Archive for October, 2024

The anole of Palo Alto

October 31, 2024

🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for ultimate October, aka Halloween; by the pricking of my fingers, something wicked this way lingers

Specifically, my fingers pricked out the name Anold for Arnold a little while ago, as they do with regrettable regularity (Gorgo finger not work right), but this time it was in a link on Facebook to this blog, so not self-correcting. But George V. Reilly caught the error and pointed it out to me, so that I could fix it. And then today, I had an inspiration, which I posted as a response (somewhat revised here) to George:

— AMZ > GVR: It has occurred to me to take up Anold the anold as another identity. The anold is a brightly colored arboreal lizard — a type of anole — in its rare and precious Swiss variant. Characterized by its curiosity (in several senses — “Look, Bruce, what a curious lizard!”) and its remarkable, um, snout.

This is the anold’s organ sometimes known jocularly as a Swiss nose. All noses are phallic, but some are considerably more phallic than others. (A lexical note on the noun snout, from NOAD: ‘the projecting nose and mouth of an animal, especially a mammal’.)

Meanwhile, while noses and snouts are phallic symbols, lizards (and dinosaurs and dragons) as wholes are much more impressively so. From GDoS on the noun lizard:

7 (Aus./US) the penis [1st cite 1969], with phrases meaning ‘to urinate’: bleed / drain / flog / squeeze the lizard; and phrases meaning ‘to masturbate’: bleed / gallop / pet the lizard and choke / stroke / whip one’s lizard

So now we’re deep into phallicity. Well, it’s my blog. Phallicity happens.

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Swim Meat, the video

October 30, 2024

(Publicity for a gay porn video, entertaining in its way but absolutely off-limits for kids and the sexually modest)

🎃 🎃 🎃 three jack-o’-lanterns for penultimate October, Halloween Eve (that is, the day before the day before the day of the dead) — in my house, the day when the pussyboys go out to seek their phallic prey

Into this scene comes this morning’s e-mail from the Falcon | NakedSword Store, offering:

Hot House movie download discounts — full movies $11.95 each

With, right at the top, the crudely pun-titled video Swim Meat and its cover illustration, offering four fine pieces of swim meat, one (Johnny V’s) just barely concealed by his swimwear; plus three proudly jutting tubesteaks that I’ve had to suppress for WordPress modesty (but here you can view the uncensored cover, along with the publicity text):

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Major Crimes

October 29, 2024

Well, I fell into this. In this morning’s posting “Removed!”, I reported myself as at the end of several tethers, one of which I addressed in this observation:

I’m not sure whether I can bear watching the news any more, and I’m not sure whether I can bear not knowing about what’s happening. For the moment, I’ve retreated into letting all six seasons of Major Crimes (which I’ve seen several times) go past me in the background while I work.

Ellen Kaisse then wondered about the show, and I embarked on an appreciation of it. And ended up with something worth expanding on a bit and posting on this blog.


(#1) An early poster for the show (+ marks characters I’ll discuss below): +Sharon Raydor in the upper right; then in four rows, left-to-right: in each row — 1st row: Detective Lieutenant Andy Flynn (Tony Denison), Detective Lieutenant Louis Provenza (G. W. Bailey); 2nd row: +Rusty Beck, +Fernando Morales; 3rd row: Civilian Surveillance Coordinator (videographer for crime scenes and interrogations) Buzz Watson (Phillip P. Keene), Detective Amy Sykes (Kierran Giovanni), Detective Lieutenant Michael Tao (Michael Paul Chan); bottom right corner: Assistant Chief Russell Taylor (Robert Gossett)

I’m not going to give you an account of the whole show, which ran for six years in hourlong episodes, but just notes on a few of the characters and a few bits from some of the story lines.

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Removed!

October 29, 2024

This has been a signally awful morning for me, but mixed in with my immersion in death (the deaths of old friends, from several generations, one or more every week), a long respiratory affliction that has made it impossible for me to enjoy our beautiful fall days, the end of face-to-face relations with friends (which has made me a deeply isolated old man, dependent on Facebook for getting any contact at all with my friends), possibly the worst persecution dream of my life (which has left me thoroughly rattled), and of course the remarkable ugliness of the MAGA Presidential campaign, there came this message from Facebook:

I will explain.

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Briefly noted: the halls of ivy

October 28, 2024

From Nathan Sanders on Facebook on 10/26:


(#1) [NS:] I love when ivy changes colours! — at University of Toronto.

— AZ to NS: That is indeed lovely. It’s Parthenocissus tricuspidata, so-called “Boston ivy”, a vining plant in the grape family closely related to Virginia creeper, and not related at all to English, or common, ivy, Hedera helix (which I have growing all over my little patio). English ivy is evergreen; Boston ivy is deciduous, its leaves turning color gorgeously in the fall before dropping off.

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A second look at a shirt-spreading Beau Butler

October 28, 2024

(Entertaining and enlightening, I hope, but definitely not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Yesterday, in my posting “Beau Butler’s shirt” (about shirt-lifting as sexual invitation, and gay porn actor Beau Butler as a practitioner), I ended with a photo of BB engaged instead in shirt-spreading (or -opening), to display his muscular torso (muscular but not ripped like a bodybuilder’s):


(#1) [from the caption there:] … a suave but intense BB

An unusual presentation for BB; he’s characteristically earthy, cheerily (even playfully) crude, brazenly shirtless, bearing with him an aura of powerful male sweat. But the guy in this photo is, as I said, suave — with styled hair (oh! much browner than in other photos, where it’s definitely black), elegant eyebrows, very light facial hair, and (another oh!) piercingly blue eyes. Meanwhile, the handsome light lavender shirt he’s spreading is much more stylish than the t-shirts BB wears when he’s not going shirtless. Even the shirt-spreading gesture is a smoother move, less overtly sexual, than the shirt-lifting of BB’s other photos in yesterday’s posting.

The anomalies pile up. Is this, then, actually BB, or is it a simulacrum of him, presumably AI-generated?

Almost surely a simulacrum, as I’ll argue in a bit. But first, one more (genuine) photo of BB — there are tons of them, mostly with him naked or minimally clothed, available in copies all over the net; most of them are clearly from studios he’s worked for — with him, wearing only boots and socks, doing a crude tush push, jokily advertising his availability as a really fine fuck.  Managing to be really goofy and really arousing at the same time. To compare with #1 above.

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Beau Butler’s shirt

October 27, 2024

(Waist-deep in gay porn, so it strays into sexual territory that’s definitely off-limits for kids and the sexually modest)

A HuntForMen (from Falcon | NakedSword) membership ad — gay porn you can subscribe to — this morning has as its central element this pose of gay pornstar Beau Butler, performing the most modest level of shirt-lifting (exposing only a bit of belly):


(#1) His jeans are open, suggesting that the pose is a sexual invitation rather than just a musclehunk’s body display

Two things: the levels of shirt-lifting, and the charming, also hard-working, muscle bottom BB.

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Was Abraham Lincoln gay?

October 26, 2024

From The Economist, “Was Abraham Lincoln gay? A controversial documentary [Lover of Men: The Untold Story of Abraham Lincoln (2024)] re-examines the president’s relationships with men”, on-line on 10/1/24 (and in the print issue of 10/5). An article behind a paywall, but I’m reproducing it here in full (I have a subscription), so that I can, first, express my dismay at the way the label gay is used there and, second, juxtapose this treatment with my careful analysis, originally from 2005, reacting to similarly dismaying discussions of Brokeback Mountain, the story and the film. And add some further material on male friendship, normative masculinity, and male attitudes towards women and femininity.

Meanwhile, I note that as I write this, I’m wearing this t-shirt —


(#1) GAY AS FUCK in big rainbow letters

— fully understanding that its message is an affirmation of an identity that is both highly localized in time and place and social setting, and also a kind of umbrella identity, accommodating a wide variety of “gay people”.

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The ecstasy of oral pleasure

October 26, 2024

(The title is a warning; this posting is about men fellating men, and while the language mostly rises above raunchy street talk, the topic is clearly not for kids or the sexually modest)

I begin with a severely cropped image of one gay porn actor fellating another, a picture that manages to have no penis in it, despite the fact that the unseen penis is the emotionally central element of the act for both participants. Because what struck me about the image was, instead, the fellator’s state of being, as evidenced in his facial expression:

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Briefly noted: the new Caligula

October 25, 2024

Posted to Facebook yesterday. I had been recalling Albert Camus’s play Caligula (adapted into English by Justin O’Brien), which I happened to see in February 1960, during its famously brief — one month long — run at the 54th Street Theatre in NYC — which led me to investigate Wikipedia’s long and intricate entry on

Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (31 August 12 – 24 January 41), better known by his nickname Caligula …, Roman emperor from AD 37 until his assassination in AD 41.

and then to write on FB:

Was just musing on TFG as the new Caligula (vengeful, unclear on the separation of his personal fortune and the state’s coffers, declaring himself a god, etc.) when I thought to look for parallel uses in the press. I bring you

the Daily Beast in 2011, Benjamin Netanyahu as the new Caligula; the Times (of London) in 2015, Jeremy Corbyn, the new Caligula; the Irish Times in 2016, [Helmut Grabpussy], the new Caligula?; POLITICO.eu in 2020, Boris Johnson the new Caligula

(there are probably more)

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