The passage from one year to the next, as recognized in illustrations, cartoons, calendar pages, greeting cards, and the like. The conventional representation of this passage uses the figure of Baby New Year, incorporating a jumble of symbolic elements from different sources into the infant. I’ll pick out just a few of these representations that have come my way in the past few days.
But first, the raunchy stuff — turning the calendar pages in the Tom of Finland calendars, where December of one year is customarily represented by a hypersexual Santa Claus, and the new year is recognized on the cover of the next year’s calendar. (Warning: this is ToF, so not to many people’s tastes.)
(In the last section, a simulacrum of male genitals, referred to by a street name, so not to everyone’s taste, also NSFW.)
Give a banana a head, and it will go far.
The memic banana duck. Spread on Facebook, this banana duck image was apparently posted on Reddit in 2021:
(#1) This comes from MemeWorld, so who knows who made this particular image — but given the similarity of the banana fruit to the long neck of a duck, it’s a natural piece of visual play, no doubt taken advantage of by many playful artists over the years
(Just a bit about the ceremony of the BFB, which is of course date-specific. But only a hint; my day has been a complete shambles, prominently featuring long intervals of narcoleptic sleep. But a small bowl of pesto posole for lunch; its name alone rolls off the tongue.)
(Warning: two hunky men in nothing but jock straps, bonding over a banana, so not to everyone’s taste.)
A gripping adventure, begun yesterday in my posting “Invitation to the groaning phallic board”, which was temporarily abandoned due to illness. The final chapter in the story of this raunchy appetizer board:
(#1) From a Facebook ad for a wooden appetizer board in the outline shape of the male genitals (head with frenulum and urethral cleft, gently bent shaft, and testicles) — highly stylized, highly schematic, but with these quite specific details; shown here with the compartments filled with appetizers of various sorts, and with accompanying bowls of other appetizers
The photo appears to be a scam come-on, created either by photographic manipulation or by the crafting of a single wooden model for advertising purposes.
My interest was in both the appetizer board (so called) and in the foodstuffs — the appetizers (though they sometimes go by other names) — that fill such boards. On appetizer boards in general, and then
some reflection on the modes of phallicity, extending my thoughts in two earlier postings, “Enhanced phallicity” of 12/10/21 (about things that are not merely phallic by nature, but (also) deliberately designed to resemble penises in some detail) and “Plush life” of 9/11/22 (about four modes of phallicity). What, in this world, are we to make of the raunchy appetizer board?
(Below is the introduction to what was intended to be the fourth and final posting — “The groaning phallic board” — in what I’ve come to think of as The Tale of Raunchy Appetizers. But I was felled, once again, by hours of irrestistible exhausted sleep (no, I don’t know why, but my life has been very unpleasant for a while). Back in the world to get some dinner, but I’ll never get this posting done today. Think of this as a Halloween teaser; save it for its eventual continuation, along the lines promised below
A digression from today’s intended posting, “The groaning phallic board”, the final chapter in the story of a raunchy appetizer board, which began in my 10/20 posting “The Funny Aperitif Board”. One of the photos of this appetizer board:
A Facebook ad for a wooden appetizer board in the outline shape of the male genitals (head with frenulum and urinary cleft), gently bent shaft, and testicles — highly stylized, highly schematic, but with these crucial details; shown here with the compartments filled with appetizers of various sorts, and with accompanying bowls of other appetizers
The story continued in my posting yesterday, “Appetizer boards”, about two conceptual categories — the foodstuff category to which appetizers belong (call it SMALL-START-FOOD); and the implement category to which food-service boards and platters belong (call it FOOD-SERVER-THING) — and the accompanying lexical fields of appetizer vocabulary and appetizer-board vocabulary.
I then went to collect some more images of the raunchy appetizer board and similar objects, only to discover some really fishy stuff (which is what this posting is about). And then I was struck down for the rest of the day by overwhelming exhaustion and deep, unpleasant sleep. So this my Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting for the day.
The intended posting, “The groaning phallic board”, is still to come, and it has lots of surprising neat stuff in it that turned up in my searches for appetizer-board images. Just not today.
A follow-up to my 10/20/22 posting “The Funny Aperitif Board”, with its entertaining word confusion between appetizer and aperitif — but now getting serious about the two categories involved in the compound appetizerboard:
the foodstuff category to which appetizers belong (call it SMALL-START-FOOD);
and the implement category to which food-service boards and platters belong (call it FOOD-SERVER-THING)
I’ll put off the funny part — the (intentionally) phallic appearance of the appetizer board in question — for a third posting in this series, taking off from my 9/11/22 posting “Plush life” (with its distinction between four modes of phallicity). But before we go on to ransack the modern English lexicon, let’s stop to appreciate the inspiration for all of this, the Grassooze appetizer board, laden with meal-preliminary foodstuffs:
This is today’s Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting. I am overwhelmed by piles of undone things, but suffering from deep exhaustion (no doubt a consequence of the most recent jigglings with my medications). I am posting in a brief period (during which I’ve had salmon teriyaki and edamame gyoza delivered for sustenance) between long stretches of stunned unconsciousness.
I offer you, without critical comment (analysis to come in a later, more thoughtful posting), this remarkable Grassooze Services ad on Facebook back on 9/11:
Funny Aperitif Board on sale for $24.99
⭐Who says size doesn’t matter? With an illusionary length of 40 cm, this magnificent penis with perfect curves will keep all its promises
… One day, a great sage said, “Don’t let anyone convince you that your dreams are too big, buy a board in the shape of a penis.”
(Gets right into gay men’s sexual parts, fore and aft, and man-on-man sexual acts, using street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
… or like cherry, vanilla, peach, or pumpkin spice. These are the Tasty Hole flavored body scrubs, formulated to make your hole tasty for the guy who’ll be rimming you.
(Just for the record: I hate flavored condoms. And flavored lubes. And flavored douches, which is the territory we’re moving into here. Unless the flavor is something like Male Sex Sweat. As for cherry flavoring, I hate it in cough drops and syrups and all that stuff, so I’m certainly not going to get it up for licking cherry scrub out of my trick’s hole. Your tastes might differ, of course. But you should know ahead of time that I’m inclined to mock the basic idea of Tasty Hole products.)
(There will be discussion of penises and vaginas, some of it using street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Having discovered and posted about a vintage photograph of three young men displaying their swimmer’s bodies (which I bought and mounted on a bookend, to make a free-standing portable photo display), I was led by Etsy to other sources of somewhat similar photographs, in particular the trove of photographic male art offered by The Male Image Art Shop (dba TheMaleImageArtShop), among which this photo caught my eye:
(#1) “Dmitry and Matteo”, as advertised on-line: the more Slavic-looking bodybuilder type on the left is presumably Dmitry, and the more Mediterranean-looking swimmer type on the right Matteo; their gazes are fixed on us, the viewers, with no expression; Dmitry has a friendly, or perhaps a proprietary, arm on Matteo’s shoulder
Other than this, we know nothing. But we struggle to extract a story that it’s telling us, some story about the relationship between the two men (and possibly about why they’re posing for us), so we ask: when was this photo taken? where are they? why are they naked? what are their lives like? what does that arm on the shoulder mean? is this photo a slice of these men’s lives, or are the men random male models posed to create a puzzle for us?
