Today’s Zippy reflects on a bit of culture — a fascination with deformed and otherwise outrageous human beings — name-checks Lady Gaga, Anderson Cooper, and (indirectly) the current residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington — and exploits the ambiguity of the compound freak show:
(#1) At the menagerie / side show
Noted in front of 325 Forest Ave. in Palo Alto, a small hedge of Salvia microphylla (small-leaved sage) ‘Hot Lips’ in bloom — covered in small labiate flowers, some bicolor, some all red, some all white, as in this photo from the net:
(#1)
Small-leaved (hence the species name microphylla), intensely scented, fashioned into a hedge. A pleasant plant, which it turns out was created by hybridization fairly recently.
Background: I’ve been a bit short of breath for some time, but with stretches of phenomenally hot days (starting back on a day in May when it was 110 F in downtown Palo Alto), things got dramatically worse. The nephrologist at first thought it might be connected to my reduced kidney function (there’s a complex story of possible connections there), and then the cardiologist was quite sure the problem was with my heart, probably the coronary arteries, and ordered up a series of scans and tests. (I’ve endured a great deal of doctoring, with lots more to come: cataract surgery starts on the 27th.)
In there were heart CT scans, which showed nothing that would explain my shortness of breath. Nobody was particularly concerned about my lungs, however, since they sounded so great on stethoscopic examination. But a chest CT scan, done on August 29th, however, showed two things:
Calcified granuloma in the right lower lobe. Areas of subsegmental atelectasis, especially right lower lobe.
I will explain. In any case: spirometry and a pulmonologist’s appointment on the 25th.
Juan came by on Friday to replace the left fan in my laptop (it had reached airplane takeoff mode) and bring me small birthday presents: some mini-cheesecakes from Whole Foods (one berry, one espresso), an excellent but hard to pronounce houseplant, and a visit to the Gamble Garden to view ranks of gauzy late summer and autumn plants in bloom.
The computer repair took only a few minutes — I am now enjoying the silence of the fans — so I’ll focus here on the vegetative side of things: the birthday plant, a spathipyllum (say that three times fast!); and those seasonal flowers, which are gauzy only to a cataractive guy like me (but the Monet impressionist-garden effect is actually quite pleasing, one of the very few positive consequences of gradual vision loss).
Underwear ads again (from today’s Daily Jocks sale), with captions from me. Men’s bodies, mansex allusions, not for everyone.
(#1) Sweat with me, baby
Solid Chet the gym jock
Sweats hard
Lick the salt he’ll
Towel you off
(#2) Lowriders on the storm
Lean Bo the surf jock
Goes low pull him
Lower use your
Teeth those trunks are
Made for cruising
Sweaty Chet and lowball Bo.
Passed on to me by Arne Adolfsen, this vintage ad (from the 1940s, for what was then the Visking Corp.):
(#1)
Skinless wiener is pretty much immediately risible, because it’s bound to bring circumcision to mind.
(Men’s underwear and bodies, taking off from a recent Daily Jocks ad for the Marcuse company. With a caption of mine. Somewhat racy, but not crude. And there will be cartoons.)
(#1)
Capitulum in corpore magno
A hard man —
An erection lasting more than four hours –
But fair —
Requires immediate medical attention –
A pinhead with
Broad shoulders
Earlier today, the posting “I sing the body elastic”, about Mikey Bustos’s parodic hymn to Speedos, the skimpy elastic men’s swim suits — with a title playing on “I Sing the Body Electric”, a poem from Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass, celebrating the human body. Beginning:
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
(Men’s bodies, underwear, snarky captions, and some slang.)
A recent offer from Daily Jocks, SUP BRO t-shirts from the Australian company Supawear:
(#1)
That’s my shirt bro
It comes from A U
I’m Buster Brown
Look for me down there too
