(About men’s genitals and man-on-man sex, in street language, with an image that’s WordPressable only because I’ve fuzzed out a ton of penises — so entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
Today only: yet another flash sale from gay-pornmongers Falcon | Naked Sword:
— a Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon from 10/20/21, “Written by Goober Louis Stevenson”, according to Wayno’s title:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
A wonderfully goofy cross between two items of popular culture:
— the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, originally told as a literary tale, a caution about the dark duality of human nature and the danger of aspiring to divine power, but quickly folded into the popular consciousness in many forms
— and the figure of Mr. Peanut, the anthropomorphic mascot of the Planter’s Peanut Company
with the amiable and elegant commercial legume standing in for the evil and murderous Edward Hyde.
The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro for New Year’s Eve Eve is a goofy amalgam of two different cartoon memes with an egregious pun; Wayno’s title is “Reclusive Russets” (russets being a type of potato). No, of course it doesn’t cohere; that’s what makes it delightful (remember that this strip is called Bizarro).
(#1) If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.
The Potato Head meme (all three characters are Potato Heads) and the seeker and the seer meme (one character is seeker, the other two seers), plus some CRAB / CARB play on the compound noun hermit crab, mountain-top seers being hermits who have removed themselves from ordinary life, and potatoes being carbs, specifically starches (complex carbohydrates )
Personal background: I decided to declare today to be a Sick Day and have been doing only the minimal things of life, mostly dozing fitfully in my recliner chair, wrapped up in my bathrobe. (Meanwhile, workmen did serious work on the balcony above my patio, so I had them and their ladders and noisy tools all over my patio, but I just let this activity drift by on the fringes of my consciousness.)
Mingled in with my tortured dreams were actual useful thoughts about postings — I am pretty much incapable of not plying my craft, even in the most unlikely circumstances — including a really neat follow-up to my 11/7 posting “Centennial moments in NYC”, which has a section on the The New Yorker’s first cover illustration, a dandy peering at a butterfly through a monocle — the gentleman now referred to as “Eustace Tilley”, who serves as a kind of mascot for the magazine. Rea Irvin’s original Tilley cover is used every year on the issue closest to the anniversary date of February 21, sometimes with a newly drawn variation in its place.
So, I wondered, what was the 2022 cover like?
Wow! Kadir Nelson’s “High Style”, with Eustace as a proud Black woman in butterfly-ornamented apparel, including a mask for the pandemic.
And then I wondered when you crossed the line from a (new) interpretation, version, or variant of an original cultural item (like the Eustace Tilley image) and moved into the territory of an abstract form, format, or pattern (something you might think of as a meme or trope — Eustace as a vehicle for, or expression of, cultural content). And I even thought of a linguistic parallel to this distinction: in playful variation of a fixed expressions vs. a snowclone.
What follows now is not a posting elaborating on all of this — I’m guessing I have maybe half an hour before I’m poleaxed by exhaustion again — but just a teaser. Please be patient.
By happy accident, my Facebook feed is celebrating the day of the archangel Michael with food and drink artworks. Two in particular: a miniaturist composition I think of as Bisonini Doing Power Crunches:
(#1) From Greg Morrow on FB 9/24 (though it didn’t filter down to me until today), with his own work, which he describes as: “Die kleinenbüffel and their shy friend take a needed break for a snack” (see below; note German der Büffel ‘the buffalo’)
And this socially multilayered appreciation of coffee-sipping:
(#2) From Tim Evanson: “September 29 is #NationalCoffeeDay!!!”; TE says he’s had the image for years, doesn’t know its source
(Content warning: the F-word and the F-act (especially between men) figure prominently, though not vividly, in what is to come. So do hiphop clothing and tofu burgers, but if you’re uncomfortable with the harder-core F-stuff, you should skip this posting.)
Caught in passing on Facebook, a guy reporting something he heard from his FUBU, which baffled me; I was dimly aware of a FUBU clothing line, but this guy must have been talking about something else.
I realize that many of my readers will have recognized the (complex) acronym immediately and so think I must be dim-witted, but I had to go look it up. The acronym is a distant cousin of FUBAR, and its abbreviatum is something I have fairly often written about on this blog, but always spelled out in full.
Passed on, back on 7/21, by a friend on Facebook, a dumpster texty (of murky origin) with a (N vs. V) pun that works in spelling (REFUSE) but not in pronunciation —
N /ˈrefˌjus/ vs. V /rəˈfjuz/
— plus, as commentary, Dylan Thomas expanding on the improbable (not to mention grotesque) V reading of the text (as opposed to the obviously intended N one). Which will then take us to Harry Diboula’s “Je refuse”, a French zouk song of lost love, which ended up in romantic Paris from the Kingdom of Kongo by way of the French Caribbean.
(#1) Like all right-minded people, I reject the idea that I — or, more precisely, my bodily remains — should be stored in black plastic sacks and placed in dumpsters. Ick. Je refuse!
Or words to that effect, from Rachel Maddow, describing her stunned reaction to watching pieces of Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony on 6/28 before the Jan 6 committee (the US House select committee investigating the 1/6/21 insurrection at the US Capitol). And yes, it did actually just happen. And I was stunned too; I watched the whole thing, amazed and appalled. (Also moved to recall my rapt attention through the Army-McCarthy hearings when I was 13 and the Watergate hearings and House impeachment hearings when I was 33).
6/28 is also Stonewall Day (remembering 1969), this year an occasion for a mixture of extreme emotions, among them distressed disbelief that we lgbt-folk are threatened with a return to the mindset — and the laws — of the Pinko Communist Scare fostered by Joe McCarthy about 70 years ago.
6/28 is also Sarajevo Day (remembering 1914), the anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Archduchess Sophie, which somehow tipped the world into the nightmare of the Great War. Followed by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the great influenza pandemic of 1918 — the wars echoed now in the monstrous evil of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Great Flu mirrored in the Covid pandemic we’re living through now.
Meanwhile, here in 2022 everything is happening at once, and a lot of it is unbelievably awful. (Did that actually just happen?) See the above, and add last week’s US Supreme Court decisions on concealed carry of weapons in public and on abortion. The last of which moved Ann Burlingham to whip off a postcard of rage and protest to me (written and mailed in Pittsburgh on the 6/25, arrived in Palo Alto on 6/28, whoopee!):
Taking off from a delightful ad for Romperjacks on Facebook back in November and December:
Here I give you the ad photo, and inventory some of the things it inspires me to write about in future postings (several being themes from earlier postings on this blog).
