Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

Puns, clever and raunchy

July 28, 2024

Sunday (7/28) is once again Punday, with a clever pun from the PunHub site and a couple of raunchy puns in a gay porn ad on the Gay DVD Empire site. (Warning: the raunchy section is unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

Part 1: rounding up the sheep. (Let us sing: Bringing in the sheaves / Rounding up the sheep) Passed on to me this morning by Virginia Transue, this cartoon / meme from the PunHub site (whose name is itself a play, on PornHub — there’s also a PubHub, about UK pubs):


(#1) A little festival of phrasal verbs: round up ‘approximate (a number) by altering it to the next larger round number’ vs. round up ‘collect (animals) together for some purpose’

The lexical story from NOAD:

verb round: [with object] …  2 alter (a number) to one less exact but more convenient for calculations [AZ: especially in the PHRASAL VERBS round off / up / down]: we’ll round the weight up to the nearest pound | the committee rounded down the figure | let’s just round it off to an even ten dollars.  PHRASAL VERB round up [a] drive or collect a number of people or animals together for a particular purpose: in the afternoon the cows are rounded up for milking. …

with the direct object of the collecting verb round up understood metonymically, in the sheep-counting context, as the numerical size of the flock (rather than the flock itself).

The PunHub site is an enormous collection of puns (and dad jokes) with various accompaniments, including a store — at which you can order their 2023 book

Is This a Joke? No, It’s a Book!: 100 Puns and Dad Jokes from Instagram’s Largest Pun Comic Creator
by Conor Smith.

Part 2: bred & breakfast at the All the Way Inn. (Kids and the sexually modest should leave this posting NOW.) Also in this morning’s e-mail, from the Gay DVD Empire site, a sale pitch that includes this twice-punning item:


(#2) This time my association is not to a song, but to an antique dirty joke based on the question How far is the Old Log Inn? (To satisfy WordPress modesty, I’ve had to fuzz out four rock-hard pornstar dicks — but that lets us focus on their faces, their torsos, and (for three of them) their (interestingly varied) thigh muscles), plus the  breakfast items, all of which are intended as sexual symbols

I’ll get to some of the richness of this goofy image in a little while, but first the p.r. pitch from Gay DVD Empire, with some more gay porn word play:

It’s not just the eggs that are “over easy” at the All the Way Inn, NakedSword Originals’ Bred & Breakfast. Owned and operated by handsome proprietor Heath Halo, the B&B is nestled in the heart of Venice Beach, California, and, for some reason, it seems to attract the hottest traveling men. Take road-tripper Derek Kage, for example. His piercing eyes and stunning good looks pull Heath into a wild morning of edgy sex that leaves them both dripping wet. Then there’s hotel handyman Beau Butler, who’s ready to fix guest Sumner Blayne’s enormous leaking pipe. Later, Carter Collins and Damian Night celebrate their second anniversary by sunning themselves in the property’s garden, eventually helping to relax each other with hot oil and a passionate outdoor fuck. Things get a little more intense when Drew Valentino and Ty Santana take over one of the B&B’s deluxe suites to cement their dom/sub relationship with a fiery, raw fuck-down. Finally, Sean Xavier and Hazel Hoffman serve Heath their own kind of “breakfast in bed” right in the middle of the kitchen. Welcome to Bred & Breakfast: All the Way Inn, where guests check-in to check each other out.

The central puns. The name All the Way Inn puns on the location adverbial all the way in ‘fully inside’ (the asshole, in the gay porn context), while bred and breakfast puns on bed and breakfast / b&b ‘ a guest house or small hotel offering sleeping accommodations and a morning meal’ (NOAD), with bred being the PSP of the verb breed ‘pedicate bareback’ (verb pedicate ‘ to have insertive anal sex with (a man), to fuck (a man) in/up the ass, to ass-fuck (a man)’, adverb bareback‘without a condom’).

