đĄÂ đ 4/23 St. George’s Day, celebrating the dragon-slaying patron saint of England, who (according to tradition) died on this day in the year 303 — the most martial of the British fab four (David, Andrew, George, and Patrick); meanwhile, thanks to Ann Burlingham, today I also celebrate the superb fairy wren, a colorful little bird of southeastern Australia
The little bird first, then the sword-wielding saint of legend.
[I wrote this while watching Cory Booker speak on the floor of the US Senate for a record of over 25 hours straight, passionately speaking against the wickedness of the president and his sidekick and in favor of (among other things) diversity, equity, and inclusion; calling repeatedly on my hero John Lewis; and cleansing the nastiness of the previous record-holder, Strom Thurmond, who was filibustering against the Voting Rights Act of 1957. I wept, I cheered, I was moved to hope, at least for a few moments.]
Two triggers for this posting:
— the Zippy strip for 9/30 (so, something close to hot news) in which Zippy and Zerbina reminisce about their fabulous vacation at the Diet of Worms in 1521 (yes, Martin Luther is involved)
— 2022 e-mail from my old friend and linguistics colleague Elizabeth Closs Traugott (who’s a year older than I am but in vastly better shape), about a trip for pleasure she was about to take to (the) Pinnacles, south of here, which reminded me of a similar trip my guy Jacques made years ago. Which then took me to a vacation J and I took together. (Yes, this topic has been simmering on my desktop for three years; I have a prodigious backlog.)
My grandchild Opal Eleanor Armstrong Zwicky was born 3/4/04, so they’re 21 years old today, 3/4/25 — the final legal hurdle to adulthood in my country  — and, wonderful coincidence, today is Mardi Gras (Shrove Tuesday, Fat Tuesday, the last day of Carnival, etc.), so we should be tossing them a string of opals. I suggest something along these lines:
(#1) A blue Australian opal necklace (with an electroformed copper chain), jewelry by Anaika from Etsy (US$50)
Unus pro omnibus
Omnes pro uno
This display came by me on my Facebook feed this morning; as a grandson of Switzerland I found it offensive (and, by the way, inaccurate):
(#1)Â From the Holy Roman Empire Association, the coats of arms of “European Kingdoms, Duchies and Principalities in 1519”
Switzerland is a confederation, with no ruler — not king nor duke nor prince — and has been (with occasional hiccups) since its founding in 1291. Like the Friends / Quakers, it is (in principle) radically egalitarian, as am I personally (though I concede that every person, and every human institution, is imperfect, flawed; but that’s a core principle of radical egalitarianism).
(saintly male bodies seen through worldly eyes and treated in sometimes very plain talk, so not to everyone’s taste)
From Susan Benson Hamel yesterday:
Thought of you yesterday when I was in the Auckland art gallery and came across this delightfully coy St Sebastian by Guido Reni:
(#1) There are an astonishing number of St. Sebastians out there; this Reni really is wonderful (I said to SBH), in its dreamy gaze welcoming death, and all done with a single mortal arrow (plus, Reni dwells lovingly on the saint’s body, giving what many have seen as a homoerotic cast to the painting; and his private parts are just barely concealed, as in a cock tease)
đ đ đ tiger tiger tiger for ultimate December; it’s New Year’s Eve, so tomorrow’s rabbits will accompany the enfant terrible 2025, while my end-of-the-year e-mail brings me two male nudes, of very different resonances, to ride the wild tigers of 2024 off
First, on the soc-motss private group on Facebook on 12/26, for Hanukkah, a piece of digital art by Vadim Temkin that’s a playful sexual tease, like the Warwick Rowers calendar photos. Then, a male nude sculpture, in the Western tradition of heroic statuary, exhibited very publicly (in a prominent location on a college campus).
The 12 days of Christmas click by as we advance to Twelfth Night — Epiphany Eve — and then on 1/6 to Epiphany itself, the day of the Three Magi, or Three Kings, conventionally each the king of a distant land, each with a characteristic appearance, each with a name, and each with his gift for the Christ Child in Bethlehem. In one tradition, Melchior (alongside Caspar / Kaspar and Balthazar) is King of Persia, the oldest of the kings (a graybeard), and the giver of gold (rather than frankincense or myrrh).
The thing is, I am Arnold Melchior Zwicky, son of Arnold Melchior Zwicky and grandson of Melchior Arnold Zwicky, the last of whom, oh yes, had brothers named Kaspar and Balthazar. I have the name, the age and the gray beard, but lack the kingdom and the gold. Yet for a brief period in January each year, I am Melchior as well as Arnold, I am resplendent, I am a king.
For this period, I rise above the fact that in my country all three parts of my name are seen as strange and foreign, none more than Melchior (for the rest of the year, when I have to clarify my middle initial, I say “M as in Michael”, leading many people to think that my middle name is in fact Michael, so they could call me Mike). Only this year did it occur to me that I should add Michael / Mike to my alter ego’s name Alexander / Alex Adams: ALEXANDER MICHAEL ADAMS, the weighty A. M. Adams, the amiable Alex “Mike” Adams, hookup name Alex, just Alex.
