Just one day after a particularly fine Rhymes With Orange cartoon combining the Desert Island cartoon meme and the Grim Reaper meme — in my 6/27 posting “The Desert Island Reaper” — came a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro with a groaner Grim Reaper pun:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
The figure of the Grim Reaper — the bringer of death — as a window-washer, removing — destroying — the grime on the windows of a high-rise building, with the blade of his scythe replaced by a window-washer’s squeegee.
Identify that Artwork, 6/28/19: a piece of conceptual art (what I’ll call Skylunch III) taking off on a sculpture (Skylunch II) reproducing a photograph (Skylunch I) showing construction workers eating lunch on a girder high in the sky. Skylunch II and III are mounted on trucks so that they can easily move from place to place.
Bob Eckstein caught sight of Skylunch III in NYC’s Columbus Circle this morning, on top of a pickup truck:
(#1)
Presumably just part of the composition (Skylunch I and II have 11 men, we see 8 here), and the photo is none too clear. I wondered who created it, when, with what materials, for what purpose, and why the men are — or appear to be — all clones of a single model.
Informed answers to any of these questions would be appreciated; comment on this posting, or send me e-mail. (Google Images is useless; it thinks #1 is a photo of a musical group.)
Today’s Rhymes With Orange, combining two familiar cartoon memes:
(#1) A compound, Desert Island + Grim Reaper
Also incorporating a joke formula, the Good News Bad News routine. The good news is verbalized in the cartoon, the bad news is implicit in the figure of the Grim Reaper.
As an extra, the boat that the Grim Reaper is steering towards the little island looks a lot like a gondola, so evoking Death in Venice and Charon the boatman of death, and possibly more indirectly, a Viking funeral boat with an animal-head prow.
Exploiting an ambiguity in the preposition on and a concomitant ambiguity in the noun tape — an ambiguity that’s been around ever since magnetic tape was first used to record readings of books (quite some time ago, though audiobooks didn’t become a significant business until the 1980s). Meanwhile, the Books on Tape company was founded in 1975, but book on tape is still commonly used as a synonym of audiobook.
(Mostly about men’s bodies and mansex, flagrantly, in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Every year, as a lead-up to Stonewall Day, June 28th, comes a much more specific — male and sex-drenched — observance, a celebration of fellatio by men in public places: June 25th, the feast day of St. George Michael of the Beverley Tearoom:
(#1)
While the topic might strike you as mere gratuitous raunchiness, or this take on it as mere flippant cleverness, and I’ll cop to both the sexual vulgarity and the ostentatious playfulness, I’m also serious about mansex in public places as a set of social practices worthy of both systematic study and a celebratory appreciation of its values for its practitioners.
It looks simple at the start, but then (as Mark Liberman explained earlier today on Language Log, in “[REDACTED]’s “cocked and loaded”: a tangled history”), it gets intriguingly convoluted.
It starts with Iran shooting down an American drone, upon which Helmet Grabpussy first ordered a military strike on Iran and then called it back. Grabpussy tweeted:
(#1)
And with “cocked & loaded”, we were off into the worlds of technical terminology, formulaic expressions, and speech errors — and then, thanks to Bill Maher, gay porn videos.
