In the wake of my 1/19 posting “Appreciate my dragon”, about 1/16, Appreciate a Dragon Day, this image posted yesterday on Facebook by Marina Muilwijk, from the For the Love of Dragons group, where it was posted by Yvette Marie:
Archive for January, 2024
Dragons to appreciate
January 22, 2024
Do we contain multitudes?
January 21, 2024Two cockroaches, you have a couple of unpleasant bugs. Undulating masses of cockroaches streaming over all the surfaces in a room, you’ve got a shudder-provoking pest infestation. (I’ve had the latter experience with Argentine ants, and it was the stuff of nightmares for weeks.) But when does the former turn into the latter? This is the question asked by self-aware cockroaches in this cartoon by Lonnie Millsap in the 1/29/24 print-edition New Yorker:
(#1) Cucarachas conscientes de ellas mismas, addressing the puzzle in the sorites paradox / the paradox of the heap
Appreciate my dragon
January 19, 2024I recently discovered (through friends on Facebook) that 1/16 is Appreciate a Dragon Day — an excellent occasion, in my view. How do I appreciate my dragon? Let me count the ways.
One, dragons have picked up a ton of gay vibes (there are lots of rainbow dragons around, many on the cute side, but some fierce), and I am way gay; two, a Year of the Dragon is the upcoming year (beginning on 2/10/24) in the 12-year cycle of the lunar calendar and I am in fact a dragon, born in the dragon year 1940; and three, since dragons are (fanciful) gigantic serpents, they are natural phallic symbols, really big and powerful penises (the objects of my desire), frequently with wings, and that means they slot right into my sexual fantasies. Il y a un dragon dans mon lit!
(#1) On the kisspng images site: a rainbow Chinese dragon, by Oluoko
Pain and persecution
January 18, 2024I woke this morning screaming “oh fuck! oh Jesus fuck!” with pain (in my hip, knee, finger, and wrist joints, all at once), after the worst persecution nightmare that I can recall (the thin veneer of tolerance and acceptance that normally papers over deep fear of and contempt for the Other is aroused by labeling us as aliens who are poisoning society and moves neighbors and friends to cleanse their world of the poison by hunting us down and slaughtering us). And a nonfunctional day yesterday (1/17, Ann Daingerfield Zwicky’s death day, back in 1985, routinely puts me into a tailspin, and the weather is almost always appalling). I’m thoroughly shaken, bewildered about how to get through the day. Eventually the panicked spike in my blood pressure subsided and I pushed through the pain to get myself breakfast. Now I’m sitting quietly in my chair at my worktable, trying to move my body as little as possible while still typing a posting.
1/17 is also Benjamin Franklin’s birthday (in 1706 rather than 1937), and normally that would give me a way lighten the sorrow with some of the remarkable and risqué details of his life. And I have just discovered that 1/16 was Appreciate a Dragon Day, which I should certainly celebrate publicly (and hope to be able to do so soon): dragons have picked up a ton of gay vibes — there are lots of rainbow dragons around, many on the cute side, but some fierce — plus a Year of the Dragon is the upcoming year (beginning on 2/10/24) in the 12-year cycle of the lunar calendar and I am in fact a dragon, born in the dragon year 1940.
Meanwhile, dark midwinter continues, as always, with the birthday (on 1/22) of my man Jacques Transue (who died in 2003). While, on a much more pleasant birthday front, I was so wrapped up in my medical treatments that I failed to celebrate the 1/9 birthday of Joan Baez, very much still alive and just a bit younger than I am, just a bit older than Jacques.
Meanwhile, I stumble unhappily through the day.