The visual symbolism of the components of breakfast. The first man pours coffee — the stream of coffee symbolizing the stream of piss in watersports. The third man holds a plate of pancakes, pancakes usually being a vaginal symbol, but in a gay context an anal symbol. The fourth man holds up a doughnut in one hand while balancing a tray of them with the other, the doughnut being a common symbol of the anal ring. So they’re all happily enjoying their b&b breakfast — everybody’s at least smiling, and the third, très gai, guy is laughing with pleasure — while symbolically engaging in a same-sex orgy.

So in its way the ad photo is charming and funny, four explosively sexy naked studs goofing off with one another and abusing their food and drink symbolically. Everybody’s going to get what he wants, maybe even what he needs.

 

Wrong window, said the sea lion, absurdly

July 27, 2024

This Charlie Hankin cartoon in the July 29, 2024 New Yorker:


(#1) Hankin is an old acquaintance on this blog; see the Page on my postings about his cartoons

The cartoon shows people queuing up at multiple windows in a bureaucratic office, each line for one type of applicant (as, in the US, at the (state) department of motor vehicles, the (federal) unemployment benefits office, or the municipal permits bureau), with one clerk for each line; in the cartoon, each queued applicant comes with some kind of ticket in hand. So far, that’s a familiar situation.

But then it’s made absurd when the clerks are aquatic mammals; a sea lion appears in the cartoon, which also refers to otters, but who knows what the other clerks are like: a manatee, a dolphin, a seal, a whale (or perhaps a polar bear, a beaver, a muskrat, a mink, a water shrew, a capybara or a hippopotamus) — given a choice, I would go to the otter or the capybara, but that’s my personal taste.

(more…)

Everything Nancy

July 18, 2024

Released on the 9th, a cartoon feast of a volume from Sunday Press (in Palo Alto), distributed by Fantagraphics: The Nancy Show: Celebrating the Art of Ernie Bushmiller by Peter Maresca and Brian Walker:


(#1) The cover: all about Nancy — but Sluggo’s not far away, and Ernie’s hovering over them both

(more…)

Slouch Gravitsky’s ode to those people

July 17, 2024

Today’s Zippy strip brings us a rambling poetic diatribe by Slouch Gravitsky, the Zipfigure of poet Charles Bukowsky in Bukowsky’s fictional alter ego, the (sometime) postal clerk Henry Chinaski — crude, aggrieved, cynical, alcoholic. And, oh yes, sharp-eyed.


This might be a burlesque of a specific Bukowski poem, but not one I’m familiar with; meanwhile, note the bottle of booze in the first and fourth panels (plus of course the cigarette) — plus Zippyesque dips into popular culture (Lawrence Welk, beef jerky, Taylor Swift)

(more…)

The coming duodecfest

July 15, 2024

Not pocalypse, but fest / A day on which I’m blest: September 6th is the coming AMZ duodecfest, the celebration of my 84th birthday, 84 being the 7th — and therefore lucky — duodecade (a duodecade is a dozen years, the duodecimal counterpart of the decade in the decimal system).  I’m posting now about my associations with 84, to get that stuff out of my head, so that 8 weeks from now I can just lie back and let the occasion wash over me.

So: first thing, my lucky duodecade. A notion that bubbled up from my mathematical past, along with things like triangular numbers, the Fibonacci sequence, repeating decimals, the infinity of primes, transfinite numbers, and all that good stuff.

Then, second thing, the 84 Lumber Company and the Pennsylvania town of Eighty Four, which leads me to the phallicity of lumber, logs, and planks; if there’s a phallus or phallic act somewhere in a topic, I’ll find it. (I continue to hope that someone has used 84 like 69, to name a sexual act — he 84ed like a crazed mink.)

Finally, Helene Hanff’s delightful 1970 book 84, Charing Cross Road, which takes me to life histories (in this case, of two people) and to rambles through books, both old friends and fresh discoveries (which is what those two people engage in, in transatlantic correspondence). Two more themes from my writing.

