(Men’s underwear and bodies, taking off from a recent Daily Jocks ad for the Marcuse company. With a caption of mine. Somewhat racy, but not crude. And there will be cartoons.)
(#1)
Capitulum in corpore magno
A hard man —
An erection lasting more than four hours –
But fair —
Requires immediate medical attention –
A pinhead with
Broad shoulders
Capitulum in corpore magno ‘A little head on/in a big body’, a distant echo of the Latin catchphrase Mens sana in corpore sano ‘A heathy mind in a healthy body’. More important, a reference to the fact that the model has developed his upper body to such an extent — his enormous traps look like they could support a suspension bridge — that his shoulders dwarf his perfectly ordinary-sized head, making him look microcephalous, like a pinhead.
“A hard man, but fair” — alluding to the apparent erection in the model’s shorts — is a variant of the judgment on the Piranha brother Dinsdale in Monty Python’s “Piranha Brothers” sketch, that Dinsdale was “a cruel man, but fair”.
This phrase is interspersed between the parts of a version of the warning on erectile dysfunction drugs (Cialis, Viagra) about erections lasting more than four hours. You wonder how long the model has been carrying around that club.
From pinheads we go to Zippy the Pinhead, who occasionally lapses into Latin, as in this 9/27/05 exchange with Latin-declining Muffler Man figures:
(#2) Three Muffler Men and Zippy decline the Latin demonstrative hic ‘this’ (nom. and gen. sg.)
(Fiberglass Muffler Men are a recurrent feature of Zippy strips.)
The model for the character Zippy was the real-life sideshow pinhead Schlitzie, shown here as he appeared in Tod Browning’s 1932 movie Freaks:
(#3)
Zippy is odd in appearance and odd in behavior, but lacks the cognitive and physical limitations associated with microcephaly in real-life. This is true as well of another cartoon pinhead:
(#4) Pinhead Pierre in Phineas and Ferb
From Wikipedia:
Phineas and Ferb is an American animated musical comedy television series. Originally broadcast as a one-episode preview on August 17, 2007 and again previewed on September 28, 2007, the series officially premiered on February 1, 2008 on Disney Channel, and follows Phineas Flynn and his British stepbrother Ferb Fletcher on summer vacation.
Pinhead Pierre is a British character who appears in several episodes.
August 1, 2017 at 8:34 am |
My mother once was passing by my bedroom door and heard me declining “hic, haec, hoc” in my sleep. Very sad, but more than 50 years later I can still decline it while awake.