The cover of the latest (10/26/20) New Yorker, which I post here only because it’s sweet and coronavirus-relevant:
Archive for October, 2020
Shifting gears
October 23, 2020
humongous
October 22, 2020(Largely about men’s genitals and sex between men, in very direct street language, so entirely inappropriate for kids or the sexually modest.)
On AZBlogX, a 10/7 posting “Humongous Cocks”, with two images from a porn video ad. I’ll quote that posting at length, but shift the visual focus on this blog to the facial expressions and body types in those images.
Three comforting presents
October 21, 2020In very difficult times — my list of physical afflictions has expanded considerably (you don’t really want to hear the details), leaving me little time in the day to write postings on my blog — friends and family have given me presents to comfort me. Three recently (with an advance notice of a fourth to come in the mail in a surprise package).
Unsettling still lifes
October 21, 2020Caught on a Facebook site that posts reproductions of artworks, Chaïm Soutine’s Still Life with Rayfish (ca. 1924):
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The accompanying note:
In this unsettling adaptation of Jean-Siméon Chardin’s The Rayfish (ca. 1725–26), Soutine paired the fish’s bloody entrails with a smiling, almost humanlike mouth. He reanimated the dead ray by concentrating on its vibrant underbelly and used thick, fluid brushstrokes to suggest slick flesh.
Desert island discs
October 20, 2020The Wayno/Piraro Bizarro of 10/19, with yet another variant of the Desert Island cartoon meme:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
The allusion is (ultimately) to the BBC 4 radio program(me) Desert Island Discs.
The Gauld scientific method
October 19, 2020
The xkcd dialect quiz
October 19, 2020A recent xkcd cartoon (#2372) plays with the sort of questionnaire that lexicographers and linguists have long used for investigating dialect differences:
Flesh Gordon
October 18, 2020Frank Abate points me to a 10/18 article in the Guardian: “Flesh Gordon? Artwork reveals erotic version that was never made: Draft designs for a planned Nicolas Roeg sci-fi movie in 1979 finally see the light of day” by Dalya Alberge:
(#1) Artwork for the abandoned film depicts Flash Gordon confronting Ming the Merciless on top of the emperor’s royal spaceship. Photograph: StudioCanal / King Features Inc.
Paul Newman rises from the sea
October 18, 2020On the Hollywood Reporter site in “When Paul Newman Dazzled Venice” by Gregg Kilday on 8/21/12:
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Promoting 1963’s “Hud” at the Venice Film Festival, the actor exhibited an effortless masculinity that had Italians swooning.
American stars go to the Venice Film Festival to test their wattage, and in 1963 no star burned brighter than Paul Newman. At age 38, he visited the Lido to show off Hud, Martin Ritt’s drama in which he played a Texas bad boy. Remembers Barbara Steele, then a rising young actress who’d just completed a role in Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, “I don’t know how, but I ended up hanging out with Paul Newman, who was at the peak of his beauty. He was a Greek god, absolutely stunning. He was every Italian’s dream of classical beauty.”
Thing is, Newman rising from the sea here was pretty much the perfect package, from face to crotch, everything in balance, nothing obtrusive. Two themes here: the beautiful character rising from the sea; and the full package of male beauty.
Acronymic mnemonics
October 18, 2020Yesterday, in “One Big Happy mnemonics”, the distinction between expression mnenomics and name, or acronymic , mnemonics, providing three spectacular examples of the former for spelling English words: among them, for ARITHMETIC:
A rat in Tom’s house might eat Tom’s ice cream.
Now, a revisit to my 9/8/10 posting “NICE ‘n’ RICE”, with examples of the latter type.