A card from Ann Burlingham (written 1/9/22), amended with a rainbow Z heading a fortune cookie fortune from my last Chinese take-out meal:
(#1) Photo by Gary D. Moon, Tillamook Light in storm, Cannon Beach OR (the top of “Terrible Tilly’s” Light is 134ʹ above sea level)
Instead of the familiar (phallic) rocket being launched in a cloud of smoke and flames as an ejaculatory symbol, here we get another viscerally intense image: a (phallic) lighthouse in a raging sea storm.
🐯🐅🐯(tiger – tiger – tiger, rather than rabbit- rabbit – rabbit) anticipating by a bit the new month tomorrow (February, holding the promise that — in the Northern Hemisphere — winter will in fact come to an end) and also the (lunar) new year, the Year of the Tiger
Meanwhile, this morning’s e-mail brings me a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro with the excellent POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) portmanteau truck = portmanteau + tow truck, the truck in question being a brunch (breakfast + lunch) truck where you can get Tofurkey (tofu + turkey) with Dijonnaise (Dijon + mayonnaise) dressing and a cronut (croissant + doughnut), which you can eat with a spork (spoon + fork).
At the same time, a Daily Jocks ad that’s at once charming and raunchy, featuring a model wearing a garment I would call a moosinglet, a moose singlet, that is, a wrestling singlet in which the model is displaying a moose-knuckle, a penis (especially an erect one) that is visible though the wearer’s clothing.
And then portmanteau truck will lead us to portmanteau jam as a name for a POP chain.
Caught yesterday in the New York Times (p. A22, the back page of the first section of the paper), this stunning full-page ad:
(#1) High-fashion models Anya Taylor-Joy and Alton Mason do ivory / ebony and femme / masc posed as breezing fabulously through the streets of NYC as part of a Tiffany & Co.”Knot Your Typical City” ad campaign (inaugurated last fall) for its collection of knot-motif gold-and-diamond jewelry; they are joined in their fantasy day on the town by fashion model Eileen Gu
(Not about language or about gender and sexuality.)
And it appears to be a knockout victory for Squirrel every time. A report on two recent bouts — from mid-December (involving the yellow cymbidium that is the first to bloom in my little garden, in the late fall) and from yesterday (involving a cymbidium that’s the palest of pinks, so that in most lights it looks plain white).
Cymbidium background. Cymbidium orchids — there are lots of species, and a host of hybrids and cultivars — are genuine winter plants. In my garden, the first flower shoots typically appear in early October, the first blossoms around Halloween. New plants come into bloom throughout the winter and spring, and the last flower shoots die back by early in June, in the dry heat of summer.
For me, the cymbidiums are Jacques plants. I gave my husband-equivalent the first one — a plant he had openly admired at a local florist’s — as a birthday present in 1987. He would have been 80 on his birthday this year, back on 1/22. More cymbidiums came every year, and then I got new ones just because they were beautiful and they reminded me of J, who died in 2003.
Not only is this a cold dark midwinter while I’m isolated with a respiratory infection during the pandemic, it’s also a time of deep sadness, with Ann Daingerfield Zwicky’s death day (in 1985) on 1/17 and then Jacques’s birthday. In the circumstances, I find it almost impossible to write about cymbidiums, but I press on regardless.
What remains of the squirrels’ second victim sits in a vase in front of me, on my desk:
(#1) From the left of three pots of cymbidiums right outside my window, just behind the bird-feeder pole; yesterday, two days after the blossoms had opened up, I left my work table to use the bathroom, and when I got back the top foot of the flower stalk was lying on the patio, cruelly sliced off by rodent incisors
From 12/14/21, a gauzy view of the scene through the blinds on my window:
(#2) A squirrel feeding in the tray on the bird-feeder pole; the three pots of cymbidiums behind it; an ivy-covered wall behind that
I was concerned that the squirrels would snip the flower stalk on the right, because it was so thin; it seemed so vulnerable. The stalk on the left was impressively thick and so was, I imagined, unassailable. But then it turned out that big guys fall hard.
Meanwhile, on the patio south of that scene back in December, the squirrels had just finished decapitating the very first cymbidium to send up a stalk of buds. They lopped off the top half one day, and then the rest of it two days later. And either ate or carried off the remains, because I never saw any.
