Today is the baleful day Friday the 13th, and in the Halloween season to boot, so the Michael Lucas gay porn film company has packaged a $13 membership offer featuring Friday the 13th‘s Jason, in his hockey mask, brandishing a tremendous meat-sword. A cropped version:
(#1)
(And other wingèd men.)
Yesterday was Michaelmas, devoted to Saint Michael the Archangel, a figure of great power and terrible beauty, who among other things lent his name to the gorgeous autumn-blooming aster commonly known as the Michaelmas daisy (see my 10/5/13 posting).
(Today on the calendar of religious holidays it’s Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. A very different thing.)
Angels and archangels are messengers of god, also protectors. As protectors, they can be either militant (usually masculine) or maternal (usually female); Michael, wielding his sword against the serpent / Satan, is definitely one of the militant band — but he can be portrayed either as a muscled hero (an Achilles or Ares figure) or as an ethereally beautiful young man doing holy battle (so a hybrid of Apollo and Ares, but Christian).
On the 8th, a posting about Ann Daingerfield Zwicky’s notebook of memorable meals at 63 W. Beaumont Rd. in Columbus OH from August 1969 (when we arrived in Columbus) through 1974. After that there are only a few scattered pages, including one in Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky’s hand that reports on the 1980, 1982, and 1983 versions of a long-standing household custom: making great piles of sweets (candies and cookies) for guests at Christmastime.
These three lists make for warm memories, but also sad ones, since 1983 was the end of the tradition. In December 1984, Ann was too close to death for there to be any kind of Xmas celebration. She died a few weeks later, in January, and the Ohio Christmases came to an end; Christmas 1985 was Jacques’s and my first one in California, in a new and different life.
As previously announced, today is my 77th birthday — my iridium, or rainbow, birthday (the element iridium, named after Iris, the goddess of the rainbow, has atomic number 77), better, as Ken Rudolph noted to me, than our 76th birthday, the trombone birthday (after the musical number “76 Trombones”, from the musical The Music Man). A hundred or so people from all parts of my life have wished me well in various ways — the electronic equivalent of companionable pats, and much appreciated. Also, some of them were funny.
(Talk of men’s bodies and mansex in very plain language, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Two holidays and anniversaries: yesterday, today, and tomorrow, the Labor Day weekend in the US (the unofficial end of summer, made dreadful this year in the Bay Area by relentless all-time record-breaking heat; today in Palo Alto is merely predicted to roughly tie the all-time record, which means that it’s billed as MUCH COOLER than yesterday); and then on Wednesday, my birthday, #77, bringing images of Ed “Kookie” Harris snapping his fingers on the Sunset Strip and of the rainbow element, atomic number 77, the metal iridium (named for Iris, the goddess of the rainbow).
So, yesterday, along with the escapist pleasures of binge-watching police procedural tv from several continents, my customary weekend gay porn break (a tonic for both body and soul). Specifically TitanMen’s Closed Set: Titan Stage One (from 2006), which I turned to because of a Falcon Studio Labor Day porn sale ad, with an actor in it who reminded me of sex puppy Cole Ryan (who figures prominently in Closed Set).
Yes, my mind takes many twisty turns.
Illustrators go to war:
(#1) Hoover Memorial Exhibit Pavilion, Stanford, 4/5/17 – 9/2/17
Visited on July 19th, with Juan Gomez. Extensive report follows.
The names for yesterday: Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden. The Urkantonen, or original cantons, of Switzerland:
(#1)
Yesterday, August 1st, was Swiss National Day.
Everybody’s got a Fourth of July sale going. Here’s the Daily Jocks entry, with my caption:
Twinkdependence Day
Put the package in stars,
Wrap the rump in stripes,
Fly it all on a pole.
