Well, not the actual penises, but the packages or pouches containing them, advertising them while technically concealing them. (Plus, butts too.)
All this in an Australia Day image found by one of my lgbt+ Facebook friends (who came across it in a “sports” group):
(#1) Comment from another friend in the lgbt+ group: “Smuggling budgies, I see”
The One Big Happy from 12/30/18:
(#1)
Ruthie has heard that huge numbers of people gather in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. But why is it called Times Square? Obviously ’cause that’s where you go to tell time — where the clock stores are.
Today’s ad from Daily Jocks, with a sale on men’s high-end underwear from Australian firms, in recognition of Australia Day (tomorrow, the 26th):
(#1) The 2eros Midnight Rose pattern (blue roses on a deep purple background), in a swim slip (Speedo-style swimsuit, but Speedo is a trade name) on the left and swimshorts on the right
Ad copy:
Celebrate Australia Day with DailyJocks and get 15% off your favourite Australian brands including; 2eros, Teamm8, Marcuse, Supawear & many more!
My parody caption:
Ooh, baby, do you know what that’s worth?
Blue roses are my place on earth
In the 1/19/19 issue of The Economist, the story (on-line) “Vaccine researchers are preparing for Disease X”, (in print) “The X factor: Vaccine researchers are preparing for the unexpected”, which begins:
Last year the World Health Organisation published a plan to accelerate research into pathogens that could cause public-health emergencies. One priority was the bafflingly named “Disease x”. The x stands for unexpected, and represents concern that the next big epidemic might be caused by something currently unknown.
and concludes:
Success by either group promises to reduce the interval between identifying a virus and running the first clinical trial to a mere 16 weeks. Moreover, because both approaches synthesise the vaccines chemically rather than involving live viruses in the process, a vaccine that did emerge from one of them could then be manufactured rapidly. All this may then eliminate the fear, surprise and ruthless efficiency of unexpected viruses.
Ah, the curtain line (spoken as the curtain falls on the performance): fear, surprise and ruthless efficiency.
Or: it’s tulips, all the way down.
Posted by Bernadette Lambotte and Joelle Stepien Bailard on Facebook this morning, two intense tulip paintings by Emil Nolde:
(#1)
(#2)
On Pinterest this morning, from the website “aspic and other delights (a blog dedicated to gastronomic atrocities of the past – curated by vanessa jane & lyall)”, this Betty Crocker recipe card from fifty years ago:
(#1)
I was cardioverted on Wednesday the 28th of November. It was supposed to take an hour to an hour and a half, but took more like 4 hours, though the actual cardioversion bit was only a few minutes. For a while I no longer experienced persistent atrial flutter or any atrial fibrillation (though I know this only by looking — frequently — at a pulse oximeter, not from monitoring my perceptions of my body, which has never once spoken to me about irregularities in my heartbeat).
From the Merriam-Webster Medical Dictionary:
verb cardiovert: to subject to cardioversion // cardioverted the patient to sinus rhythm
noun cardioversion: application of an electric shock in order to restore normal heartbeat
(A kind of cousin to the defibrillation you have become accustomed to seeing on tv medical dramas.)
Advance warning: if at any point in this posting, you feel the urge to suggest a line of medical diagnosis or to offer me advice about what I should be doing, stifle that urge. If you give in to it (despite your ignorance of a grotesquely complex medical history, some of it stretching back over 50 years), you will be introducing entirely unwelcome complications into a life that has been largely devoted to medical matters for many months now, matters that are driving me frequently to despair. You will be saying, forget about coping with things, listen to my ideas and respond to me; you will become another part of the problem.
I am not asking for help. I am not asking for advice. I am offering some explanation for my frequent inattention to this blog. And I’m telling you my story, for whatever use you can make of it for yourself. I’m also complaining, in the belief that complaining for its own sake, especially to people who are in no way responsible for caring for you, can be therapeutic. A sympathetic murmur is the most such complaints should elicit.
From a couple days ago, in my 1/22 posting “Squirrely”:
Left on their own, the ivy [Hedera helix] leaves just turn brown and leathery, repelling water rather than decomposing. But urine acts as an agent for decomposition, and a big pile of ivy leaves have now decayed satisfyingly into a layer of duff (posting on duff to come separately).
So I’ve been successfully creating ivy duff, little bit by little bit, building up a sunken border on my patio.
It appears that ivy duff is very much not a thing; searches on the expression net women named Ivy Duff on dating sites, but nothing from the forest floor.
It was a little Christmas present for me from Opal Armstrong Zwicky, reported on in my 12/26/18 posting “Four presents”:
a bit of nearly indescribable Japanese kawaii that involves a little self-watering ceramic penguin that grows wild strawberry plants (Fragaria vesca) on its back
The ceramic penguin has been perched on the edge of one of my man Jacques’s mugs — one with his name on it — in the window of my kitchen. And now:
Charles Schulz’s Peanuts strip from 12/31/57, in which Snoopy takes on a penguin persona:
(#1)