(Male genitals — not displayed only because I fuzzed a penis out for WordPress modesty — and discussion of man-on-man sex acts in street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
Today’s TitanMen gay porn sale ad in my e-mail (with a fellated penis you have to imagine):
It’s definitely Penguin Day on AZBlog — following on my earlier “Illusory penguins ” posting — with this wonderful wordless Jared Nangle cartoon in the new New Yorker, for 7/31:
(#1) The kite inherits its flightlessness from its subject; bird kites and butterfly kites can fly, but not penguin kites (meanwhile, a kite that could dive and swim like a fish would certainly be a disappointment)
On Pinterest, this image of a man embracing a (male) statue:
Gay Pygmalion and the statue he loves
This from oatbug’s Tumblr account, where it’s dated 10/7/22, with the note:
reblogged from luvwish; originally from executed-deactivated20161004
But this last link is apparently now dead, so we don’t know who the ultimate creator of the image was, and what they had in mind. I post the image here because I find it moving (but then I’m a fool for same-sex affection of all sorts). And beautifully composed.
First, the news event, from yesterday. Then a Facebook exchange between Greg Morrow and me, about what might have afflicted Mitch McConnell, the minority leader of the US Senate. (GM and I both deprecate the evil of the Tortoise in the sharpest terms, but this posting is entirely about what might have caused his notable freeze.)
From my regular correspondent Ellen Kaisse yesterday:
I was walking around the grounds of a nearby high school and saw these black and white creatures off in the distance.
(#1) [AMZ:] Are those penguins, advancing upon us?I knew they had to be football training sleds (see picture below of the closest thing I could find on the web), but they sure looked like penguins. I immediately thought of you. [AMZ: notorious penguin fan that I am]
(#2) [AMZ:] Football training sleds; you charge into them (I have actually done this)I think if you enlarge the picture [in #1], it will keep looking like penguins, at least up to a certain magnification.
There’s a little lesson in perception here. If, for whatever reason, you are primed to search out certain things in your visual field, you are likely to “see” your target in some of the wrong places, in visuals that merely resemble the thing that so engages your attention. Penguins are one of my totem animals; I live surrounded by images of penguins and simulacra of penguins, and friends keep giving me more; so I’m attuned to penguins in a way that few other people are, and am inclined to unconsciously seek them out. Through long association with me, Ellen Kaisse has picked up some of this inclination. (My daughter and grandchild and various other friends who have been supplying me with penguiniana over the years have similarly gotten attuned to the flightless birds.)
I have written elsewhere on this blog about my perceptual sensitivity to the letter Z, ’cause I’m a Z guy. That occasionally leads me to misidentify symbols that merely resemble Z, or to fix on certain forms of the capital letter S as if they were Zs. For me, Zs lurk everywhere. (I notice spoken /z/ in much the same way, especially in word-initial position.)
It’s all about male faces and the great variety of masculinities — there will be six pictures — as explored by photographer Joseph Barrett (who I was first alerted to by a 7/24 Pinterest posting).
JB’s incredibly chaotic description of what he’s about, untouched by my hand (but with some elucidating comments of mine), from his website:
Joseph Barrett Photography: See more ideas about barrett joseph pennsylvania impressionist [a completely different artist from this Joseph Barrett]. Changing the masculine portrait. Finding the essence of man in portraiture [and Redefining the male gaze]
Joseph barrett photography. Freelance photographer at self employed photography freelance photographer at self employed photography norwich university of the arts. [Norwich University of the Arts, a public university in Norwich, Norfolk, UK] Traditional notions of masculinity have been thrown out of the window. In this interview he talks about breaking preconceived notions of masculinity in the context of the gender spectrum. … [barrett:] i think it is necessary for people to see photographs without implications of gender and sexual orientation for new masculinity
Passed on to me by Joel Levin, from Mike Galos on Facebook on 7/25: A display of English wine cask units, from the largest to the smallest: tun, butt, puncheon, hogshead, tierce, barrel, rundlet, kilderkin, firkin, pin:
To which I add pipe, a synonym for butt, and of course the smallest unit, the gallon, whether imperial or US
For the most part, the names originated as everyday names of wine (or beer) containers of various sizes, then were extended to semi-technical or technical usage as the name of a volume of drink, in a process we might call technification — a process amply illustrated in the practices of biologists who adapt everyday vocabulary like fly, bug, worm, and petal as technical terms, and then often privilege their usage as the correct one, as if ordinary people were carelessly mis-using the vocabulary (yes, that pisses me off).
After a brief reflection on technification, I’ll pass to the vocabulary in the display above, noting that most of them are in frequent enough usage to make it into the New Oxford American Dictionary (a lexicography-based one-volume dictionary).
Sighted by my helper León Hernández, on his way from the Caltrain station to my house day before yesterday: stunningly blue flowers just mixed in with some blooming wild grass under a tree out on the street in front of Verve Coffee Roasters (162 University Ave. — on the south side, just east of High St.). I had no idea what they might be, so yesterday on his way to my house he took some photos on his phone, two of which I’ll post below.
There were a lot of them, and they were certainly beautiful: little balloons of intense blue — flax blue — on a plant with strap-like leaves. I maintained that I’d never seen anything like them, but that turns out to be provably false, since I posted about a closely related plant in Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden back in 2019. Memory is a fickle thing.
In today’s Zippy strip, Zerbina and Zippy indulge their onomatomania — a love of certain expressions that leads the affected person to chant them over and over for pleasure — by slinging competing (trochaic tetrameter) product names at one another competitively, before falling passionately into one another’s arms:
Noticed in passing on Pinterest yesterday, this dramatic statue of Prometheus and the eagle, by German sculptor Reinhold Begas:
A male nude (unusual for Begas, whose specialty was monumental statues of public figures); I don’t know where it’s located
The eagle looks threateningly at the chained Prometheus, who shrinks back in terror, anticipating the eagle’s next feasting on his liver.