That stalk would have produced yellow blooms, like these from 2017 (in my 11/13/17 posting “Orchids on the march”:
(#3) Actually, greenish-yellow
Squirrel background. First came the bird feeders, to bring birds to my window, to provide life and activity during endless days alone. But then: you got bird feeders, you got squirrels.
For quite some time, exactly four squirrels. The same four squirrels. Two gray in color, two black in color. I could observe them closely enough to see them as individuals. The two males worked especially aggressively to get at the bird feeders mounted on my windows, even though the nuts and seeds that they adored were piled up all over the place.
When they failed to master climbing up a glass wall, or leaping six feet from a fence, they did excellent enactments of little kids having tantrums: they chittered at me through the glass, rushed around knocking things over, attacked other squirrels, and chewed on stuff — things like the wooden garden furniture and, alas, the plants.
They bit pelargoniums (“geraniums”) off close to the ground (these are tough plants; they send new shoots up from their base of those stems). They devastated my succulent gardens, bit leaves off the hydrangea bush (and dug up all the sprouting callas).
And snipped off flower stalks of the cymbidiums.
Squirrels have frequent litters (they also die off and get killed, but, locally anyway, they seem to be a steadily shifting but expanding population, eight or ten of them now, engaged in confrontations both aggressive and sexual, on top of their antics in getting at the bird feeders.
Two days ago, one the very young black squirrels made a stunning, applause-worthy, absolutely perfect 7-foot leap from a fence onto the pole of the bird feeder, apparently intending to use the momentum from that leap to pivot from the pole onto one of the feeders. The little squirrel failed utterly in the second part of this maneuver, dropping to the ground like a stone — but then recovered by leaping back onto the fence and sitting there quietly cleaning its paws, in effect pretending that absolutely nothing had happened, nothing to see here. I was expecting it to wreak some kind of havoc, but no. Like I said, they’re all different.
I did think, through my laughter at the whole performance, that Jacques would have loved it. He was, in fact, fond of squirrels, as you can see from this photo:
(#4) A boy and his squirrel
… est sur le bureau de mon oncle. Or something like that. Two recent Wayno / Piraro Bizarros: from the 24th, le journal (for example, Le Monde, on sale on the street); from today (the 27th), le phoque d’approbation (and his best buddy, le morse du dédain).
Emily Menon Bender on Facebook yesterday: “Office calendar, bringing me joy”, with the page from her Tatsuya Tanaka Miniature Life wall calendar (with wire hanger) for the current week of 2022, depicting a maid ironing some stackable potato chips. To which I juxtapose the current (month of January) page of my corresponding (Tom of Finland) wall calendar, depicting a Sexual Spy scene, in which a passionate encounter between two men is secretly observed by a third man, who is aroused by them.
(Warning: my discussion of the ToF calendar will go well over the raunch line, including depictions of male-male sex, so this section is inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest.)
(Yes, about male bodies and sex between men, often in plain terms, so not for kids or the sexually modest)
It begins with an e-mail ad for some recent Raging Stallion gay porn; the DVD cover photo has as its central figure the pornstar Cole Connor as a hypersexual race driver, who stares intently into our eyes while holding his workshirt open to display his attractively muscled, lightly furred left pec and the erect nipple at its center: his nipple and pec as objects of our sexual desire.
(References to sex between men in several places, so not to everyone’s taste.)
The centerpiece is this 1900 painting Italian Man with a Rope by John Singer Sargent:
(#1) Though reproductions are on sale all over the place, as items of attractive decor, I haven’t been able to find any information about the occasion for the painting or the model Sargent used (call him Tugger, since he’s tugging on that rope); even the 1900 date comes from an art auction site and might not be reliable
From Ann Burlingham (in snowy Pittsburgh) on Facebook this morning, this ice patch:
(#1)
AB: Late Friday sun. Jason [her husband, Australian-born, now a US citizen] says I have rearranged some things if I think that ice patch looks like Australia.
AZ: That’s a hung Oz — with a really big Tasmania.
… in the cartoons. Two — a Joseph Dottino and a William Haefeli — from the latest (1/24/22) New Yorker, plus a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro from 1/19. Recognizable penguins, upscale gay-male couples, and crash test dummies, oh my!
