Breaking news: from Susie “Brokeleg Mountain” Bright on Facebook, a re-play of this delicious Will McPhail New Yorker cartoon of 1/19/17 (the date is important):
On its first go-round, McPhail intended this cartoon as an allegory for the 2016 election of Grabpussy as POTUS 44; now in 2024, it works for him once more, with feeling, as POTUS 46
(There’s a Page on this blog about my postings on McPhail)
(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.
Posted to Facebook yesterday. I had been recalling Albert Camus’s play Caligula (adapted into English by Justin O’Brien), which I happened to see in February 1960, during its famously brief — one month long — run at the 54th Street Theatre in NYC — which led me to investigate Wikipedia’s long and intricate entry on
Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (31 August 12 – 24 January 41), better known by his nickname Caligula …, Roman emperor from AD 37 until his assassination in AD 41.
and then to write on FB:
Was just musing on TFG as the new Caligula (vengeful, unclear on the separation of his personal fortune and the state’s coffers, declaring himself a god, etc.) when I thought to look for parallel uses in the press. I bring you
the Daily Beast in 2011, Benjamin Netanyahu as the new Caligula; the Times (of London) in 2015, Jeremy Corbyn, the new Caligula; the Irish Times in 2016, [Helmut Grabpussy], the new Caligula?; POLITICO.eu in 2020, Boris Johnson the new Caligula
(there are probably more)
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).
Hana Filip (Professor of Semantics at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany, and a daughter of Moravia) reminds us on Facebook that today is Wencesla(u)s Day in the Czech Republic. St. Wenceslas Day is the feast day of the saint, commemorating his death in 935; and in 2000 also became a national public holiday, Statehood Day of the Czech Republic. The Duchy of Bohemia was founded in the 9th century; the Czech lands — Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia — were then integrated into the Holy Roman Empire and later the Austro-Hungarian Empire, emerging as part of the First Czechoslovak Republic in 1918, which was then peacefully dissolved into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1992 (yes, it’s complicated — well, the history stretches over 12 centuries and wars too many to count — but you can see why opting for the saint’s feast day as the national holiday makes some sense).
From the statue of Saint Wenceslas in Prague:
The statue in Wenceslaus Square (Flickr photo)
So reads a sign — a genuine sign, not an achievement of digital image-making — reproduced widely on Facebook in the past two days:
(#1) The sign at the Wiener Circle / Wieners Circle / Wiener’s Circle, 2622 N. Clark St., Chicago IL 60614; two things about it — its’s a joke, a pun dogs (short for hot dogs ‘frankfurters’) on dogs ‘domestic canines’; and it’s a piece of political mockery
A mockery of Grabpussy, in the US Presidential debates on 9/10, who cited as fact preposterous on-line rumor stories, among them that Haitian immigrants in Springfield OH are preying on people’s pets, eating their dogs and cats — thus painting immigrants as dangerous invaders, monstrous inhuman beasts.
Acres, folks, acres. Diamonds and dildos got covered in my 8/26 posting “Acres of dildos”. Then from Wendy Thrash on Facebook the next day, more acres that I probably should have talked about in the first place. WT wrote:
Sorry, but as an old Seattleite this forces me to think of Acres of Clams
and referred to a Folk Music Blog posting, “The Songs of Ivar Haglund” by Jacqui Sandor on 5/28/19. I was just going to post WT’s note as a comment on my posting here, but then it occurred to me that “Acres of Clams” might not be familiar to everyone, and even if you know about the folk song (a text climaxing in acres of clams, set to an old Irish jig tune), the note might not have transported your imagination to Seattle, or, indeed, to Ivar Haglund. It might just have been baffling.
So now I will take you into a gigantic morass of the folk song world — in which, however, shines the canonical “Acres of Clams” text, which ends up being about Puget Sound (where Seattle is located), where clams abound, and where there’s a seafood restaurant founded by folksinger Ivar Haglund named Ivar’s Acres of Clams. You see, it does hang together. (And, despite the previous dildos, the clams in question are — surprise! — not lady-parts, but edible bivalves.)
The morass is a consequence of the fact that an extraordinary number of texts have been set to that same jig tune — possibly more than to any other folk tune — and then both the tune and all those texts have been popularly known by names that are phrases from the texts (you’ll see a small sampling of these names in a moment). Even the canonical clam text (from about 150 years ago) is so popular that virtually every folksinger who performs it alters the text to fit their own interests, passions, aims, and politics.
To set the stage, from the HistoryLink site:
(#1) From “Ivar Haglund opens Ivar’s Acres of Clams at Pier 54 in July 1946” by David Wilma on 6/19/00
(Sadly, not suitable for kids or the sexually modest; kids, you’ll have to go to a pool hall in your local barrio — or some similar place — to learn to sling dirty Spanish vocabulary, ’cause I’m not supposed to corrupt you by teaching you about it)
This political yard sign, in mean-street Spanish, passed on by Monica Macaulay on Facebook, back on 7/24:
MM: OMG I want this sign for our yard! (the yard in question is in Madison WI, and MM shares it with Joe Salmons; professionally, they are linguists of some eminence, which is how I got to know them)
The text (just seven words):
Chinga tu MAGA pendejo ‘Fuck your MAGA idiot / asshole’
No mas Naranja ‘No more Orange Guy’
The first line alone is a compact masterpiece of everyday US Spanish vulgarity, with chinga … pendejo; and the whole thing conveys political slurs on the Orange Menace. Note: naranja is a (feminine) noun meaning ‘orange (the fruit)’, hence also a (masculine) noun meaning ‘orange (the color)’, hence also a masculine noun meaning ‘an orange(-colored) man’.
The sign writer failed to work culo ‘butt, ass’ or maricón ‘fag, fairy’ into the sign, but then you can’t do every fucking thing in seven words, gimme a break.
What must be done on this day, according to an adaptation of the cover for Uncle Sam: Special Election Edition, about the DC Comics character Uncle Sam, who is himself a dark and hallucinatory version of the American icon:
(#1) As modern Santa Claus goes (on Christmas Eve), so goes this incarnation of Uncle Sam (on Independence Day Eve) — though this Uncle Sam looks like he’d much prefer blood and flesh to milk and cookies
(Passed on by Tim Evanson this morning.)
