Archive for the ‘Shirtlessness’ Category

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In the political news: catalectic trochaic tetrameter

March 2, 2020

(This is a new posting, intended as a reconstruction of and replacement for a “Catalectic trochaic tetrameter” posting of 3/1 that was somehow destroyed by WordPress, in such a way that if you try to access the posting under that name you are now automatically re-directed to my 3/1 “Guy gear” posting, which is intriguing but not the same thing at all. This “In the political news” posting quotes some sexual street talk but isn’t about men’s bodyparts or mansex, so I’m not warning anyone off. But it’s not all sunshine and roses.)

A Facebook dialogue from 2/29:

Gadi Niram: I don’t know what the deeper meaning might be here, but “Klobuchar and Buttigieg” has the same stress pattern as “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern”.

Arnold Zwicky: A line of catalectic trochaic tetrameter – SW SW SW S — incredibly common in folk verse of all kinds, and elsewhere. Including: “Lord what fools these mortals be”. Not to mention one reading of: “Captain of our fairy band”. And, from a recent posting of mine: “Lincoln Darwin Valentine”.

From my 2/13/19 posting “Captain of our fairy band”:


(#1) Captain of our fairy band: Lincoln Darwin Valentine (a double dose of CTT; note that double dose of CTT is itself CTT)

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Music, Poetic form, Shirtlessness | Leave a Comment »

Golden jubilee

February 26, 2020

For gay men of Gen X now achieving their Golden Year: Surfing for Ulysses:



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Posted in Holidays, Movies and tv, Shirtlessness | 1 Comment »

The year in spam

December 31, 2019

The most recent posting on this topic: on 3/5/19, “Another 100k spams”, where I noted that the number of spam comments here (since the blog started in December 2008) passed 5,600,000 on 3/3. Some were automatically deleted by WordPress software, a great many more were made available for bulk deletion (or individual inspection) by me, and some were submitted to me individually for moderation. In periodic spam attacks, comments spam arrives at the rate of more than one per second (until the software wrestles it to the ground again).

That was 3/3. On 7/23, the count passed 5,700,000. And then, yesterday (12/30), 5,800,000. 6 million beckons! (Probably not next year, but soon.)

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Posted in Actors, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Phallicity, Shirtlessness, Signs and symbols, This blogging life | Leave a Comment »

Two actor POP days

December 13, 2019

It’s Eva Marie Saint Lucy’s Day and, in today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro combo, a Kurt Russell terrier bounds in:


(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbol in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there’s just one in this strip — see this Page.)

First, Kurt Russell and the Russell terrier. Then Eva Marie Saint and St. Lucy’s Day. In both cases, a member of what I’ve called the Acting Corps (see the Page on this blog), with a name in a POP (a phrasal overlap portmanteau; see the Page on this blog).

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Posted in Actors, Holidays, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Shirtlessness, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »

Revisiting 38: More male beauty

November 25, 2019

A return to the subject of my 3/10/16 posting “Male beauty”, on cultural categorizations of attractiveness and masculinity, primarily as evidenced in facial characteristics. Adding to the mix (a) yesterday’s posting on my man Jacques Transue as a young “dreamboat” (“Him, 55 years ago”); and (b) repeated passing references here to the Clint Eastwood of the tv series Rawhide (1959-66) as “young and beautiful, but ruggedly handsome”.

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Posted in Actors, Categorization and Labeling, Facial expressions, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Photography, Shirtlessness | 1 Comment »

A man, his hands, his pants

October 5, 2019

(That’s AmE pants, roughly equivalent to BrE trousers. This posting is about men’s clothing and men’s bodies and gets fairly racy — it starts with a guy with his hands in his pants and sex on his mind — so some readers might want to exercise caution.)

So you’re a straight white guy, from North America or some place culturally similar. A photographer wants to take your picture. How do you pose your body? In particular, what do you do with your hands? More generally, what do you do with your hands when they’re not actually involved in your current activity? Then, what role do your lower garments — trousers, shorts, maybe underpants — play in the placement of your hands? And what, if anything, does your choice of placement signify?