Now, two things. First , an alternative view of the royal Melchior, from a 2022 posting in which he’s depicted as, wow, not only young and virile but also as the (mythic) king of France. And then another 2022 posting that starts out being about okapis and somehow ends up with “M as in musk ox” for my middle initial (plus “O as in okapi” for the O of ARNOLD).
Meanwhile, Epiphany is coming and my royal robes need fluffing.
Steven Levine on Facebook yesterday, contemplating Poussin’s The Adoration of the Golden Calf (1633-34) at the National Gallery in London:
(#1) [SL:] Those golden idol worshipping Israelites were pretty hot. I didnât learn this in Hebrew school
Note: Poussin’s canvases are mostly huge — far too large to be appreciated properly in reproductions like the ones I’m giving you — and sprawling, crowded with characters (voluptuous women and studly men plus, where appropriate, adorable cherubs) in motion in an assortment of encounters, the whole scene illustrating some biblical or mythological theme, set in a wild natural landscape under a dramatic sky. (The celebration of the picturesque famously characterizes the Romantic movement in the arts, but in Poussin it flourished in the Baroque.)
Now: notes on Poussin; then on his religious painting on the Golden Calf theme in #1; then on to a mythological painting, Acis and Galatea; to a mythological painting in which six different encounters on a single theme (metamorphosis into a flower) are gathered together: The Empire of Flora; and, finally, to a mythological painting focused on sheer physicality:Â Bacchanale.
Then I will digress to Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, evoked for me by Poussin’s character-packed canvases. Then from Poussin’s surname, I drift to the tasty French dish poussin, and from this young chicken (typically roasted), I drift further to other chickens, young men considered as desirable sexual objects. Which brings us back to those steamy Israelites worshipping the Golden Calf. It’s the curse — or gift — of the associative mind.
Encountered on Pinterest on 10/28, in a collection of mostly homoerotic images — Pinterest strives to cater to your interests, and mine aren’t hard to suss out — this painting, identified as being an early 19th-century work by Russian painter Alexander Ivanov (an artist completely unknown to me):
(#1) My first response was that the painting was truly creepy, looking to modern eyes like high-class kiddie porn: a beautiful young man (wearing a laurel wreath, therefore noble or divine), naked but with drapery over his lower body (his gaze fixed dreamily on something in the middle distance), embracing a totally naked young teenage boy (whose eyes are closed, apparently in enjoyment), while another fully naked boy, considerably younger, plays a wind instrument (apparently an aulos, an ancient Greek double-reed) for his companions’ pleasure; a lyre hangs from a tree in the background
A gauzily Romantic painting, set in a rough scenic wilderness, apparently of some classical or mythological subject in which music plays a significant role. Ok, so the beautiful young man is probably the god Apollo, famously skilled at the lyre (bonus: by far my favorite of the pantheon of ancient Greece and Rome). In this painting as the god of music and also the protector of the young. The boys are naked because they are true pre-pubertal innocents. Or just because the scene is set in the Arcadian wilderness, suffused with divine presence, a territory in which the gods and those within their aura have no need for the garb of ordinary mortals. Well, certainly not in artworks; consider the famous Apollo of the Belvedere  statue (my 9/23/24 posting “Godlike beauty” has a section on the Belvedere Apollo and his full-frontal divinity).
So I tracked down #1: it’s Alexander Ivanov’s Apollo, Hyacinthus and Cyparissus making music and singing (painted during 1831-34), which I’ll call AH&C for short. At this point, things just got puzzling. The Russian painter Ivanov (1806-58) was new to me; he turns out to have a remarkable life history (summarized below). And then there’s the scene in #1.
Today’s Zippy strip displays our Pinhead’s onomatomania, as he chants CAR WASH HOT DOG over and over, to his evident pleasure. I was entertained by the notion of a car wash hot dog, which struck me as ludicrous, conjuring up the image of sodden, sudsy frankfurters in buns:
(#1) But then I remembered that Zippy’s obsessively reiterated chants are never sheer inventions on his part, but are always found mantras, so car wash hot dogs must be a real thing — and so they are, on the understanding  ‘hot dogs at a car wash, hot dogs with a car wash, hot dogs and a car wash’, or, as they are sometimes advertised, car wash / hot dog sales
This was all news to me; I didn’t recall ever having heard of selling a car wash along with hot dogs and didn’t think the two things were a natural pairing. But there they were, lots of them, car wash / hot dog sales for very local causes.
Why had I never heard of them? Because they are not just an American thing (unknown in the UK, Australia, and so on, even in Canada), but a very specific regional American thing, apparently confined to a narrow band of the southeastern US, from Florida to West Virginia. (Zippy’s Dingburg is in Maryland, which is, with West Virginia, at the very northern edge of this band). I have lived in the middle Atlantic, New England, mid-America, and California, but not in the southeast, and so I missed out on C. W. H. D. (as Bill Griffith’s title for #1 has it).
