From the latest issue of the New Yorker (for 4/26 & 5/3 2021), two cartoons (by Benjamin Schwartz and Zach Kanin) that qualify the magazine to be, not only the Technology Issue, but also the Size Issue: body size in the Schwartz, penis size in the Kanin.
Archive for the ‘Language and the body’ Category
Size cartoons
April 23, 2021Hot Jock Crop Top
April 14, 2021A lightning posting of today’s Daily Jocks ad, for the sake of the half-rhyming title (conveying ‘a crop top for a hot jock’), plus of course the hot hunk displaying his body seductively:
CROP TOPS
At [Daily Jocks] we are always on the lookout for what’s trending for men in all things underwear, activewear and fetishwear, like crop tops.
Wait! Are crop tops for men making a comeback? They never went away, shop our range of crop tops from Varsity …
Tramp stamps
March 30, 2021and odalisques (with their erotic lumbar regions, aka lower backs) and rhyming disparagements (like tramp stamp and slag tag). It starts with the Zits comic strip of 3/26:
(#1) The rhyming (and disparaging) idiom tramp stamp had passed by in the fringes of my consciousness, but this strip foregrounds it
The history of humor
March 22, 2021… with a note on fart jokes.
Another Tom Gauld cartoon from his collection Baking With Kafka:
(Note British spellings.)
A jointed-limb portmanteau and a sugary front-clipping
March 18, 2021Two 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:
Pornstars do this so you don’t have to
March 13, 2021(All about sex between men, discussed mostly in street language, so totally unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)
It started with a mailing yesterday from the NakedSword gay porn folks, advertising the 2021 flick Lake Need, with a reproduction of the DVD cover, on which Johnny Rapid, Jesse Bolton, and Cyrus Stack together perform a complex sex act (69spitroasting) that requires considerable athleticism and agility. The three men carry it off as an aesthetically satisfying arrangement of bodies — until you think about whether you could do it yourself, and realize that this is something much better left to the professionals.
That led me back to an earlier period of Johnny Rapid’s porn career, which included a flick in which he engaged in an equally challenging two-man sex act (Flying Cowboy) with Rafael Alencar, an act that’s both beautiful to look at and deeply intimate, tremendously sexy. But it’s really not something to try at home — again, it’s much better left to the pros.
I put the two images together in an AZBlogX posting “Johnny Rapid” today, which led one of my LiveJournal readers to judge that:
The positions assumed in both of those photos look uncomfortable to the point of impossible.
Well, yes, but that’s what we pay Johnny Rapid and his brothers in porn for. They do it — they realize physically challenging sexual fantasies — so we don’t have to.
No-name joints
March 6, 2021Two mornings ago, I awoke feeling generally good and energetic, but very painfully afflicted by osteoarthritis, in both shoulders and both elbows and both wrists and all the joints of both hands — but worse in my already damaged right hand, and especially in its middle (and otherwise least damaged) finger, and especially in the top joint of that finger, just under the fingernail, which was swollen and reddening. Swollen so much I couldn’t straighten it out.
Then, while I was getting my first mug of tea, an operation that requires holding a mug under a spout as it fills with very hot water, I realized, simultaneously, that I was incapable of holding onto the mug as it filled and so was about to drop the whole thing on the floor (I immediately set it down and switched to doing everything with my left hand, which was agonizing but achievable); and that I had no ordinary name, or even a fancy anatomical term, for that swollen and screamingly painful joint on my right hand. I had a description — “the top joint of that finger, just under the fingernail” — but no name; in fact, I had no name for any of the hand joints other than those at the base of the fingers: the knuckles, in my usage.
It was somewhat worse yesterday, though I could use a mouse and type, cautiously, with my right index finger. I took a photo, using my iPad — a minimal instrument, and very hard to manage for using an afflicted left hand to shoot a worse-afflicted right hand. Not a triumph of the photographer’s art, and better at showing some of the devastation of ulnar nerve damage (the useless, permanently contracted little finger, the pit of vanished muscle between my thumb and index finger) than the terribly swollen joint on my middle finger:
Three remarkably named men’s fragrances
February 20, 2021First, to announce a new Page on this blog listing my postings about men’s fragrance. Then, to continue some recent postings on notable names for men’s fragrances, a look at Fucking Fabulous and two nomenclatural celebrations of testosterone, Testosterone Original Fragrance Paris and Testostérone (from Zurich).
Cologne tease
January 30, 2021Having recently posted on colognes / men’s fragrances (especially those with homoerotic ad campaigns), I’ve been inundated with offers for more colognes along these lines. Today’s haul included some remarkable cock tease advertising for the fragrance Fierce, from Abercrombie & Fitch.
(Given the subject, this posting isn’t recommended for kids or the sexually modest.)
The sexual essence of a jockstrap
January 29, 2021(Very much about men’s bodies as sexual objects, so clearly not for everyone.)
Today’s Daily Jocks sale ad, carefully posed and quite steamily direct, also with an anatomical feature I don’t recall having seen in real life: a blood vessel running down the outside of the model’s leg, quite prominently visible on the surface of his leg (presumably because the model has so little bodyfat to conceal it):