Yesterday on the My Home is California group on Facebook, Jen Ede posted this scene of creatures afflicting greenery at Subway Cave, Old Station (in Lassen National Forest):
(#1)
That’s an amateur shot; here’s a more dramatic photo, with much better lighting:
Passed along on Facebook recently, a BBC One clip from 12/13/18, with this header:
(#1)
I read the header before I looked down at the scene. And what I read was:
Emperor penguin chicks take on a giant pretzel
I found this mightily puzzling. The Giant Pretzels of the Antarctic? Then I saw the petrel.
I’ll get to the fangs and the pumpkin eventually, but first a taxonomic puzzle in botany and two botanical puzzles in (Mexican) Spanish, triggered by this Pinterest photo from a while back:
(#1) [as captioned by its (Mexican) poster] Lirio plantasonya
The centerpiece:
(#1) “Rainbow Dragons” (for LGBT Pride 2018) by Ross Sanger, on Deviant Art (hat tip to Kim Darnell)
Two effects here. One, in popular culture, dragons are tamed, almost to the point of cuteness; otherwise, they’re creatures of great power and potential danger (in Western traditions, active malevolence) — but here are cicurated (tamed, rendered mild or harmless), or even cutesified. And then, dragons have become loosely attached to gay culture; they’ve been homoized in some contexts — Homoland is, at the very least, congenial to dragons as symbols, perhaps as symbols of gay power, so that dragons and rainbows have come to have some affinity for one another, in draconical rainbows and arcipluvial dragons (like Sanger’s).
Especially in places where dragons bear some specific symbolic weight, gays and their rainbows are likely to follow: the red dragon of the Welsh flag; the logo of Dungeons and Dragons; and the dragon of Chnese astrology. But gay dragons, often in rainbow, might pop up anywhere (as in #1).
Today’s notable NomConjObj, from MSNBC reporter Garrett Haake in Clyde OH (a Whirlpool appliance company town), talking about the effect of tariff increases on appliance dealers, with reference to:
… the price disparity between they and their competitors
Oh my, a nominative conjoined object about as far from the central examples of the construction as you can get (so not in my selective NomConjObj files): 1-3P between they and their competitors (pronoun in 1st position, 3rd person pronoun, singular pronoun) rather than the very common 2-1S (as in between my competitors and I). One for the files!
A visit to the giant white calla lilies of my neighborhood, centerpieces of the garden explosion on Bryant St. in Palo Alto, just a block from my house. Meanwhile, my own modest pot of purple callas is shooting up towards blooming.
A sweep of (much of) the garden explosion, showing the two stands of white callas, both about 2½ feet tall, both blooming for at least 6 weeks now (they are plants that span the local botanical seasons spring and early summer, which is where we are now):
(#1) The strikingly colored spikes are snapdragons, a feature of botanical winter locally, though they will bloom into the summer (this photo and two others below by Kim Darnell)
During the frustrating days of searching for a source of the Japanese-Spanish “Ariperro” cartoon (5/5 report on this blog here), I wrote on Facebook:
Stacy [Holloway] says there’s no clear answer. I say I’m sad about the unclear answer.
And Stacy offered to allay my sadness with something happy, specifically, from the My Modern Met site, “Adorable “Leaf Sheep” Sea Slugs Look like Cartoon Lambs” by Jenny Zhang on 8/22/15:
(#1) A leaf sheep sea slug, Costasiella kuroshimae
GRP is short for Government Relations Professional (an actual job title — GRPs have their own professional association, even). The title above is an echo of the title of my 4/9/19 posting “The serial entrepreneur of Victoria BC”, referring to Richard Zwicky, whose latest business venture was a cannabis product distribution company. Yes, a cannabis business-connected Zwicky — and today we get another, Dylan Zwicky, of Leonine Public Affairs in Montpelier VT (at the other side of the continent from Victoria BC), the new vice-president of Leonine’s Vermont Government Relations team with the account of the Vermont-based Trace (representing the hemp and cannabis industries).
(Consider the topic before reading on.)
That would be National Masturbation Day, May 7th, today — launching National Masturbation Month, lusty May:
(#1) From my 5/4/18 posting “Then, if ever, come lusty days”
(#2) “Black Solo” (from the Porn for Women TV site), cropped
Specifically, self-lust, self-pleasure. A regular topic on this blog — write about what you know, they say, and I’ve been practicing this one for about 67 years — also an occasional hook for movie comedy.
(Several shirtless people, in case that annoys or distresses you, but otherwise mostly about music.)
According to my calendar, today is both World Naked Gardening Day and World Accordion Day, which naturally led me to imagine a naked gardener playing the accordion. But my calendar turns out to be half wrong: World Accordion Day is fixed on May 6th; World Naked Gardening Day, on the other hand, is a movable feast, the first Saturday in May, which this year was the 4th.
However, the two occasions did coincide exactly in 2017, and at least one accordion-playing gardener squeezed nude for that occasion.
