For 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).
Archive for the ‘Mammoths’ Category
Three greetings for 9/6/22
September 6, 2022Eat Your Woolly Mammoths!
August 27, 2022I was in the middle of singing along (at home, by Zoom) to the Palo Alto All-Day Sacred Harp Singing (10-4 today), when the following appeared on my screen, representing a fellow electronic participant:
(#1) Image identified as belonging to James Solheim, who I happened to know was actually singing along from Omaha NE, using technology much cooler than Zoom
But whoa! Is this a slogan? Is it a thing? I appreciated that it was surely intended as an exhortation to ingestion, not fellation. But still… The woolly mammoth is my chief totem animal, and Woo(l)ly Mammoth is one of my pseudonyms; I am W M, I am. And I take these things personally.
As it happens, I’ve met Solheim, who sang with the local Harpers a while back, when he was visiting his daughter Jenny, who’s a recent addition to the set of local singers (more on her below). But I had no idea what he did for a living. Turns out he’s an artist and an author, specializing in books for kids. Of which Eat Your Woolly Mammoths! is one.
Woolly mammoths in Birkenstocks
May 27, 2022Knowing that the woolly mammoth is my primary totem animal, Anneli Meyer Korn has pointed me to this little slice of the University District in Seattle:
(#1) The Woolly Mammoth shoe store, 4303 University Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105: “Comfortable, high quality, good-looking shoes and excellent customer service”
And from Wikipedia, on the excellent qualities of Mammuthus primigenius, the original woolly mammoth:
The woolly mammoth coexisted with early humans, who used its bones and tusks for making art, tools, and dwellings, and hunted the species for food.
M. primigenius provided humans with comfort, offering up its huge bones to form into shelter, and beauty, in ivory carvings. Plus useful tools and life-sustaining meat. The Woolly Mammoth store’s shoes provide comfort and good looks, but can they be used as needles or stave off hunger? I thought not.
Still, those are damn fine shoes. Especially the Birkenstocks:
Epitaph for a mammoth
March 8, 2022… and the ferocity of gatherers. In the heat of the moment, it all came down to:
IT WAS IN THE WAY
The Sunday (and so landscape rather than portrait, also Piraro-only) Bizarro from 2/26, posted here for International Women’s Day, 3/8:
(#1) Mammoths, hunter-gatherers, and the power of women (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are, omigod, 13 in this strip — see this Page.)
Apparently, she took the mammoth down with a sharp stick, something she was perhaps gathering as firewood. Wow. Don’t mess with Bess.
Items of gay decor
September 15, 2021(References to penises but no depictions of them , even (alas) on plastic action figures. On the other hand, there’s a neon pink dildo, so readers might want to exercise their judgment.)
My neon pink DJX Trough jockstrap (in size L) has arrived from the antipodes (the company is in Australia, but the jock was shipped from New Zealand) and been installed in its place as an item of decor in my living room. Meanwhile, my new Lollicock neon pink dildo has come to rest on the desk in my bedroom; it has become a Desk Dildo. And I am finally releasing a portrait of three gay action figures and their three companion mammoths, engaged in a ritual celebration under the blazing bedroom sun (on what I still think of as Jacques’s dresser, even though it’s the one I use in daily life — the dresser on which J once erected a small shrine to Mark Wahlberg in his (Marky Mark’s, not J’s) Calvins).
Anyway, it’s all dick-heavy (on the scene and even in reminiscence), though there are no discernible actual dicks.
A mammoth revival
April 19, 2021Well, yes, it’s a big thing, or will be if it works, but the story here is about a proposal to revive — de-extinct seems to be the technical term — the woolly mammoth, à la Jurassic Park.
Dinosaurs, no; see the scientist in this wry cartoon by Tom Gauld (originally from New Scientist, then reprinted in You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack and in Department of Mind-Blowing Theories):
(#1)
But woolly mammoths, sort of and maybe. And on that there’s recent news from Harvard (where is Tom Lehrer when we need him?).
I thought of you
April 4, 2021Back on 3/16, I was honored by not one, but two, Facebook postings on the theme “this made me think of you”.
From Michael Palmer, a flyer for the 1897 mammoth opening of the swimming season at the Sutro Baths in San Francisco (MP: for “Arnold Zwicky, because mammoth”, alluding to my attachment to creatures of the genus Mammuthus).
And from Livia Polanyi (alert to my writing on gender and sexuality), 1940 gender adventures in Dallas: hunky male car hops in shorts and cowboy boots.
Welcome back gifts
December 9, 2020An assemblage of recent appreciative gifts, mostly collected in this photo:
(#1) Objects of appreciation (in front of a wall mostly devoted to William Haefeli gay-themed cartoons from the New Yorker)
I do not disguise the fact that this photo is in part a demonstration of my mastering (slowly but successfully) yet another skill in posting to my blog: taking photos with my iPad, sending them to my Stanford account, and editing them there for publication. (As an example of the photographer’s art, it’s not much, but the point is that I can do it at all.)
Two woolly mammoths
October 17, 2020On Facebook early in this month, two woolly mammoths for my pleasure — one stuffed, one of ivory.
The images quilt
December 15, 2019The last in a set of four; the linguistics quilt, from the 19th, is its predecessor. As before, a 12-panel composition (roughly 6 x 3 ft) made of old t-shirts of mine, assembled into a quilt by Janet Salsman, with the collaboration of Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky and Kim Darnell (and photos by Kim). This time, t-shirts with images that have pleased or entertained me:
(#1)
Now the 12 panels individually, by row (R) and column (C).