Archive for the ‘Logos’ Category

Three peanuts meet in a bar

August 18, 2022

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, requiring a boatload of popcultural knowledge to understand:


(#1) The easy part: these are three anthropomorphic peanuts, M, M, F from left to right, and they are sitting at a bar, with drinks in front of them (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)

Somehow the meeting of these three exemplifies the N1 + N2 compound N wingnut / wing-nut / wing nut (which has 4 senses in NOAD, plus a bunch more you can imagine). But how?

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From the annals of commerce: Doggie and Whippy do it in a leather bar

June 18, 2022

(This is obviously going to go where no kids or sexually modest people should go, and it’s going to get there fast.)

The commercial names Doggie Diner and Mr. Whippy, both surely conceived in all innocence, but, to the prepared mind, easily evoking sexual images (as it happens, my mind is prepared for man-on-man sexual images, so that’s where I’m inclined to go): the doggie / doggy position for anal intercourse; and a leatherman master whipping a leatherman slave.

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Woolly mammoths in Birkenstocks

May 27, 2022

Knowing 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:

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The construction workers that bloom in the spring, tra la

March 4, 2022

(It’s Tom of Finland time again, and this posting doesn’t shrink from the men’s sexual parts and man-man sexual acts that crowd ToF’s drawings, nor from street language for talking about these things, so this is very much not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Things were way too busy on Trois Lapins de Mars (which was both St. David’s Day and Shrove Tuesday), so I didn’t get around to posting the March page in my 2022 Tom of Finland calendar then. But here it is, in all its vernal working-class splendor:


(#1) In a 1988 drawing, three construction workers, on the right, experience the rising sap of spring — look, a footlong springing up! in early March! — while appreciating a police / military guy from (as you can see on his shoulder patch) the Tom’s Men force

Key observation: the scene is framed as a fantasy sexual encounter in which Uniform Guy displays himself as a lust object for Construction Guys, but in that encounter the wave of cruising is actually streaming in both directions.

Points to come:

— the construction-worker theme in ToF’s work

— ToF’s presentations of homomasculinity

— on categorization and labeling: a conceptual category I’ll call FORCES — which has no ordinary label in English — embracing the police and the military together

— on signs and symbols: the Male Triad symbol on the Tom’s Men shoulder patch worn by the uniformed guy and on his lapel

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Clash of the titular Peppers

September 1, 2021

Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, a cartoon that would be totally incomprehensible without several pieces of pop-cultural knowledge:


(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)

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The flannel guys

December 28, 2020

It starts with a photo that came up in a slideshow of things from Elizabeth Daingerfeld Zwicky’s image trove: Steven Levine and me, both in flannel shirts, in a time and a place and on an occasion that neither of us could identify — and EDZ wasn’t any help.


(#1) The flannel guys

Steven put it at roughly 20 years ago, because the shirt he’s wearing is one that he wore lovingly to death some years ago (cue Donovan singing “I Love My Shirt”). I still have my shirt, however, because it was one of a set of 5 or so L.L.Bean flannel shirts I bought late in the last century and have been carefully rotating over the intervening years, to make them last through as many winters as possible (I do love those shirts; among other things, they are lined).

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Great progress, grave threat

September 23, 2020

Two recent items about great progress in the acceptance of lgbt people in my country, with an alarm bell in the second about grave threats to us. First, a posting about a piece in Out magazine. Second, a comment on the Queer Linguist(ic)s Network (QLN) on Facebook.

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Another Super Bowl Sunday

February 2, 2020

(For me, Super Bowl Sunday frequently erupts into a festival of sex, either literal or fictional, between men, so this posting about my relationship to the event will be awash in male bodyparts and mansex, described in street language, and will therefore be entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)

That would be Super Bowl LIV, the San Francisco 49ers vs. the Kansas City Chiefs at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens FL, game time 6:30 EST, so going on as I type this:


(#1) The logo for Super Bowl 54, in all of its boring shininess

I have an unbroken record of not viewing Super Bowl games, and not giving a shit about any of their details — I had to go look up the facts above — so my custom has always been to do something out of the public eye, where my homonormative sports-averse masculinity won’t incite thugs to harass me. Chamber music concerts used to be a favorite alternative, along with occasional Super Bowl days reveling in cock at the gay baths (some notes below), but I’ve been a lone homebody for some years now, and get my Super Bowl mansex in videos; today has brought me many pleasurable hours re-viewing the oeuvre of the sweetly smiling hunky Damien Crosse, that exponent of sexually democratic, mutually attentive sex, intense assfucking, and cum facials, among other things. (I’ll expound further on DC’s charms in another posting.)

After some brief notes on that logo — the hell with the game, let’s talk about design, honey — I’ll run through some Super Bowl notes roughly in reverse chronological order. Backwards will run the postings until reels the mind.

The logo. It follows the pattern established ten years ago, when someone introduced the shiny metallic dick ejaculating a great big shiny metallic football as a design element. (I believe many people think the vertical element is just supporting the football, but sharp-eyed viewers know otherwise.) And then, in the place of complex and varied logos, we got this:

(#2)

Yesterday: the demise of Mr. Peanut as a Super Bowl ad event. From my 2/1/10 posting “Revisiting 42: stalked by a giant anthropomorphic squirrel”, with a David Sipress cartoon:

(#3)

the cartoon is exquisitely topical: Mr. Peanut has in fact just met his death (though not as the prey of a giant squirrel), and will be mourned at the Super Bowl [on the 2nd]

(Further details in the posting.)

