Archive for January, 2022

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Commercial Christmas 2021: DJ’s third quarter

January 6, 2022

(Well, men’s homo-underwear ads, featuring what are intended to be alluring male bodies, and skirting the line of outrageous lewdness. Clearly not to everyone’s taste.)

Following up on yesterday’s Twelfth Night posting (“Three days of commercial Christmas”), about the Daily Jocks treatment of the second quarter of the 12 days of commercial Christmas — Days 4 (12/16, calling birds), 5 (12/17, golden rings), and 6 (12/18, geese) — for Epiphany itself today, the DJ treatment of the third quarter: Days 7 (12/19, swans), with fetishwear; 8 (12/20, maids), with traditional jockstraps; and 9 (12/21, ladies), with — hiss, boo — a mystery jock offer, nothing to see here.

Nothing says Christmas like harnesses and old-school jockstraps.

In any case: a quick tour of DJ’s Days 7 and 8, then a survey of Epiphany on this blog.

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Posted in Art, Facial expressions, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

Three days of commercial Christmas

January 5, 2022

(On the first of these three days, this posting gets right into details of men’s bodies and sex between men, in very plain language, so it’s out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest.)

In the current world, it’s 1/5/22: it’s Twelfth Night (Epiphany Eve) on the Christian calendar. Celebrated in this cartoon from a Liz Climo series (originally on Tumblr in 2013):


(#1) From Liz Climo’s 12 Days of Christmas, as depicted in exchanges between a bear and a bunny — on Day 1, from Bear: “The partridge flew away, and I ate all of the pears”

But back in the Commercial Christmastide of 2021, from Daily Jocks, it’s Day 4 (12/16, Beethoven Austen Day in the real world; Pure for Men in DJ’s Homoland, which will take us right into the down and dirty of sex between men, behind Pure’s veil of “all-natural cleanliness”), Day 5 (a disappointing 12/17, nothing but DJ gift cards), and Day 6 (12/18, Amplify x Circuit underwear from DJX, finally some male bodies to appreciate!).

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Posted in Holidays, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Underwear | 5 Comments »

Seasonal gatherings

January 4, 2022

(Some reflections on my life as an old man, disabled, living alone — resolutely and defiantly — in the midst of this endless, constantly morphing, pandemic. Trying to be clear-eyed about all of this, but a certain amount of unpleasant self-pity will no doubt creep into my account, so this posting isn’t for everyone.)

Two occasions on December 19th, together making my social life for the Christmas season: from 10 to 1 (Pacific time), a Zoom gathering of soc.motss folk (a community going back to the Usenet social newsgroup for lgbt-folk and their friends — members of the same sex — a community I joined in 1985); then at 2, an hour’s visit from my entire immediate family: my daughter, Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky (who lives here in Palo Alto), and my grandchild, Opal Eleanor Armstrong Zwicky (visiting for a few weeks from their first year at college, at the University of Pittsburgh).

These two occasions unified by little more than my costume: my in-your-face FAGGOT t-shirt above, and my Swiss-flag gym shorts below.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and food, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Poetry | 2 Comments »

Miniature Christmas beefcake

January 3, 2022

(Another Xmas-related posting. These will go on for some time, since the backlog of material is huge, and I’ve only been able to manage one posting a day: back in isolation, with plenty of time in my days, but enmired in the tar of dismay, so I work even more slowly than usual.)

It’s about an “It’s a Fairy” ad of the season — for Christmas ornaments from the Stars Gemstone company — on my Facebook page, the ad and the ornnaments fashioned for a gay male audience:


(#1) (Note that a (sprite) fairy in French is masculine gender, un fée; a (faggot) fairy is, less surprisingly, masculine gender too, un pédé) The ornaments are marketed merely as adorable fairies for the Xmas tree — who doesn’t love fairies? — with little notice that they all happen to be male fairies posing as sexy underwear models, in fact as models in beefcake mode (#2 doing a cock tease; the whole bottom row wearing black armbands, on their right biceps to indicate that they’re bottoms)

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Homosexuality | 2 Comments »

Adventures in a balloon

January 2, 2022

In today’s (1/2/22) Bizarro, the Old Balloon Peddler hawks his wares in the park:


(#1) And thought balloons too! Take a word or thought ride in one of these sturdy inflatable delights (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)

The Magical Adventure Balloon Ride
— a private basket adventure exclusively for thrill seekers

He gives the kids free samples
Because he knows full well
That today’s young innocent faces
Will be tomorrow’s clientele

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Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Play | 1 Comment »

Our frugal cartoonists

January 1, 2022

🐇 🐇 🐇 + 🐇 🐇 🐇 (three for the new month, three for the new year)

It’s about re-using resources. In particular, re-using cartoon artwork for fresh purposes — a regular practice in (among the strips I follow regularly) Zippy the Pinhead and Bizarro. In Zippy, it’s mostly re-texting an old strip; but in Bizarro, it’s mostly assembling a strip from a collection of standard components arranged in a standard abstract pattern — rather like a syntactic construction.

The topic for New Year’s: assembling a Bizarro Psychiatrist strip.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

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