(Little kids, but I pursue them into the weeds of sexual anatomy, though without the photos or raunchy talk. Take appropriate cautions.)
The One Big Happy cartoon from 2/9:
(#1) Once again, about the kids finding a word (un)familiar in a particular sense: the apparel noun hood
And the OBH from 2/17:
(#2) And minute ‘extremely small, tiny’
(Uncompromisingly raunchy references to male bodyparts and mansex, so absolutely not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Lincoln Darwin Valentine Day lies in the cleft between Lincoln Darwin Day, February 12th, and Valentine’s Day, February 14th. It is a day of unbridled mansexual excess, coming as it does between the high seriousness of the day that honors two towering figures — two Great Men — of the 19th century and the romantic heterosexual excesses of Valentine’s Day. It’s Carnal Carnival without reference to the religious calendar (actual Mardi Gras can fall any time between February 3rd and March 9th).
From Tim Evanson on Facebook, this image of (literally) horny guys in nothing but pouch-thrusting underwear, sucking suggestively on spicy sticks for Christmas:
(#1)
From Tim, I learn that this entertaining photo — a still from a Xmas beefcake video — was created by the Sellers Dorsey Foundation in 2013 as part of a Full Frontal Freedom / Out2Enroll campaign encouraging gay men to enroll in Obamacare. The full video can be viewed on the OUT Magazine site.
… or edible roots (with root covering any underground plant organ), or whatever you call the stuff. In the 7/30 One Big Happy, Ruthie, confronted with /hol fudz/, takes it to be just such a label, hole foods, when her mother is referring instead to a grocery store, Whole Foods:
(#1)
The conventional (semi-technical) label for the category in question is root vegetables.
The spur: this brief moment from the NYT obit for chef, author, tv personality, and social critic Anthony Bourdain, by Kim Severson, Matthew Haag, and Julia Moskin, on-line on the 8th as “Anthony Bourdain, Renegade Chef Who Reported From the World’s Tables, Is Dead at 61”, in print on the 9th as “Anthony Bourdain, Renegade Chef, Dies at 61; Showed the World How to ‘Eat Without Fear'”:
(#1)
He first became conscious of food in fourth grade, he wrote in “Kitchen Confidential.” Aboard the Queen Mary on one of the family’s frequent trips to France, he sat in the cabin-class dining room and ate a bowl of vichyssoise, a basic potato-leek soup that held the delightful surprise of being cold. “It was the first food I enjoyed and, more important, remembered enjoying,” he wrote.
(After some extended moments of reflections on religious belief, this posting will venture into the sexual wilds, and the later material will not be suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
Two design drawings by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky (from a set available to the public in an Instagram file): one a rose window (alluding indirectly to such images at Stanford’s Memorial Church, which serve as potent Christian symbols); and one suggesting tongues of flame / fire (alluding to those that figure in the Christian religious holiday of Pentecost, which fell this year on Sunday, May 20th). Two religious symbols, with associated linguistic expressions (rose window; tongues of flame/fire, to speak in tongues).
First, things: the rose, and flames.
Then, these things serving as symbols in Christian ways of thinking (actually, each can have several different symbolic values, even within this specific sociocultural context).
Then, these symbols, with these values, deployed in art, music, film, and fiction, and even in food and in plant names.
Then, the original things — rose and flames — serving as symbols in other sociocultural contexts: in particular, as sexual symbols, for body parts and for sexual acts.
I don’t know how, but somehow I missed the ad videos from Dollar Shave Club — until Kim Darnell stumbled across their “Buttery Dunes” video a few days ago. A follow-up to “Butter Safe Than Sorry”. Those were in 2017. Back in 2013, DSC came out with “Let’s Talk About #2”, an ad for its line of butt wipes.
Full of double entendres, raunchy images, puns, and absurdity.
I’ll take them in reverse chronological order.
In my recent tortellini posting (on the 4th, “I say it sounds yucky and I say the hell with it”), I quoted from the Wikipedia article:
Tortellini [and their larger versions tortelloni] are ring-shaped pasta, sometimes also described as “navel shaped”, hence their alternative name of “belly button” (ombelico).
Now metaphoric navels (informally, belly buttons) have come up on this blog before, in a 10/26/10 posting “The counterpart of phallic symbol”:
(Mostly cultural analysis, focused on gay porn. But plenty of very plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex, so this is not for kids or the sexually modest.)
(#1)
The pizza boy archetype, as depicted by young Melbourne artist Allain de Leon in DNA Magazine, April 2013
The figure is a package of symbolic content and associations, among them: the desirable youth; the delivery figure, someone who comes to your door bearing pleasurable goods for money; pizza as an American cultural emblem of warm informal social associations; and a cluster of associations of food with sex, some more general, others specific to pizza slices and whole pizza pies
The trigger for this posting is a recent ad for C1R/Catalina Video, with a sale on a new release — Pizza Boy 4 – Slice of Pie — and the three earlier films in the series, starting with Pizza Boy: He Delivers (William Higgins, 1986). The ads, which are way XXX-rated, are available in a posting on AZBlogX (“Another slice of pizza boy”). But here: a salacious image of pizza boy Steve Henson from the first film, a classic of gay porn:
Yes, genitals on your nails (Lat. unguis (Nom.), unguinis (Gen.) ‘fingernail’). Not for kids or the sexually modest.
From Katie Schmitz a few days back, a link to “This Vagina Nail Art Is Perfect For When The Patriarchy’s Got You Down” on the Femalista site on 8/19/17:
