We advance upon a surprising gift of the Pennsylvania Dutch to American culture: Groundhog Day (February 2nd). In earlier years, this blog provided coverage of Marmota monax (the groundhog / woodchuck), its holiday, and the comic movie, comic movie, comic movie. Now comes Alex (Alessandro Michelangelo) Jaker on Facebook:
I think that, the same way that the Easter Bunny visits and leaves candy [notably, chocolate eggs] and jelly beans at Easter time 🐰🍬🍫, we should start a tradition where, on Groundhog Day, the Friendly Groundhog stops by to visit during the night, and leaves the children a bag of nuts. 🐿🌰🥜
I replied (alas, emojilessly):
Even better: Marmo the Enchanted Groundhog, who leaves a bag of magic nuts.
(Lots of off-color jokes, some of them gay-inflected, along with a number of peanut cartoons. So: crude, and perhaps not to everyone’s taste.)
Today’s Rhymes With Orange — entertaining if you get the crucial pop culture allusion, incomprehensible if you don’t:
(#1) An elephant at the doctor’s office, with an x-ray showing the contents of his stomach to be a top hat, a monocle, and a cane; in the face of this evidence, the doctor asks the patient if he’s sure that all he ate was one peanut (presupposing that the patient has claimed just that)
How does this even make sense, much less be funny? Even granting the poploric association between elephants and peanuts — which is actually pretty baffling (see below) — why do peanuts come up in #1 at all? We have a trio of men’s accessories and no visible peanuts.
There’s a hint in the bonus commentary on the left: elephant to elephant, “It’s a medical Mister-y”, where the clue is Mister. But the clue is useless if you don’t know your way around the symbolic figures of American commerce.
(Not much linguistics, but there are penguins and mammoths.)
A late birthday present on Friday, wrapped in rainbow tissue paper:
(#1) From the Sock It To Me company in Portland OR: “Penguin Taking Flight” crew socks (artist: Tara Gildow)
The back story from the company:
Blue men’s crew socks featuring a steampunk penguin wearing headgear and a jet pack launching upwards
Tired of being mocked by other flying birds, this flightless penguin is taking matters into her own hands…err wings. Steamed she couldn’t fly, she built herself a marvelous flying contraption and finally took flight. Wear these magnificent penguin socks when you feel a little too earthbound and need to take things to the next level.
In today’s mail, a wonderful conjunction of two images: a vintage ad for Spangles (a classic British sweet, or candy), subject (in modern eyes) to an entire constellation of giggly racy interpretations; and a Daily Jocks ad (quite fairly labeled NSFW) for an item of fetishwear, a Locker Gear jockstrap with an open pouch for easy access. As it happens — surprise! — Spangles bring with them allusions to the adventures of the American screen cowboy Hopalong Cassidy and his young sidekick Lucky Jenkins.
You can see where this is going when all three elements are set in motion.
I’ll start with the Spangles ad, with its unintentional silly sexiness, and then (after a page break) go on to a male couple experiencing raw mutual enjoyment of the Locker Gear jock; the image and my accompanying caption are not suitable for kids or the sexually modest. (It’s the most sexually explicit, and dramatically hot, underwear ad I’ve come across so far.)
But first (hat tip to Tim Evanson): “Handily packed, delicious to eat, SPANGLES are the fruitiest sweet!”:
… provided by friends in a time of unspeakable violence, though neither is a totally unmixed pleasure: from Mike McKinley, the 1962 boys’ space adventure yarn Lost City of Uranus, just for the cheap but evergreen double entendre in its title; from Betsy Herrington, a link to the rainbow dreadhead stone lions of Monza, Italy, an admirable exercise in yarn bombing.
(#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).
My friend Aric was astonished yesterday to come across this food product:
Pork me: a classic presentation of faggots, in a brown gravy, accompanied by peas and mashed potatoes
No doubt he would find the following news bulletin (from Wikipedia) remarkable:
The “nose-to-tail eating” trend has resulted in greater demand for faggots in the 21st century.
Aric is American and gay, so of course pork faggots — being British and devoid of sexual associations (beyond those attending on any sort of meatball) — are neither familiar nor salient to him.
Brought back from Colorado by Kim Darnell, this flyer for the company:
(#1)
What the company does is make and sell jerky — beef, bufflo, pork, elk, venison, turkey, salmon (alligator too, I think, though that’s not in this flyer) — so that’s pretty much got to be in its name. And then Dillon CO (where the company is headquartered, in Summit County) is only about 40 mi from the, as it turns out, very aptly named Climax CO (in Lake County); the relevant sense of the noun climax is ‘apex, highest point’. But of course, they’re also playing with us. I mean, “Reach Your Peak”.
(Not suitable for Facebook, because double entendres and incidental naked men, but not actually X-rated. Mostly about food.)
Fruit cream tarts, one with pansy. Plus a little Echeveria plant. These are more birthday presents from the 6th, from Juan Gomez and the aging care company he works for (a big tart — not merely una tarta, but un tartone — plus the little succulent) and from Kim Darnell (a cute fruit cream tartlet with a pansy).
