Falling together this year on 5/7: No Pants Day (the first Friday in May); and, now that you have your pants off, the way is smoothed for you to celebrate a May 7th event, Masturbation Day, if you have a mind to.
(#1) An appeal from Comics Kingdom (an on-line platform for King Features Syndicate), with Dennis the Menace as their spokescharacter for the occasion; note the usage in the name of the day — AmE pants, referring to outerwear, vs. BrE pants ‘underpants’
5/4 (yesterday; yes, I’m late, but I was without internet access for about six hours and couldn’t finish assembling the materials for this posting); and 5/9 (Ann Daingerfield (Zwicky)’s birthday, and, this year, Mother’s Day). About the occasions, but also about the dates as 54 Day and 59 Day — in the pages of the Sacred Harp.
It’s a new month, so: 🐇🐇🐇
In a moment I’ll reprise “rabbit, rabbit, rabbit” and other 5/1 associations in a posting from last year, but before that I’m going to suggest a new association: in the tradition of 3/14 as Pi(e) Day (from 3.14 as the value of pi / π) and 4/20 as Marijuana Day (from 420 as slang for smoking pot, or otherwise consuming cannabis), I suggest that 5/1 should be celebrated as Alien Encounter Day, in honor of Area 51 in Nevada. (There already is a World UFO Day, celebrated by some on 6/24, by others on 7/2.)
For Penguin Appreciation Day yesterday (4/25), the Half Moon Bay company (a UK firm offering themed merchandise: “Home to TV, Film and Popular Culture fans”) exhorted:
The only water bottle you need this #WorldPenguinDay…
Buy yours here: http://aard.mn/feathersbottle
(#1) The Feathers bottle, a metal water bottle modeled on the felonious penguin character Feathers McGraw from the Wallace and Gromit animated movie The Wrong Trousers
It’s St. George’s Day (honoring the patron saint of England, and a number of other places too); now Sandra Boynton notes that it’s also Shakespeare Day — traditionally celebrated as his birthday (in 1564), and clearly his death day (in 1616). For the Shakespearean occasion, she provides one of her visual puns:
2 bees oar not 2 bees: “To be, or not to be”
Two recent Wayno/Piraro Bizarro strips, from the 15th and (for St. Patrick’s Day) the 17th, both of linguistic interest: among other things, the portmanteau arthropodcast in the first; and the front-clipping ‘shmallows (for marshmallows, of the psychedelic sort) in the second:
(Yes, it’s going to be about dildos, specifically as used for anal pleasure, still more specifically as used for this purpose by gay men. So there will be talk, in plain language, about male bodyparts and sexual acts, both solo and between men. This posting is then not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
The Daily Jocks ad from yesterday (2/17) continues DJ’s exploration of sextoys for men (“Macho Toys”; see my 2/14 posting “Macho toys: the ads”). The mailer came under the header:
Would you take Jake home? 👨🏻
with the main text:
MEET JAKE – 8.5″ UNCUT
Have you ever tried an uncut dildo before? Neither had we until we found Jake. This super lifelike dildo is made from high grade body safe silicone, so real you will barely notice the difference.
Dildos in the form of uncut cocks have been on the market for a while, but what sets Jake apart is that his foreskin is flexible — apparently, a step forward in dildo technology. (Yes, there will be photos.)
(This posting is about (real or fictive) sexual encounters between men, sometimes discussed in street language, so it’s not for kids or the sexually modest.)
The Daily Jocks ad from 2/15, under the header:
(#1) With the motor boat emoji (there’s a ferry emoji that might have done the job here, with a bad pun as a bonus)
(This posting — with its depictions of and street-language descriptions of, sex between men — is totally unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
An ad, both very carefully and pleasingly composed and also goofily absurd, for the HUNT eZine gay porn sale for Valentine’s Day 2021, plays on movie clichés of tango or flamenco dancing, in which a red rose (symbolizing sexual passion) is held between the teeth of one of the dancers in a couple, most commonly the woman, but sometimes the man. (Note: roses, of whatever color, between the teeth play no role whatsoever in actual tango and flamenco.)
The ad shows two men who are fucking, not dancing, but the top (exhibiting a fiercely ecstatic facial expression) has a red rose clenched between his teeth, as a symbol of his overwhelming desire for the bottom (whose eyes are closed and whose mouth is half open, in receptive ecstasy):
Chacun à son goût on Valentine’s Day. Here’s cartoonist Lars Kenseth’s take on sentimental gift-giving among the baleen whales (from the 2/15&22/21 issue of the New Yorker):
A swarm of krill! How did you know?”
