On Liz Climo’s Facebook page on 12/5/19, Dog gives Cat a Christmas present: an empty Christmas bag. And that’s just perfect.
Readers of her FB page of course responded with a blizzard of photos of cats happily installed in bags and boxes (where they seek relief from stress in a protected space, and also warmth).
Now in my comics feed, a 11/22 One Big Happy strip mostly about what home is, but with its first two panels on masculinity for boys (I’ll show you the whole strip at the end of this posting):
(#1) Guy stuff, no glitter — ’cause that would be gay stuff
Another item in my “Masculinity comics” series. From the first, on 10/5/21:
I’ve been accumulating comic strips having to do with boys and masculinity, in particular about what they’ve picked up about normatively masculine behavior and attitudes by the age of 8 or so: the age of the character Joe in the comic strip One Big Happy, who’s the older brother of Ruthie, age 6, who’s the central character of the strip. … To judge from the comics (and my recollections of boyhood), an 8-year-old has an extensive and pretty fine-grained command of the cultural norms of masculinity within his social group.
Today’s Piraro/Wayno Bizarro crosses iconic space aliens from popular culture (sequestered, according to lore, in Area 51 in Nevada) with an anthropomorphic Heinz ketchup bottle (advertising itself, on its label, as one of the Heinz 57 varieties):
(#1) This unlikely couple met on the arid high desert of Nevada; but the ways of the heart are inscrutable, so they now live together in a rough cabin in Area 54, along with their oddly tasty progeny — bottled as Out Of This World salsa verde (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)
Very brief note. I’ve spent the day being down about the spread of the Omicron variant and about this morning’s painfully low temperatures, which kept me from going outside at all, and also about a sinus infection, so I didn’t do what I’d intended to do today at all, and this is a minimal substitute.
Going through the Stanford Humanities Center annual report for 2020-21 (a year in which all events were virtual — nothing face-to-face at all, not Fellows’ weekly presentations, not lunches, not the eminent visitors, no random encounters in the building, none of that) and looking at the Fellows’ photos and brief identifications, I turned a page and came on a face that instantly grabbed my attention. And I thought: Nice guy. Gay guy.
And so he was. There were no doubt other queerfolk in the set, but this one just called out to me. I have no idea what things I was picking up on. Here’s his photo and thumbnail i.d. from the SHC:
Yet another cartoon meme, the Eye Chart, with an instance in today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, set in the fictive city of Metropolis:
(#1) It’s a bird… It’s a plane… It’s Superman (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
Yes, it’s also an instance of the “It’s a bird” meme. Memes tend to travel together, like elephants, or municipal buses.
Two things about today. First, it’s Day 3 of the 12 Days of Commercial Christmas, celebrated on the Daily Jocks site with this vision of playfully phallic briefs (the Hot Dog pattern of Cheeky underwear by Maverick):
(#1) 🌭 🌭 Also available in trunks and jockstrap; and in a Peach pattern (the playfully pygic, or buttocks, counterpart to the phallic pattern above); more discussion below
The ad copy from DJ:
Look tasty in the new Maverick Cheeky Brief! Featuring a fun design of miniature hot dogs, this brief is fabulous and comfortable. / Made from a soft and stretchy material, the pouch features contrasting piping to accentuate your assets. / 88% Nylon, 12% Elastane
Second, it’s the traditional Nishi — Japanese for ‘west’ — Day in my household, the beginning of the 5-day drive from Columbus OH west to Palo Alto CA for winter quarter (matched by Higashi Day, March 15th, for the start of the return trip).
The title of a paper whose first version was a NWAVE presentation on 4 October 1991; revised for a presentation at the Deseret Language and Linguistics Society on 9 March 1995; here in the version of 4 April 1997, reproduced on this blog for its historic interest. It provided the basis for my 2001 Stanford SemFest talk “Counting Chad”, on the count/mass distinction in English, with special reference to chad, e-mail/email, and ice plant; the (detailed) handout for that talk can be viewed here.
The formatting for “How to talk about plants” is rudimentary, not at all elegant, but I hope serviceable.
Today, December 13th, is Day 1 of the 12 Days of Commercial Christmas (Day 1 of the 12 Days of Christian Christmas is, of course, Christmas Day, December 25th). (Meanwhile, December 13th on the Christian religious calendar is St. Lucy’s Day, on which unwary Scandinavian girls set their hair on fire, as a precursor to the coming of the light of Christ on Christmas Day. Yes, people have told me that my religious education is somewhat spotty.)
In any case, the Daily Jocks people are recognizing the days of Commercial Christmas with what looks like a Man Meat of the Day for each of the 12 days, beginning with the, um, boxboy I called Joey when he turned up last year as the DJ offering for Boxing Day.
Now promoted to the inaugural position in the season of commercial excess, Joey appears again in his Santa hat, red party socks, and blindingly new basketball shoes (underwear models and gay porn stars nearly always appear in brand-new athletic shoes — or spiffy boots — whatever else they fail to be be wearing). Joey is quite free about displaying and offering his delicious body, so that some of what follows is not for the sexually naive or the sexually modest.
