In my comics feed for the day, this One Big Happy from 6/15, featuring a Dad Tall Tale, DTT for short (here an elaborate poetic burlesque):
(#1)
The original: Joyce Kilmer’s famous (and famously sentimental) poem “Trees” — also famously parodied, most notably in Ogden Nash’s “Song of the Open Road”.
An excellent line of dactylic tetrameter — Navy flamingos and roseate spoonbills — featuring two strikingly pink birds, and these birds on fancifully patterned men’s swimwear and shorts. Then a bonus item that’s not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.
We begin with yesterday’s Daily Jocks ad, for the Elia beachwear company:
(#1) A not entirely human apparition on the beach, a superreal PlasticMan hunk, staring down fixedly at his big (artificially enhanced) package and at the wonderfully playful pink flamingos on his navy-blue swim briefs (note the typo flip fops, which I’ll get to in the bonus section)
A postcard from Ann Burlingham back in March, from an exhibition at the Frick Museum in Pittsburgh, with this ghostly vision:
(#1) Nick Veasey’s Boxer Shorts (2008)
From Wikipedia:
Nick Veasey is a British photographer working primarily with images created from X-ray imaging. Some of his works are partial photomanipulations with Photoshop. He therefore works with digital artists to realise his creations.
Born in London in 1962, he worked in the advertising and design industries and pursued work in conventional still photography before being asked to X-ray a cola can for a television show. Veasey also X-rayed the shoes he was wearing on the day and upon showing the finished image to an art director was galvanised by the response it provoked.
(Mansex and raunchy sex talk; not for kids or the sexually modest)
Today’s mailer from the HUNT e-magazine (representing Falcon Studios and its associated gay porn brands):
(This is a new posting, intended as a reconstruction of and replacement for a “Catalectic trochaic tetrameter” posting of 3/1 that was somehow destroyed by WordPress, in such a way that if you try to access the posting under that name you are now automatically re-directed to my 3/1 “Guy gear” posting, which is intriguing but not the same thing at all. This “In the political news” posting quotes some sexual street talk but isn’t about men’s bodyparts or mansex, so I’m not warning anyone off. But it’s not all sunshine and roses.)
A Facebook dialogue from 2/29:
Gadi Niram: I don’t know what the deeper meaning might be here, but “Klobuchar and Buttigieg” has the same stress pattern as “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern”.
Arnold Zwicky: A line of catalectic trochaic tetrameter – SW SW SW S — incredibly common in folk verse of all kinds, and elsewhere. Including: “Lord what fools these mortals be”. Not to mention one reading of: “Captain of our fairy band”. And, from a recent posting of mine: “Lincoln Darwin Valentine”.
From my 2/13/19 posting “Captain of our fairy band”:
(#1) Captain of our fairy band: Lincoln Darwin Valentine (a double dose of CTT; note that double dose of CTT is itself CTT)
Today’s Zippy strip returns to the hypnotic pleasures of mantric repetition, a favorite theme of Bill Griffith’s:
(#1)
First, it’s parsed as
[ Cosmic Catnip ] [ alpine scratcher ] ‘alpine scratcher with Cosmic Catnip in it’
where Cosmic Catnip is a commercial brand of catnip and an alpine scratcher is a kind of slanted scratch toy for cats. Second, it is indeed a real thing. And third, the name is an excellent line of trochaic tetrameter, eminently usable as a meditative mantra when repeated, ideally at least three times.
Today’s Zippy, with Mr. Toad’s chide … deride … upbraid — a one-line poem and an exercise in lexical semantics:
(#1) Mr. Toad condescends to the counterman at the Nameless Diner
The 5/27 Wayno-Piraro Bizarro strip, set in the Land of Dogs:
(#1) (If you wonder about the secret symbol in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there’s just one in this strip — see this Page.)
A dog food with Quibbles in its name is of course not going to agree with you, in one sense of agree with. So you can understand the cartoon, and see that the pun on agree with in it makes it amusing — and still miss the extra joke that Wayno and Piraro threw in for you.
The cartoon would have been funny if the dog food had been named just Quibbles. But Quibbles and Fits is a lot funnier, because it’s another pun, on the name of the (actual) dog food Kibbles and Bits. But of course you have to know about this particular commercial product to get that joke.
(This message is brought to you by Frolic, Romp, Frisk, Gambol, Cavort, Caper, & Prance, Ltd., purveyors of iambs and orgies.)
Today’s playful Zippy:
(#1) Drying clothes engaged in an orgy of cavorting and gamboling, playfully, sensually sliding against one another: inhale the freshness!
With one satisfying line of enigmatic iambic pentameter:
All ˈlaundry ˈis a ˈblur of ˈstatic ˈcling
Words to live by. If you can only divine their deeper lesson.
From Jeff Bowles on Facebook on the 12th, this Magritte-based composition:
(#1)
Apparently a Magrittean disavowal (there’s a Page on such disavowals here), playing on Magritte’s wry late 1920s painting La Trahison des images (The Betrayal / Treachery of Images) — which shows a pipe, with the painting labeling itself Ceci n’est pas une pipe ‘This is not a pipe’. Here we get Louis Flint Ceci, on the left, objecting in astonishment that what’s on the right is not (a) Ceci; instead, it’s (a) Davisson.