(more…)

Cruising Utopia

July 14, 2024

(Men’s bodies and men portrayed in sexual acts, so not to evereyone’s taste)

Encountered on Pinterest this morning, on the Pace Gallery online exhibitions site, “Peter Hujar: Cruising Utopia” (open from 6/30 to 8/3 in 2020), with this arresting photograph:


(#1) Jay and Fernando [Two Men in Leather Kissing], ca. 1966 (I’m an avowed fan of men kissing men, so this photo was guaranteed to get my rapt attention)

(more…)

Pengrooms on parade

July 13, 2024

A surprise from my tiny family this morning, as my grandchild Opal presented me with two gifts: the children’s picture book The Pengrooms by Paul Castle (Paul Castle Studio, 2022), together with an adorable plushie toy of Pringle the Pengroom — Pringle, who is grooms with Finn (both sporting rainbow bow ties, in case you missed the same-sex theme). The cover of the book, showing the couple atop a wedding cake, with the publisher’s blurb:


(#1) Follow Pringle and Finn, two penguins with big hearts, as they deliver wedding cakes to their friends in the animal kingdom. Each cake tells a story, and each [same-sex] wedding offers a challenge that Pringle and Finn must face together. The Pengrooms is an enduring tale about love, diversity, and the importance of working as a team.

Pringle is larger than Finn — couples differ in many ways — but they’re equal partners as a team. The Pringle plushie:


(#2) Pringle, with a really big bow tie

(more…)

The solemn duties of Independence Day Eve

July 3, 2024

What must be done on this day, according to an adaptation of the cover for Uncle Sam: Special Election Edition, about the DC Comics character Uncle Sam, who is himself a dark and hallucinatory version of the American icon:


(#1) As modern Santa Claus goes (on Christmas Eve), so goes this incarnation of Uncle Sam (on Independence Day Eve) — though this Uncle Sam looks like he’d much prefer blood and flesh to milk and cookies

(Passed on by Tim Evanson this morning.)

(more…)

What I’ve been writing: the cartoon

June 23, 2024

From Bob Eckstein’s substack The Bob yesterday, this cartoon (from Writer’s Digest), which struck a metaphorical chord with me:


(#1) Abandoning the farm to write romance fantasy

You’ll see the connection in my 11/9/22 posting “What I’ve been writing”:

over the past two decades I’ve abandoned traditional publication for postings on my blog that I now think of as intellectual entertainments, aimed at a general audience, mixing writing about language with writing about g&s (gender & sexuality), plus all sorts of other stuff that happens to come within my view. The pro here is that this isn’t like anything else you’ll find on the net; it is, as people have said about my work since the 1960s, idiosyncratic. And that’s pretty much the con too; what you get is me, in all my playful and highly personal rambling over all sorts of stuff, which many people will find weird or distasteful or both.

(more…)

A band of four, conferring

June 15, 2024

(Not for kids or the sexually modest)

A particularly well-made ad in my e-mail on 6/8, which I’ve cropped so as to split off two aspects of the composition:


(#1) The Band of Four, who I’ll refer to unimaginatively as Man1 though Man4 (they’re actors, of course, posed for this ad; I’ll give you their stage names below); the first three apparently have their gaze fixed on Man4 (possibly their leader, but certainly their conduit to the world outside their little group, as his gaze is to the side, on us, the viewers of the photo)

#1 shows the four men in close conference with another, the suggestion being that they’re what I’ve called a male band (more on this to come); they could be a sports team, a singing group, a smash-and-grab robbery gang, a police unit, frat brothers, a band of musicians, a street-corner gang, a faculty committee, a religious study group, an improv troupe, and so on, or just a bunch of buddies who hang out together.

But wait. They’re all shirtless, or quite possibly naked. And seriously buffed. They’re also racioethnically diverse. Who are these guys? What is this group? What are they conferring about? And, while we’re puzzling, where are they? In the midst of yellow-focus tropical foliage, it seems. (That’s obviously a stage setting, but it’s undeniably tropical in intent.)

The characters are in Brazil, in multiethnic Rio de Janiero, where the actors were filmed in one episode of the recent gay porn flick Muito Quente:
(more…)