It’s held on the tips of three fingers, it’s orange, it’s fully erect, and it leaves a messy powder. But is it art? Is it edible? Is it, omigod, about to shoot? A swirl of questions envelope the phallic cheese puff resting in the Cheetle Hand of Cheadle, Alberta, shown here accompanied by a bag of the cheese snack Cheetos, for scale:
Archive for the ‘Signs and symbols’ Category
Powdery residue falls on Canadian plains
March 12, 2024Now we are twenty
March 4, 2024That would be my grandchild, Opal Eleanor Armstrong Zwicky — what a string of names! — who is (decimal) 20 today. For OEAZ on the occasion, this tiny poem:
One score for Opal
Vigesimal 10, the first day of
Her second score —
No longer a teen, now in
Her 20s —
The crowds cheer
Her breakthrough
Now, since I’m irremediably a linguist, a dip into the noun score in games and the measure noun score ’20 years; 2 decades’, which are listed together in dictionaries because, surprisingly, they have the same origin.
Trifecta time
February 12, 2024(In the middle of this, with reference to my invention LDV Day, is a discussion of men’s bodies and of sex between men in elevated language — so technically not over the line, but certainly not to everyone’s taste.)
Three different occasions that happen around this time of year, on three different schedules, but this year come together in a single week. And we’re in the midst of it. First, two festivals of pleasure: the Valentine cluster (2/12 Lincoln Darwin Day; 2/13 LDV Day; 2/14 Valentine’s Day) and
Shrove Tuesday / Mardi Gras / Carnival / Pancake 🥞 Day / Fas(t)nacht / Doughnut 🍩 Day (in the land of my childhood). A day of — depending on where you are — food excesses, sexual excesses, raucous parading in the streets in fabulous costumes, role inversions, whatever, before the 40-day shriving of Lent, the Christian season of penance before Easter’s rebirth (through crucifixion and resurrection). (from my 2/13/23 posting “Abraham Lincoln hosts two festivals of pleasure”)
Mardi Gras — by the church calendar, tomorrow, though festivities are already in progress — is a moveable feast in the Christian liturgical calendar, dependent on the date of Easter, a date that’s calculated for each year from the phases of the moon. In 2024, the two festivals of pleasure happen to coincide; today is Lincoln Darwin Day and Wednesday is Valentine’s Day (which is also a family holiday for me, since it’s my daughter Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky’s birthday).
And then in 2024 these two festivals come during the continuing celebrations of the lunar new year according to traditional Chinese reckoning (in a 12-year cycle); a Year of the Dragon began on 2/10, and the parades and displays are still going on.
That’s the outline; a few more details, with some illustrations, follow. (Oh yes, this is also today’s MQOS Not Dead Yet posting, just more elaborate than usual.)
Pretty in a print
February 9, 2024Lightning news: today’s MQoS Not Dead Yet posting (not dead yet, but emotionally in a dark valley), inspired by yesterday’s Daily Jocks mailing, which presented the company’s new styles: a set of remarkable, extravagant, showy pieces of fetish homowear, and this Code22 harness, which is instead just really pretty, like its matching shorts:
Beautiful shorts for men are no surprise, and knock-your-eyes-out harnesses (in shocking pink, flagrantly jeweled, whatever) can be read as defiant toughness, but a harness in a pretty print strikes me as sweet but out of place, like an XXL jockstrap pouch embroidered with cute cartoon flowers
Here’s the thing: harnesses for men (like dog collars for men) have moved from BDSMwear — harnesses as bondage, as restraint, and symbols of submission, but also as symbols of raw toughness (I can take whatever you put me through, sir) — and have largely yielded to harnesses as fashion statements, designed to show off the wearer’s pecs and nipples (as the Code22 harness does, quite satisfactorily).
The Pisces pose
January 25, 2024(Hunky men minimally dressed, advertising gay porn that features tons of bareback sex; nothing actually over the line here, but obviously not to everyone’s taste)
Two bodies, much alike, complementarily aligned, but also interestingly different, and fitting together in a complementary relationship. As in this image advertising Naked Sword’s gay porn video Rio in Heat:
(#1) Very similar in body type, skin tone, and grooming, but different in the details; meanwhile, the two men relate to each other’s bodies in two very different ways — Man 1, at the top, has his hand on Man 2’s crotch (claiming it as the object of his desire), while Man 2 has an arm around Man 1’s thighs (claiming the other man’s buttocks as the object of his desire)
So the image conveys Man 1 as receptive, Man 2 as insertive.
This alignment of bodies I’ll refer to as the Pisces pose, after its rough similarity to the two fish in artwork representing the astrological sign Pisces. It’s also similar to the yin-yang symbol, with its two complementary elements.
