(Hunky male models in very little; lots of lexicography to come in later postings, but here lots of plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex, so not advised for kids or the sexually modest.)
The 3/37 Daily Jocks ad in e-mail — with the header Bottomless Shorts 😳 — now with a caption of mine:
(#1)
He navigated the
Corridors of the Blue
Boy Bar, savoring its
Pygian gloom, signaled
Red in the smoky
Dusk of desire, whispered
Shoot me, please,
Shoot the Moon
(No actual penises, but some decidedly peniform plants and lots of intimate anatomical references, sometimes in street language; urethras abound. So clearly not to everyone’s taste.)
It began with a Facebook posting by Jens Fiederer, with a photo of the Botanical Penis of Doom, from the Thailand-Secrets site:
(#1) Cheng Kam Wor: “This is a pitcher plant of the genus Nepenthes sp. The glans-like top is actually a lid for the bottom pitcher structure. A carnivorous plant like the Venus flytrap!”
Yesterday at the Gamble Garden in Palo Alto, a small stand of rather sparse shrubs, blooming gorgeously and giving off the heady scent of lilacs. So they were, and that was notable: you don’t see a lot of lilacs (Syringa vulgaris) in California. What you see instead are what are called California lilacs — California lilac is a resembloid compound referring to plants in the genus Ceonothus, not even in the same plant family as Syringa; see my 6/20/13 posting “Poppies, lilacs, and lilies”, with a section on Ceonothus vs. Syringa. (Of course yesterday’s flowering shrub was in fact a California lilac: subsective California lilac ‘lilac from or in California’.)
But why are lilacs rare in California? Because they’re cold-winter plants. Then why are there any at all? Because there are now some hybrids that are relatively tolerant of warm winters.
From Joelle Stepien Bailard this morning, as part of her campaign of flinging images of artworks against the dread weight of the news (I now have six or seven friends doing this systematically, on various themes, and I’m not counting the ones with dogs or cats; owls, yes, however), this 1887 painting by Vincent van Gogh:
(#1) Vase with Daisies and Anemones
The 2/26 One Big Happy, riffing on /sɛns/, in idioms with sense (common sense, horse sense, nonsense), in incense, and in cents (also in an idiom, two cents):
(#1)
Which, of course, leads us inevitably to the psychedelic days of 1967, with their whiff of incense and peppermints (plus some pot).
(More news for glass penises, but now a matter of interpretation rather than representation.)
Following up on the posting “Through a Glass Penis, Darkly”, which ended with a glass penis-simulacrum by Dale Chihuly. Segue to Chihuly’s “Black and Green Striped Herons with Icicle Clusters” at the Atlanta Botanical Garden in the 2016 installation “Chihuly in the Garden”:
(#1) Glass sculptures among the plants: plants behind, plants in front, plants overhead
News for vitreous penises, in two parts, this one, and (in a following posting) “They might be herons”, mostly about the artist Dale Chihuly exhibiting in botanical gardens. Penis simulacra in glass (occasionally, plastic or ceramics) here, merely suggestively phallic art there, but frangible male members will be thick on the ground, so if that makes you uncomfortable, move on to something else.
The text for part 1, from the Brittles’ trippy surrealist “Glass Penis”:
Looking through the bent-backed lovers
To see how the gay boys live
Looking through a glass penis
Mike Pope on Facebook, following up on my posting of the 25th “Lilo & Stitch”, with a question about the naming of the characters in the movie:
(#1) Stitch and LiloMP: Do you think the animators consciously followed a kiki/bouba paradigm?
AZ: Almost surely not consciously; they just chose names that “sounded right” to them.
In general, writers’ name choices for fictitious characters are inscrutable in detail; even if the writers have an explicit account of where the names came from, unconscious preferences for certain kinds of names can usually be seen to be at play.
One of these preferences is the bouba/kiki effect, which has to do with the visual appearance of the referents (see the images above). Also involved are effects having to do with the gender of the referents (Stitch is male, Lilo female). No doubt there are more.
This week’s inspiring words on the social progress front, from Gloria Ladson-Billings, circulated on Facebook by H. Sami Alim on the 22nd:
I know that I am 4 generations out of chattel slavery, 3 generations out of sharecropping, 2 out of legalized apartheid, and I’m an endowed university professor. Not because I’m great, but because people kept on pushing the boulder up the hill.