Dinos in bed
January 16, 2024Now that I have the three Dinos books (Dinosaur Therapy, Dinosaur Philosophy, Dinosaur Friendship), I’ve found further poignant Dino strips about what I called deep friendship in my 1/8 posting “The best bits of me”. Deep friendship is also known as a kind of love: philia, the love that friends have for one another (as distinguished from eros, romantic or sexual love). That has brought me to strips in which two of the Dino characters are attached erotically as well as philically — notably, this delightful “big bed” strip from 2022, involving the two characters the creators refer to as red and blue (called Brn and Blu in my earlier posting):
(#1) Bed space is nice, but the embrace of your lover is even nicer
The creators of the comic have gone to some trouble not to gender the two characters; they differ in color, but otherwise they’re identical in appearance. This means that #1 can be — though it doesn’t have to be — understood as showing same-sex eros. With this remarkable result, as reported by the creators on Twitter (now called X) on 6/16/22:
this comic was too much for Instagram and they deleted it
Consequently, the strip didn’t come up in my earlier net searches, which turned out to depend on Instagram; I didn’t discover it until I got my copy of Dinosaur Friendship. I am offended.
Morning names: kelp and skulk
January 15, 2024Immediately, I thought: Kelp and Skulk, Attorneys at Law, famously slimy and devious. But what came into my head on awakening was just the noun kelp, for the algae; and the verb skulk, roughly ‘lurk’. Suspiciously similar to one another phonologically. If you combine them, you get the name of a common fish, the scup. And each of them spins off a huge range of phonologically similar and possibly thematically related words.
I did have an idea of how kelp and skulk got into my head — through a proper name that’s phonologically similar to both of my morning names: the surname Delk. The last name of a character on the American tv show The Closer, which I’d watched two episodes of last night: Thomas “Tommy” Delk, a fictional Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department (beautifully portrayed by Courtney B. Vance).
Scup the fish and Delk the cop:
(#1) Stenotomus chrysops, a porgy; and (#2) Tommy Delk, a chief
Sunday punmanteaus
January 14, 2024Today’s Bizarro, a Sunday Punnies in which all the puns are incorporated in portmanteaus:
(#1) Three punmanteaus (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 8 in this strip — see this Page)
Now each of them in detail, in turn. In each case, the pun comes in the material shared by the two contributors to the portmanteau — material that is understood one way as part of the first contributor and a different way as part of the second. And then the cartoon combines the two understandings in a single drawing: a (spiritually) aware werwolf (lupine zazen); ill-tempered tempered glass (oh shut up, Silica Boy!); and a matador doorman (the hand that stabs, the hand that opens). (more…)
Love and intrigue in the palace of cards
January 13, 2024Encountered this morning on Pinterest, this remarkable artwork: a playing card showing the jack of hearts in the arms of the king of spades and holding hands with him:
(#1) A same-sex encounter in the palace of cards, the work of Iranian-born Mahdieh Farhadkiaei; according to the site of the publisher of this playing-card art, Black Dragon Press (“a family-run print publisher based in London, UK”), she’s “an illustrator and concept artist working in advertising and fashion”
MF’s first set of these cards shows same-sex romantic pairings (both female and male), mixed-sex romantic pairings, and scenes of palace intrigue, all involving the characters on the three face cards (king, queen, and jack), as well as some solo portraits; we can only hope that more depictions of palace life are on the way.
Sandwich and pie at the Zipperverse Diner
January 12, 2024(The very last section of this posting, on the name Monty Crisco, gets right down to man-on-man sex in street language, so is out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest; the rest of the posting is quirky but not indecent)
The 1/4 Zippy the Pinhead strip takes us back to Zippy’s imagined perverse version of the (now-defunct) Miss Albany Diner in Albany NY — call it the Zipperverse Diner — and its blackboard menu above the counter:
(#1) The messages on the board are about the day’s offerings, but neither sandwiches nor pies are mentioned; meanwhile, Monte Cristo sandwiches are a not-uncommon diner offering, but Zippy maintains, perversely, that the sandwich name is correctly spelled Monty Crisco (and you don’t want to think about the ingredients or how you eat the thing); and Nesselrode pie is a bit of elegance far from any ordinary diner’s pie offerings, but Zippy supposes, perversely, that it’s on the board at the comic-strip diner, with a typo in it
Three things here: about the (actual) diner and its appearance in an earlier Zippy strip, with the same drawing but different text in Zippy’s speech balloons; about (actual) Monte Cristo sandwiches and Nesselrode pie; and about the name Monty Crisco.