The Gary Larson Far Side cartoon of 12/27/82, posted on Facebook on 11/4 by Evan Randall Smith because it spoke to him:
Caveman enthusiastically taking a deeply grumpy mammoth for a walk; mammoths are not notably biddable creatures
Archive for the ‘Mammoths’ Category
Mammoth walkies
November 5, 2025
Events of the day
August 30, 2025🪛🔧🔨 penultimate August and (US) Labor Saturday; looking ahead, I see that Labor Day in 1940 was 9/2, but I wasn’t born until 9/6, so that was a long labor; meanwhile, from Benita Bendon Campbell today, an early birthday greeting to me:
The mammoth, the orchid, and the penguin, the emblems of my land, a BBC confection celebrating (as Bonnie observed) a friendship going back about 66 years
Meanwhile, these are birthday days for survivors from those days: Ellen Sulkis James (also going back ca. 66 years, to the Reading Eagle newspaper), who is 85 today; BBC (from Princeton), who is 89 tomorrow; and then, eventually, me.
Volcanic verse
September 10, 2024Well, silliness provoked by my getting, yesterday, this excellent fortune cookie fortune:
You will be awarded
some great honor
Which I was then able to combine with a postcard from Ann Burlingham (sent on 3/4/24), showing, of course, a volcano — Frederic Church’s 1862 painting of Cotopaxi in Ecuador — adding the requisite woolly mammoths (on a US postage stamp), flanking the fortune, to complete the composition:
For which I have supplied some verse, filched from Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855), with its famously jogging trochaic tetrameter:
Bobblehead Dick
September 8, 2024(Well, yes, a birthday penis for me to enjoy, so this posting isn’t suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
This year’s birthday card for me from my old friend Vadim Temkin (old friend, but one generation younger than me), a digital artist whose work has often been featured on this blog — playful, clever, homosexy, and with a style of its own. He creates well-designed characters that don’t pretend to fool the eye, but live in a parallel reality — in the case of this year’s card, what looks like a world of slickly made plastic figures, from which comes the smiling Dick, who is completely naked except for a white collar and black bow tie where his rather large head attaches to his body, giving him the appearance of a bobblehead doll. (I don’t think Bobblehead Dick was Vadim’s intention, but it’s what I see, so I’m going with it.)
Meanwhile, his penis is on display, except that it’s awkwardly attached to his body; I’ve had to fuzz it out for WordPress modesty, but it’s an imperfection in the figure, and an annoying one, because of course the bobblehead’s penis — Bobblehead Dick’s dick — was a significant part of Vadim’s gift to me. Among other things:
Timeless fashion for all seasons
August 12, 2024For all seasons, Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky wrote me a little while back, in recommending a Wooly Mammoth fashion plate (in wool) from the “Autumn / Winter 300,000 years ago collection” by Ruby (rubyetc_) on Instagram (where she identifies herself as “lllustrator, artist, big silly”); Ruby’s full set of mammothwear:
In wool, but also in linen, latex, and tulle (fashions for all tastes)
From NOAD:
adj. woolly (US also wooly): 1 [a] made of wool: a red woolly hat. [b] (of an animal, plant, or part) bearing or naturally covered with wool or hair resembling wool: woolly gray-green foliage | the woolly aphid. [c] resembling wool in texture or appearance: woolly wisps of cloud. …
Hence the name of the (now-extinct) wool(l)y mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), which was covered in warm fur.
Q: What’s woolly, engorged, and good at scaffolding?
May 29, 2024for the antepenultimate day of May …
A: The Mammoth Erection company, providing scaffolding design and erection services, based in the northern Toronto suburb of Aurora ON. A genuine company that’s been around for several decades but was only this afternoon brought to my attention (on Facebook). My delighted attention, given that I’m a serious fan of both mammoths (of the woolly sort) and erections (of the penile sort).
One of the company’s enormous trucks, for transporting piles of scaffolding material:
(#1) The company name embraces a pun on the adjective mammoth ‘huge’, as you can see from the company logo in close-up:
An AZ icon?
