The One Big Happy in my comics feed today (released to newspapers on 9/4) shows Ruthie finding messages in the ABCs — the letters of the alphabet in their conventional order in modern English (A B C D E F G …):
friendly greeting H I … descending to prohibitive N O
But wait! Go on a bit further and we get to T U, spelling a pronoun of friendly address in French (and sort of, in Spanish, too). Oh, you changeable ABCs, with your many moods!
(… and Fuck Me socks — just another promissory Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting, but even so, it’s totally not for kids or the sexually modest)
I continue to live in an awful fever dream, except that I have no fever, and my hands keep cramping up so I can’t use them for long periods, and I am ravenously hungry for protein and umami, bring me salmon and edamame, but mostly I sleep like a stone. It will pass, but meanwhile you don’t get postings, only intimations of postings.
Like this one, just a teasing peek into the odd world of what I think of as Ruff Guys, hypersexual hypermacho anally hyperreceptive man-oriented men (with, oh yes, a fetish for sex machinery). In some paradoxical liminal world between actual leathermen and fantastical bdsm creatures. Just a peek. At Ruff Guy jockstraps: MVP Jocks in a Fort Troff e-ad of 9/12 (which I reproduce without editing):
This is today’s Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting. I am overwhelmed by piles of undone things, but suffering from deep exhaustion (no doubt a consequence of the most recent jigglings with my medications). I am posting in a brief period (during which I’ve had salmon teriyaki and edamame gyoza delivered for sustenance) between long stretches of stunned unconsciousness.
I offer you, without critical comment (analysis to come in a later, more thoughtful posting), this remarkable Grassooze Services ad on Facebook back on 9/11:
Funny Aperitif Board on sale for $24.99
⭐Who says size doesn’t matter? With an illusionary length of 40 cm, this magnificent penis with perfect curves will keep all its promises
… One day, a great sage said, “Don’t let anyone convince you that your dreams are too big, buy a board in the shape of a penis.”
… and, eventually, how to abracadabra things out of sight. Yes, it’s Verbing Day on AZ Blog!
Politics and real estate: to door knock. It started on the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC on 10/11, with the cite presented here in its larger context:
(#1) to door knock / door-knock ‘knock on doors’ (in political canvassing): a N + V verb, whose origin lies in a back-formation from the synthetic compound door knocking / door-knocking
The semantics / pragmatics of the synthetic compound is specialized — not merely knocking on doors, but doing so in specific sociocultural settings (political canvassing and door-to-door solicitations by real estate agents, in particular) — and this specialization is shared by the 2pbfV (two-part back-formed V)
Brief posting. My day has mostly been consumed by (finally) installing MacOs 12 Monterey (trouble-free but time-consuming), so this is just ripped from a Facebook ad this morning for a set of Xmas cards (12 of them) from the Mialylove company (of which I know nothing), featuring Day 3: Three French Hens:
If the stereotypes are good for the cock, they’re good for the hen, apparently; see my 10/5/22 posting “Zhock jocks at play” for the Frenchman stereotypes
Pungent cigarettes all around, a beret, a Breton striped shirt.
And — surprise! — a garland of garlic, standing presumably for both body odor and fine gastronomy. And proclaiming the vampirelessness of the hen house, I suppose.
Not remotely what I intended to post about today, but it figuratively leapt from the pages of yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, figuratively shrieking directly at me:
PENGUIN LANGUAGE! PENGUIN LANGUAGE!
Well, as it turns out, sort of penguin, sort of language. The sort-of-penguin is Pingu, a claymation tv character. The sort-of-language is Pingu’s variety of grammelot, a performance art form of “speaking without words” (pronunciation note: in English, /ˈɡræməlat/).
In the Magazine’s Letter of Recommendation section, a piece by Gabriel Rom: on-line 10/11 with the title “This Kids’ Show Proves the Wisdom of Gibberish”; in print 10/16 with the title “Pingu”; and both with the subtitle: ““Pingu” teaches everyone, even adults, to find meaning in made-up language”
(#1) Pingu, a creature of affective utterance and non-verbal communication (illustration by Niv Bavarsky)
(Gets right into gay men’s sexual parts, fore and aft, and man-on-man sexual acts, using street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
… or like cherry, vanilla, peach, or pumpkin spice. These are the Tasty Hole flavored body scrubs, formulated to make your hole tasty for the guy who’ll be rimming you.
(Just for the record: I hate flavored condoms. And flavored lubes. And flavored douches, which is the territory we’re moving into here. Unless the flavor is something like Male Sex Sweat. As for cherry flavoring, I hate it in cough drops and syrups and all that stuff, so I’m certainly not going to get it up for licking cherry scrub out of my trick’s hole. Your tastes might differ, of course. But you should know ahead of time that I’m inclined to mock the basic idea of Tasty Hole products.)
The Zits strips for 10/10 and 10/11, on bro insults: what bros do instead of complimenting one another. Because actually complimenting another guy would be kinda faggy, totally not according to the Boy Code. And girls just don’t understand this basic fact.
(#1) Not any old insults, but ritual insults, like baboon-butt, which won’t be taken seriously; there’s no injury here
(#2) And monkey-heinie and flame brain, all of them serving not as insults but as signs of male bonding — male friendship and mutual regard
(There will be discussion of penises and vaginas, some of it using street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Having discovered and posted about a vintage photograph of three young men displaying their swimmer’s bodies (which I bought and mounted on a bookend, to make a free-standing portable photo display), I was led by Etsy to other sources of somewhat similar photographs, in particular the trove of photographic male art offered by The Male Image Art Shop (dba TheMaleImageArtShop), among which this photo caught my eye:
(#1) “Dmitry and Matteo”, as advertised on-line: the more Slavic-looking bodybuilder type on the left is presumably Dmitry, and the more Mediterranean-looking swimmer type on the right Matteo; their gazes are fixed on us, the viewers, with no expression; Dmitry has a friendly, or perhaps a proprietary, arm on Matteo’s shoulder
Other than this, we know nothing. But we struggle to extract a story that it’s telling us, some story about the relationship between the two men (and possibly about why they’re posing for us), so we ask: when was this photo taken? where are they? why are they naked? what are their lives like? what does that arm on the shoulder mean? is this photo a slice of these men’s lives, or are the men random male models posed to create a puzzle for us?
The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon for 10/11 — Wayno’s title: “Surrealism Syndrome” — brings together the green apple of Magritte’s Son of Man with the apple William Tell legendarily shot off the head of his son Walter:
(#1) Yet another Bizarro Psychiatrist cartoon; the therapist is Wayno’s caricature of the surrealist artist René Magritte (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)
