Annals of bizarre commerce, in today’s announcement by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky that she has ordered an (ornamental) deer head with ZWICKY (among other things) emblazoned on it. From Miho Unexpected Things (“Striking and fun italian home decor”), where it’s one of a number of deer heads on offer:
(#1) This particular model is named Zwickypedia; ZWICKY is presumably pronounced en français, like the other words on the head
WTF!? you exclaim / ask. Why ZWICKY?
It starts with an elegant Seth Fleishman cartoon in the latest New Yorker (2/13&20/23), and ends up in the world of very competent dogs; in between lie my home intellectual worlds of linguistics and g&s (gender & sexuality studies). Or you could just think of it as being about border collies and Robin Queen.
First comes the cartoon:
(#1) From left to right: on the escalator, the shepherd and three of his flock; on the ground, an understandably reluctant sheep and a border collie performing its job as herder
When advance copies of the cartoon appeared on Facebook, I immediately wrote my linguistics colleague Robin Queen (at Michigan) to say that it was as if Fleishman had created this cartoon especially for her; in addition to everything else she does (see below), Robin and her partner-in-life Susan Garrett run a small farm with a flock of sheep and with border collies that they have trained to herd them (collies that Robin enters with in stockdog competitions).
Following on my 8/12/22 posting “Mi okapi es su okapi”, one more set of AI bricolages of artworks and okapis, plus a lot of stuff that seems to have wandered in from Randomland — in the “digital art” Bert Vaux got on 8/12 by asking for “oil painting of female cowboys riding okapis in the style of klimt”. Which will lead me to contemplate actual okapis at some length.
Bert’s Klimtokapi cowgirls:
(#1) The program doesn’t know much about Klimt’s style — the women look a lot like Carmen Miranda, without the fruit — and takes several very different approaches to depicting okapis — meanwhile, three of the women (in the 4th panel) appear to be fuzzy versions of the Magi (well, the program cobbles together whatever it comes across)
An accidental find on Pinterest: Huzenko Kyrylo, a Ukrainian sculptor working in Kyiv, in a considerable range of forms, but specializing in emotionally intense male nudes, in socially and politically informed works of great power. (Note: there will be two of his male nudes reproduced below, which I believe to be acceptable on WordPress through the Fine Art Exemption for such things, but which some viewers might disapprove of.)
You can view a gallery of his daily life and works on his Instagram page (text in Ukrainian, but with — not very dependable — English translations available); there seems to be no on-line source of information about him and his career.
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, in which George Lucas tangles with Hector Boiardi in an interleaved portmanteau:
(1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
Orthographically, we’ve got Chef Boyardee (a brand of canned ravioli) confronting R2-D2 (a film robot), which don’t join easily to get Chef BoyR2D2. But it’s all in the pronunciation. In transcription, marked off in syllables, with the shared parts underlined:
bòj.ár.tu.dí.tu = bòj.ar.dí + ár.tu.dí.tu
From my 6/28/22 posting “Zwicknames”:
some of us Zwickfolk probably have a Slavic ancestry, way back when, so there’s a kind of poetic symmetry in a migration of Swiss people, among them a notable Zwicky [Johann Heinrich Zwicky, known as Henry] east to [the Odesa area] in 1822, to establish vineyards there (in [what is now] Ukraine). Some stuck it out there, but others fled north to what is now Belarus. [see my 5/22/19 posting “Tsviki from Belarus”] In the mid-20th century, the [Shabo] Zwickys fled back west on a tortuous route, eventually re-establishing themselves in Switzerland (one — Oskar Zwicky, born 9/23/30 — is, astonishingly, still alive and giving interviews; posting to come). And then more recently, many of the Tsvikis from Belarus also fled west, some to Switzerland, some to the United States (including the Miami area and NYC).
(#1) Oskar Zwicky, looking very Swiss, in an engaging 2022 interview, in Oberterzen, Canton Glarus (photo: swissinfo.ch)
This is the fulfillment of that promise: a posting about Oskar Z, born in Shabo, near Odesa in what is now Ukraine, now living back in Canton Glarus, in Switzerland’s northeastern alpine region.
Carinascincus ocellatus, the spotted (or ocellated) snow (or cool-) skink is very small and inconspicuous and hangs out on an out-of-the-way island — Tasmania, way down south — but offers two excellent things for us to enjoy:
— the name spotted snow skink, an /s/-alliterative double trochee (SW SW) that lends itself to satisfying repetition as a found mantra
— the occasional individual that’s sexually discordant — of one sex anatomically (and reproductively), but the other sex genetically (for these skinks, anatomically male but genetically female); the change in anatomical sex during incubation (for these skinks, associated with temperature then) is attested in some oviparous (egg-laying) fish, amphibians, and reptiles, but not, until recently, in a viviparous (live-bearing) creature. Most lizards are oviparous, but Carinascincus ocellatus is viviparous, so it’s a new frontier in sexual discordance.
There turns out to be quite a lot to say about this little creature; bear with me as I wander, pretty much aimlessly, over a large intellectual landscape.
(all about men’s bodies and sex between men, in street language, so entirely not for kids and the sexually modest)
The social lives of Ruff Dudes, including fashion choices and sexual practices. Specifically, on Fuck Me socks and fuck machines. In the fulfillment of a promissory note from my 10/21/22 posting “Neon jocks”.
… on the psychiatrist’s couch, in a 7/12/11 cartoon by Canadian cartoonist (illustrator, graphic novelist, and children’s book author) Dave Whamond:
(#1) A cartoon about cartoon characters (from Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson), with a character reversal — the tiger Hobbes is real, and the boy Calvin is his stuffed toy, though Hobbes fantasizes that the boy is real
(solidly about men’s bodies and man-on-man sex, in street language, so entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
For the background, I return to two postings on this blog from July 2022:
— from 7/3/22, “Smiles of the summer days”, about a sexual encounter between Cocky Boys Levi Karter and Blake Mitchell that exemplifies a common trope of gay male porn combining a facial component — two faces pleasurably engaged with one another (in what I’ll call facial coupling) — and a groin-buttocks component — a back-on-front sit-fuck (what I’ll call a lap fuck, aka Reverse Cowboy):
(#1) 1 ONE-SIDED interaction: R[eceptive] Levi Carter, I[nsertive] Blake Mitchell)— from 7/5/22, “The reverse of me”, about gay pornstar Zach Astor, with X-rated images in an AZBlogX posting of 7/5/22, “Zach Astor”: ZA engaged in such an encounter with Tannor Reed:
(#2) 2 ONE-SIDED interaction: I Zach Astor, R Tannor Reed
