Archive for the ‘Clothing’ Category

Beanies, baby

January 31, 2025

🐅 🐅 🐅  three tigers for ultimate January, and a day continuing the theme of late-January early-death birthdays: Robert Burns, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Edward Sapir in an earlier posting of mine (“Luminous birthdays” from 1/26); now, Anton Chekhov two days ago and Franz Schubert today

Meanwhile, tigers savage rabbits, but the rabbits of February are clamoring at the door, growing in size and ferocity, and are now prepared to chew up the tigers like mere blades of grass. A monument in bread to the coming triumph of these adorable but gigantic bunnies:


(#1) Today: from Benita Bendon Campbell, who got it from Jacqueline Martinez Wells

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Hats off to the vampires!

January 19, 2025

For yesterday, 1/18, in Bizarro, the 6th and I suppose last Waynoratu Nosferamanteau:


The male nosferatu (holding a wineglass of what is presumably blood, and chatting with his young female companion at some sort of vampiric meet-and-greet) seems to be wearing a Canadian toque (= tuque), with pom-pom, to warm his head during the cold dark nights in his coffin (yes, it’s very silly) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

The nosferamanteau is Nosferatoque = Nosferatu + toque. As for the hat, from NOAD:

noun toque: [a] a woman’s small hat, typically having a narrow, closely turned-up brim. [b] historical a small cap or bonnet having a narrow brim or no brim. [c] Canadian a close-fitting knitted hat, often with a tassel or pom-pom on the crown. [variant of tuque] [d] a tall white hat with a full pouched crown, worn by chefs.

(The heart tattoo with A B O in it, for the blood types A B AB and O, is a nice touch.)

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Fangs for the memories

January 17, 2025

Very briefly: in entry 5 in the Waynoratu Nosferamanteau marathon, today, two anti-establishment vampires greet one another:


A 1960s-style hippie on the right (peace symbol, long hair, headband, etc.), a 1970s-style Johnny Rotten punk rocker on the left (anarchist symbol, spiky hair, studded collar. etc.)

Meanwhile, the punmanteau is a complex one: Johnny Rotten wrapped around nosfer– (representing Nosferatu)

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The naked scribe

December 8, 2024

From Tim Evanson on Facebook yesterday, this cover art by J.C. Leyendecker (1874-1951): The Literary Digest of 6/12/1909:


(#1) Homoerotic soft porn in the style of classical sculpture (complete with a laurel wreath for the author au naturel); the laurel wreath identifies the writer as an incarnation of Apollo, the god of poetry, who is often depicted with a laurel wreath (recalling his desire for Daphne, a nymph who was transformed into a laurel tree to escape the god’s advances); meanwhile, the writer is nude, because he’s a god (the model for this drawing was JCL’s favorite model, also his partner in life, Charles Beach (1881-1954))

I’m a writer (among other things), and I mostly work in my underwear, but I don’t write commando. Well, I’m no Charles Beach, and certainly no Apollo.

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Slip into a plush penguin

November 26, 2024

From Chris Ambidge (one of the Wardens of the Spheniscid Zarchives) on Facebook this morning:


(#1) [CA > AZ:] Arnold! Have you considered … penguin slippers? Keeping Feathers McGraw underfoot might be the best way to make sure he doesn’t get into mischief

From the Coddies website:

CoddiesÂŽ Wallace & Gromit Feathers McGraw slippers:

Silent but villainous, Feathers McGraw is the ultimate plush slipper icon!

Slip into the soft embrace of Wallace & Gromit’s Feathers McGraw himself with Coddies’ new plush slippers, designed to capture the essence of Aardman’s criminal mastermind. They fit like a glove – not unlike the red rubber glove perched atop Feathers’ head – a disguise so brilliant in its simplicity that it once outwitted Wallace and even the local law enforcement.

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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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A Swiss philological moment

October 20, 2024

Wayles Browne writes from Cornell:

you might spare a posting for Jacob Wackernagel, the Swiss philologist, who was the first to make sense of second-position clitics (https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/270), born 11 December 1852; and for Jost Winteler, the other Swiss philologist and author of Die Kerenzer Mundart des Kantons Glarus in ihren Grundzßgen dargestellt (1876), who may or may not have been a predecessor of phonemic theory, but who definitely was a mentor to young Albert Einstein after the latter moved to Switzerland. Winteler was born 21 November 1846.

This is that posting, First, I have added Wackernagel (12/11/1852) and Winteler (11/21/1846) to my e-calendar.

Then, from my reply to WB:

I used to be an authority on second-position clitics, even have a t-shirt that says PUT YOUR CLITICS IN SECOND POSITION.
As for Winteler, Canton Glarus is where the Zwickys come from — mostly from Mollis.
Meanwhile, I happen to be wearing my Swiss-flag gym shorts. Hail, Helvetica! and all that.

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Eugene Daniels

October 19, 2024

A panel discussion about the elections on MSNBC. Among the panelists, the regular contributor Eugene Daniels, the White House correspondent for Politico: amiable, funny, sharp, passionate — a smart, impressive black guy, with an Afro that’s clearly meant as a political statement but is, somehow, actually adorable. (He is, in appearance and demeanor and attitude, one of my “types” — though I’ve come to understand that that just means he resembles, physically and in his projection of himself, someone I once had a satisfying sexual and affectional encounter with; it’s a kind of imprinting, it’s entirely in my head and not my actions, there are no real-world consequences, but it gives me a moment of pleasure, like visiting an old friend.)

Over time I’ve listened to his reporting and opinions a lot — tv goes on while I work — and occasionally I’ve glanced at him while he was speaking, but for the first time I focused on him full-bore. Ten seconds in, I said to myself, “Wow, this guy is gay!”, and then realized I hadn’t the slightest clue why I thought this. I watched him for some time then, without catching anything I could identify as a tell. I still don’t know what I was reading, but it turns out that in addition to his other sterling qualities listed above, and in addition to his being literally a great team player (including on an NCAA Division I football team), a leader of groups, and a conspicuous role model for young black guys, he is also way gay, wonderfully, flamboyantly gay — a presentation achieved by his clothing and adornment (so it can easily be adjusted for the context; he moves through a lot of worlds).

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Speeding into the 20th century

September 15, 2024

Encountered on Pinterest today, this cover of Collier’s magazine from 1/19/1907: an early J.C. Leyendecker work of gay soft porn in the style of classical sculpture (an art form that lets the artist get away with a lot), which is also a hymn to rapid transport in the early 20th century:


“The Speed God” posed with a stylized caduceus against a hot air balloon, while the messenger of the Roman gods poses his muscular body on the hood of an early automobile

And then there are Mercury’s truly fabulous winged sandals, which appear to be living creatures in their own right.

(JCL appears every so often on this blog — most recently in my 9/2 posting “Leyendecker Labor Day”.)