And now: Sexy Sunday, ooh, what have you done?  (in 2016, 2014, and 1996)

2016: Gridiron Gang Bang. In my 2/6/16 posting “The Super Bowl looms”:

On Super Bowl 50, a gay gangbang, language play in porn, and the careening career of gay pornstar Dayton O’Connor, all of this inspired by an ad today under the header “C1R Locker Room Super Bowl Pass”, with two stills from the Channel 1 Releasing gay porn flick Gridiron Gang Bang: a locker room scene and a rear shot of Dayton O’Connor in football gear.

(#4)

2014: two Todd Winters videos. Not previously blogged about, but then today on AZBogX, in my posting “Jocks, Socks & Cocks”:

Two gay porn items [both from 2014] that came to my mind for Super Bowl LIV today:

From Channel 1 Releasing: Todd Winters as a football player, in Rascal’s Take One For The Team (with a jockstrap on the cover, but no dick)

(#5)

and in Catalina’s Jocks, Socks & Cocks (with three stiff dicks on the cover, in a careful formal composition of sexually significant visual elements)


(#6) Cover cropped to hide the three hard cocks

(The AZBlogX piece has an analysis of the formal composition of the cover of JS&C, using the material cropped above.)

Note on Take One For The Team. From the Lexico / Oxford site:

phrase take one for the team: US informal Willingly undertake an unpleasant task or make a personal sacrifice for the collective benefit of one’s friends or colleagues.‘I took one for the team by naming myself the designated driver’

But then the idiom can be understood as roughly equivalent to take it for the team, with it understood as referring to a penis; take it ‘to have sexual intercourse’ (in GDoS from 1910 on) is in fact understood as receptive intercourse specifically, and can be either vaginal or, especially, anal (to take it up/in the ass). Putting all this together gets us from the neutral idiom take one for the team to the contextually conveyed ‘get fucked (up the ass) for (or by) the team’, which is what the porn video is about.

Note on the ad copy for JS&C. A bit of  excellent iconic prosody built on conventional dirty talk: four pile-driving feet followed by two lightly racing feet: hard deep fucking followed by a rapid shower of cum:

(#6)

(The vowels are also nicely chosen.) All of these poetic niceties are of course intuitive, not calculated — choices made just because they “sounded right” to the writer.

1996: Superbowl Sunday at the baths in San Jose. An account reproduced on AZBlogX in three parts on 10/3/10. Intense and personal, but also analytical: participant observation. The three parts: “Superbowl Sunday (Part I): San Jose, 1996” (link), “Superbowl Sunday (Part II)” (link); “Superbowl Sunday: notes” (link).

From the first:

Football fan.  At the gay baths, there is a noticeable outflow of patrons as the magic hour of 3 (Pacific Time) approaches: fags hurrying on to their Superbowl parties.

I know what some of you are saying to yourselves: they aren’t real fags, they are mostly-straight bisexuals, in the closet, getting a little dick on the side. And that is probably the case for the first guy I play with – a guy with hugely broad shoulders and big chest who reels me in in the porn-TV lounge by stroking his proportionally big hard-on under his towel and staring fixedly at me. I follow him back to his room, where it turns out that what he wants is to suck my cock for a little while, an experience that gets him so excited he comes almost immediately (in a spray that goes over two feet – it splashes on his face – something I’ve never seen before and find entertaining, in a Believe It or Not sort of way).

Football Fan has a wedding ring on. In the over 40 years since my first carnal experience with another man, I’ve had maybe a dozen guys ask to suck my cock and then shoot within seconds of taking it (always appreciatively, but then as far as they were concerned we were done). Every one of them was a married man, to judge from their wedding rings or their explicit testimonies.

Football Fan was, I believe, a lone patron that Super Day, looking for dick on his own hook.

But, in the other direction, it wasn’t uncommon for two or three buddies (sometimes, they were married friends, ostensibly just guys hanging out with one another) to turn up together to get serviced by willing cocksuckers, to get the easy, skilled, responsibility-free, just-the-sex-man blow jobs that (they feel) their women can’t provide. Usually completely unreciprocal sex, but not at all hostile. Still … as one of them said to me after I’d taken his load (with pleasure) and suggested I’d like him to exchange the favor, “Well, you can’t help being the way you are, but I’m not queer”. Not hostile, but thoughtlessly contemptuous.

In any case, all of these MSMs could get their quick mansex fix and go on refreshed to their Super Bowl parties. In a way, I was relieved that Football Fan was in and out so quickly, because he really was a football fan, and if we’d talked any more he would have discovered what a dead loss I was in the sports department, and maybe then in his eyes I wouldn’t have been man enough to get him off.

(Eventually, I had an extraordinarily good time, stretching over a couple of hours, amazingly intricate and satisfying sex with just one guy, on that Super Day at the baths. But no football was involved in any way.)

 

The images quilt

December 15, 2019

The 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).

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The university quilt

December 10, 2019

#2 in a set of 4, the first having been my 7/30/17 posting “The queer quilt”. To come: the linguistics quilt and the images quilt. Each one, 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.

#1 re-used old queer t-shirts, some political, some playful, some artistic. #2 is university t-shirts (from roughly 20 to 40 years ago), from institutions where I’ve talked, either teaching a class there, speaking at a conference there, or giving an invited talk there.


(#1) names, abbreviated names, nicknames, logos, and seals: Northwestern Univ., Univ. of New Mexico, Brigham Young Univ.; Georgetown Univ., Univ. of Kentucky, American Univ.; Harvard Univ., banana slugs (the mascot of the Univ. of Calif. at Santa Cruz (UCSC)), Univ. of Pennsylvania; Univ. of Calif. at Davis, UCSC, Univ. of North Dakota

Still to come: a linguistics quilt, with lx-related t-shirts; and an image quilt, with amusing or arresting images of several kinds.
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