Appreciate my dragon
January 19, 2024I recently discovered (through friends on Facebook) that 1/16 is Appreciate a Dragon Day — an excellent occasion, in my view. How do I appreciate my dragon? Let me count the ways.
One, dragons have picked up a ton of gay vibes (there are lots of rainbow dragons around, many on the cute side, but some fierce), and I am way gay; two, a Year of the Dragon is the upcoming year (beginning on 2/10/24) in the 12-year cycle of the lunar calendar and I am in fact a dragon, born in the dragon year 1940; and three, since dragons are (fanciful) gigantic serpents, they are natural phallic symbols, really big and powerful penises (the objects of my desire), frequently with wings, and that means they slot right into my sexual fantasies. Il y a un dragon dans mon lit!
(#1) On the kisspng images site: a rainbow Chinese dragon, by Oluoko
Love and intrigue in the palace of cards
January 13, 2024Encountered this morning on Pinterest, this remarkable artwork: a playing card showing the jack of hearts in the arms of the king of spades and holding hands with him:
(#1) A same-sex encounter in the palace of cards, the work of Iranian-born Mahdieh Farhadkiaei; according to the site of the publisher of this playing-card art, Black Dragon Press (“a family-run print publisher based in London, UK”), she’s “an illustrator and concept artist working in advertising and fashion”
MF’s first set of these cards shows same-sex romantic pairings (both female and male), mixed-sex romantic pairings, and scenes of palace intrigue, all involving the characters on the three face cards (king, queen, and jack), as well as some solo portraits; we can only hope that more depictions of palace life are on the way.
The Maltese fresco
December 30, 2023Encountered on Pinterest yesterday, a reproduction of this painting, identified there as a “Pompeian fresco” (and attributed to the painter Filippo Venuti) from the Palazzo Paradisio (a site I didn’t recognize, but it turns out to be a lavish palace on Malta). The central figure is clearly that of the winged Roman god Mercury, steering a small winged boat across the sea. (I don’t recognize the flag the boat is flying.) At the prow of the boat, a female figure, apparently in despair, languishes precariously.
This would presumably be Mercury in his role as the guide taking the souls of the newly dead to the underworld; as for the woman, if she’s meant to be some specific character from Roman mythology, I don’t recognize her. But the composition is all about Mercury.
(#1) And who would have thought Mercury was such a stud? — with the face of a handsome young modern Italian man, the body of a muscle-hunk, and just barely concealed genitals
Ah, this is a modern work, painted in the first decade of the 20th century: a “Pompeian fresco” only in the sense that it’s in the style of the frescoes at Pompeii (near Naples; ancient Pompeii was destroyed in 79 CE by an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, but the volcanic ash preserved an extraordinary record of both the art and the everyday life of the city). A modern work, painted about 2,000 years after Pompeii went under, on the island of Malta, about 345 miles by air from Naples.
The vomiting and nauseated emojis
December 6, 2023A posting in which I realize, once again, that an emoji (say, the vomiting (face) emoji) can look different on different platforms (in this case, Facebook vs. Microsoft Word), even though you use the same code to call it up — an effect that’s analogous to a letter of the alphabet (say, the lower-case letter whose English name is /ti/) looking different in different fonts (notably, being serifed in some, sans serif in others). And even more distantly analogous to a phoneme of a language, in a specifc position (say, /t/ after an accented vowel and before an unaccented syllable, as in battle and blotto), being pronounced differently in different social varieties of the language (as an voiceless stop in BrE but a voiced tap in AmE). Autres lieux, autres moeurs.
The emoji action went down this morning on Facebook, prompted by Gadi Niram getting set off by US Senator Tommy Tuberville’s having ceased his months-long blocking of a big pile of military promotions (for a reason that has nothing to do with the merits of the promotions). The FB exchange:
Rehab return day
December 5, 2023It’s a foggy day in Palo Alto town, on the anniversary of my return home from a Palo Alto rehab center on 12/5/20, after having given up drinking several weeks before, a decision that impelled me into Stanford hospital with alcohol withdrawal syndrome on 11/11; I was moved to the rehab center on 11/17, and then discharged into the world on 12/5, as a recovering alcoholic beginning a new life. So 12/5 is a kind of rebirth day for me.
12/5 comes in between the death days of two remarkable musicians: Frank Zappa on 12/4 and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on 12/6. This year Zappa’s death day was anticipated by Kyle Wohlmut’s posting, on Facebook on 12/3, this inspired digital creation honoring FZ:
(#1) Seeing nothing like this on the (delicatessen food company) Dietz & Watson site, I assume that the Zappa Franks billboard is the work of ingenious bots.
It occurred to me that FZ might have composed the thing himself, that would have been so FZ, but I can find no evidence that he did. So this will be our “Eat Me” homage to him now.