March 30, 2024Thanks to a pointer from Jeff Bowles, this first panel from a Peanuts strip (dated by Charles Schulz as from 2/16/60), now a candidate for my on-line icon:
(#1) Schroeder at his toy piano, on which rests a somnolent Snoopy, emitting the cartoon Z of sleep (also the Zwicky initial); for further personal meaningfulness, I am a former pianist (still an enthusiast of the piano repertory), now an analyst of the comics (among other things)
Mammoth Drop, near Woolly Hole
January 9, 2024(Along the way, some direct talk in street language about man-on-man sex, so not for kids or the sexually modest)
On AZ’s Astounding Bookshelf, the remarkable Mammoth Drop: Murder, Mammoths, and Mimosas (Kea Wright Mysteries) by R. J. Corgan, independently published in 2022 in paperback and Kindle editions. An ad for the book (supplied to me on Facebook yesterday by Michael Palmer, with a link to the Amazon site for the book):
(#1) Obviously up my alley: as a fan of murder mysteries and a highly visible homo, with a woo(l)ly mammoth as my totem animal (MP has my number)
Street Life
May 21, 2023A just-installed photo gallery on the wall above the desk in the study of my condo. An addition to the visual density of the place, providing enjoyment for me, but also intended to absorb and please friends and visitors (I am a deeply sociable person, and I like to entertain, in several senses.)
About Street Life. A display of six sex-tinged (but not actually X-rated) photos of men on the street (from Samson McGee, who maintains a gigantic library of malesex photos for sale), each with a fortune from a fortune cookie. I have given them titles and ordered them below in a kind of natural progression; here with the fortunes:
— Soon Paid Off: street hustler, iconic and tough; All of your hard work will soon be paid off.
— Performance over Speed: street hustler, not at all toughened up yet; People forget how fast you did a job — but they remember how well you did it.
— Time Not Money: two sailors, possibly cruising, maybe even hustling; A friend asks only for your time and not money.
— Offer Affection and a Sea-going Hard-On: two sailors strolling, one with a hard-on; Love is being offered to you, be affectionate in return!
— Offer Affection and an Unbuttoned Hard-On: two guys talking on the street, one with a hard-on and his fly open; [once again] Love is being offered to you, be affectionate in return!
— Fish Sticks and Moose Knuckles: two guys talking on the street in front of a shop selling fish sticks (one sporting a tremendous moose-knuckle); Every wise man started out by asking many questions.
Once again, I would like to give you a photo of the display, but I have to wait until I can get someone to take a picture for me.
The visual density of my environment. First there are the books — in the big main room, the study, and the bedroom. Mostly a deeply random collection of things saved from the dispersal of my 40,000-volume professional library, though there are some coherent subcollections. But possibly worth scanning: I doubt that there’s anyone else in the world with this collection of titles, so you might find some surprises.
Then on almost every remaining horizontal surface, collections of objects — remarkable, pretty, funny, sexy, artfully made, full of affectionate associations. Gay symbols, penguins, mammoths, phallic symbols. In the heavily X-rated bedroom, representations of dicks, simulacra of dicks, creatures with bodyparts in the shape of dicks, and so on.
And on almost every available vertical surface, artworks, cartoons, collages, Zwicky images, postcards (men, animals, food, whatever), and photographs, both family photographs and hot guys. In the heavily X-rated bedroom, a huge assortment of my XXX-rated homoerotic comic collages.
Much here to amuse the eye and engage the mind. Come visit sometime.
Three greetings for 9/6/22
September 6, 2022For Woo(l)ly Mammoth’s #82: a fresh greeting formula, a morning hummer, and a fairy woodland bouquet. To which I’m adding some carrot cake and coffee ice cream: it’s not only my birthday, it’s also National Coffee Ice Cream Day, which I’m honoring all aslant (with coffee gelato), as I do so many things. To alter a family saying (If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly): If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing eccentrically (for other occasions: If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing outrageously).