, but seems not to have found its way onto this blog before):
Turtles are slow, but snails are a good bit slower. In the land of snails, turtles are the impetuous kings of the road. So if snails want to hurtle forward, they can hitch up a turtle and urge it on. Giddy-up, Chel!
… brings gay porn sales for the occasion. (Warning: this will be about gay porn, with frank discussion of men’s bodies and mansex, so it’s not for kids or the sexually modest.) The cover photo (technically not X-rated) for the C1R sale:
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#1 focuses on one theme of the sale offerings: daddy-boy relationships. Then there’s a trio of Cocky Boys videos (featuring young, impertinent, highly sexed characters) depicted in an AZBlogX posting, “Cocky Boys for Pride”. And finally, an ad section offering Brawn sex toys in the O-M-GLOW line: soft touch silicone that glows blue or orange in the dark.
In my previous posting, a swimsuit exploiting the U.S. Stars and Stripes. Meanwhile, on the way back from today’s senior exercise hour, Kim Darnell and I encountered, in midtown Palo Alto, a gigantic red, white, and blue flag flying in front of a house. It hadn’t been there on Saturday, so I figured it must have some connection with a holiday.
What came first to my mind was Puerto Rican Day (June 11th this year). I thought that the flag might be some variant of the red, white, and blue Puerto Rican flag that I hadn’t encountered before. The PR flag:
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But no. There is a holiday involved, but it’s Chinese, and this year it’s today.
A recent Daily Jocks ad, with a N2N speedo-style Stars and Stripes swimsuit for Memorial Day, yesterday, also looking forward to Flag Day on June 14th and Independence Day on July 4th (with my caption):
Young, hung, lean, pale,
Patriot through and through,
Peter swims in the
Stars and Stripes.
Peter can be purchased at fine men’s stores throughout Southern California.
Two atypical books by Dr. Seuss — one for children, but about alphabets (On Beyond Zebra!); and one for adults, though in Geisel’s usual children’s-book format (You’re Only Old Once! A Book for Obsolete Children).
Two things came together: another photo by my man Jacques, of a 3D jigsaw puzzle he completed in 1994, of Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria; and a photo in a Pinterest Food Art board of a jigsaw dessert from Enoteca Pinchiorri in Florence, which led me to jigsaw cakes:
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From puzzles to castles and cake.
The One Big Happy in today’s comics feed, a charming 11-panel Sunday special:
The panel I’m interested is the one right in the middle, panel 6, in which the kids’ father says, of the mystery leaf: “from one of those exotic trees, like a Quesadilla benjamina, or something.”
It started with Brian Kane (in Washington DC) writing to Facebook on May 18:
Not what I expected to see growing in the front lawn:
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Doug Morgan: Is that a real strawberry or the edible but tasteless Indian strawberry?
Chris Ambidge: Didn’t Ingmar Bergen make a film about such strawberries?
Arnold Zwicky: Wild strawberries are small but delicious. Barren strawberries are small, hard, and pretty much tasteless. But pretty.
There are three plants at issue here: (1) plants of the genus Fragaria, including the hybrids that are the strawberries of garden and grocery, plus a number of species that grow wild, in particular F. vesca, the most common “wild strawberry”. (2) Waldsteinia fragarioides (‘strawberry-like Waldsteinia’), a weed commonly known as “barren strawberry”. (3) Duchesnea / Potentilla indica (‘Indian potentilla / cinquefoil’), a weed commonly known as “Indian strawberry”.
All three are in the Rosaceae, or rose family.
I wander the streets of Palo Alto, on foot or in a car, with my helpers Kim and Juan, and they ask about the flowers that line the streets, especially, at eye level, showy shrubs and low-growing flowers. Many of them are entirely familiar, like roses and geraniums, but some are exotic, at least to Kim and Juan. Lots of the exotics are now in bloom, including two with names that begin with the letter O, two that are growing right out my back door: Nerium oleander, oleander; and Oenothera speciosa, Mexican primrose or pink evening primrose. (Spelling note: oleander begins with O, pronounced /o/; oenothera begins with OE, pronounced /i/.)
