… the slogan from a Funny Times magazine t-shirt ($30):
(#1) [FT‘s ad copy:] Embrace the sweet irony of this nostalgic candy-themed tee! It’s a Funny Times exclusive and perfect for thoughtful candy lovers
The model for the shirt:
(#2) A package of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups
Now, lots of background.
Reported on Facebook by a friend, who treated it as a display of real Amurrican values, this sign on an aisle in a US supermarket:
Aisle 11: a text culminating in Guns Bibles Sweatpants
As always, I wanted to know what store this came from and when, but the sign came to me as something just being passed around on the web, and nobody involved in such transmissions (of images or text or both together) has any interest in knowing where they come from, so it’s pointless to ask. Since such memic items are very often inventions, or involve doctored photos, I was suspicious of this one: too good to be true?
Some rooting around eventually brought me to the relevant fact-checking Snopes site, but not before I’d fashioned the climax of Aisle 11 into a parody song.
(Or, Quoth the Sperm Whale “Swimming Hole”)
From Rod Williams, commenting on Facebook on my 9/6 posting “Rowing on the River”, about a Thomas Eakins painting:
— RW: We [Ted Bush and Rod] have a print that quotes from Eakins’s “Swimming Hole”
(#1)
in an unusual and delightful way
(#2) The allusive work, by an unknown hand
Another brief posting. And yes, I am not dead yet, and my second breakfast — sriracha-spicy soy-salty Singapore-style rice noodles (which has shrimps and chunks of ham in it) with sliced mushrooms and a ton of chopped celery (wielding my excellent new kitchen angle knife!) in chicken broth — was yummy, and will make at least one more meal (several, if I decide to turn it into mostly-garbanzo soup, a sort of deranged Chinese posole).
Today’s Zippy strip finds our Pinhead musing poetically, à la Blake, on the symbolic potential of the diner:
It’s the initial quatrain of Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”, as seen from a vinyl-covered counter stool
The original:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
Very much a Mary, Queen of Scots, not dead yet posting — but in fact a wildly celebratory one. Explanations after the main event, in which eccentrically costumed (but neatly attired) enthusiastic young men have appeared at the front door to push their niche religious beliefs on the resident (who views them dubiously):
(#1) Offering the (good) word / the (good) news to the heathen — feel free to imagine the emphatic pronunciations that are often represented by initial caps on Good, Word, and News — in a goofy cross of dead-serious LDS evangelism and the jokey belief system of the Pastafarians (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
Today’s Mary, Queen of Scots, not-dead-yet cartoon (I’m alive!): today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro:
(#1) The two ingredients of this preposterous pun: It’s alive! and endive (punning on alive)
(all about men’s bodies and sex between men, in street language, so entirely not for kids and the sexually modest)
The social lives of Ruff Dudes, including fashion choices and sexual practices. Specifically, on Fuck Me socks and fuck machines. In the fulfillment of a promissory note from my 10/21/22 posting “Neon jocks”.
Every so often the accidents of the calendar bring together remarkably contrasting occasions. This is a day of such cognitive dissonance. Weep with me. Gasp in pleasure and delight with me.
First, today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp, in 1945, an event that serves as a symbol of the Holocaust — the Shoah — that wiped out around six million Jews (and a number of others) and caused untold suffering.
But then today is also the birthday of two people whose works have brought pleasure to millions: the astonishingly prolific composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (born in 1756) and the mathematician-turned-comic-writer Charles Lutwidge Dodson, who wrote the Alice books and a number of remarkable nonsense poems under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll (born in 1832).
Today’s Christmas card material (hat tip to Aric Olnes): identical-twin muscle-hunk sex-elves in seasonal costume, with some cookie-eating oral action as a bonus:
Twins Cory and Calvin Boling: TikTok stars, bodybuilders, fitness models, and trainers; born 10/18/97 in North Carolina, they advertise themselves on Instagram and Facebook as well as TikTok
Yes, indisputably homoerotic; I imagine them pole-dancing.
🐇 🐇 🐇 (NOVEM! NOVEM! N-O-V spells VON! Von who? No, No, that’s Doctor Von Who! Doctor Von Who’s on first? Doctor Von Who’s on first of November, oh god this is where we came in)
Bob Eckstein’s charming cartoon-trope cartoon (a new cartoon for Halloween this year @AltaJournal, also posted yesterday on Facebook along with a trick-or-treating story; and note that National Pumpkin Day went by on 10/26):
(#1) Three cartoon memes (I will no longer attempt to distinguish memes from tropes, given the extraordinary variation in the usage of the two terms): Sisyphus, Desert Island, Seeker and Seer