So: adventures in hand-pants (or manual-bracal) kinesics.

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Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Gesture, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Masculinity, Metonymy, Movies and tv, Shirtlessness, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

Musclemen from Mars

September 29, 2019

(There will be rampant male shirtlessness. Just a friendly warning, or an invitation, depending on your tastes.)

It’s a Zippy strip (today’s!). It’s another gender note (about masculinity). It’s yet another shirtless posting (shirtlessness as a prime masculinity display, in fact.) It’s about umliterature (physique magazines, in particular). And about camp (Flash Gordon). And of course, since the arousing shirtless campy musclemen are from Mars (or possibly Mongo), about SF. And finally, tucked in there inconspicuously in the last panel is an antique Griffithian self-referential surprise (from 1973):

(#1)

Male superheroes are extravagant embodiments of masculinity: they are, to start with, embodiments of great human power (conventionally associated with men), and then they have superhuman powers beyond that; their costumes are designed to encase their bodies, but tightly, so as to suggest, reveal, or exaggerate every bit of gendered anatomy (the broad shoulders, the musculature of the arms, torso, and thighs, and the genital package). (Beyond the powers and the costumes, there are the conventionally hyper-masculine faces.)

The strip begins with superheroes on this planet, but it ends, in the lower right corner, with (hunky) superheroes in space — “Musclemen from Mars” is what the Dingburgers are reading — and it turns out that space-traveling superheroes (as exemplified by Flash Gordon) are given to frequent bouts of shirtlessness (mostly while performing their feats of manly derring-do, but sometimes during the virtually obligatory shirtless torture scenes).

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Posted in Costumes, Gay porn, Homosexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, My life, Shirtlessness, Signs and symbols, Spelling | Leave a Comment »

The hollow

September 18, 2019

In a comment on my 9/14/19 posting “Clavicular knobs” (aka Ricardo’s acromia), Robert Coren writes about “the hollow space above the inner end of the collar-bone”, and I confess to not knowing a name for it. Roger Phillips (in England) fills in:

It’s not in Merriam-Webster, but all my British dictionaries have “saltcellar” for the collarbone pit. The first OED citation is:

[1870 O. Logan Before Footlights 26] I was a child of the most uninteresting age..a tall scraggy girl, with red elbows, and salt cellars at my collar-bones, which were always exposed, for fashion at that time made girls of this age uncover neck and arms.

The item has a complex social and cultural distribution, but knowing this much eventually led me to the technical term from anatomy: the suprasternal, or jugular, notch. Sometimes referred to in ordinary language as the hollow of the neck or the neck hollow.

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Posted in Dialects, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Names, Shirtlessness, Technical and ordinary language, Variation | 3 Comments »

Oh Canada baby, ripple my maple leaves!

July 1, 2019

Today is Canada Day, Canada’s national day, celebrated in many ways, perhaps most remarkably in this display of national pride — “hot shirtless muscle jocks in Canadian themed pants”, according to one of the many Pinterest sites on which it’s reproduced — which came to me from Tim Evanson, who thought that they might be a Canadian sports team of some kind (they certainly are fit):


(#1) The Canadian Thunder team: Bobby Ryan, Carlo Spina, Michael Scratch, Daniel Bennato, Vince Johansson and Malcolm Foster

Yes, a team, and yes, certified Canadians (I’d feared they’d turn out to be American male models hired for the photo, but, gratifyingly, not), and the men are no doubt accomplished athletes, but they aren’t a sports team.

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Posted in Dance, Language and the body, Movies and tv, Shirtlessness, Signs and symbols | 2 Comments »

The Magnificent WaterSports

June 19, 2019

(Men’s bodies and mansex, not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

In the Daily Jocks mailing yesterday, this heavily sexualized ad for WaterShorts swimwear (in black, aqua, lime, and coral), the first swimwear from the premium homowear company PUMP! (an old acquaintance on this blog) — with a caption of mine in run-on free verse:


(#1) The Magnficent WaterSports

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Posted in Captions, Gender and sexuality, Language of sex, Movies and television, Phallicity, Shirtlessness, Signs and symbols, Underwear | 2 Comments »

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