(Underwear models displaying their bodies, with allusions to various forms of intense man-on-man sex, so not to everyone’s taste)
A Daily Jocks sale ad in my email today (2/25):
[ad text:] Cellblock13 at Daily Jocks — buy 2 & save 30%
What sort of dramatic relationship from the world of the butch faggy — Red Guy and Blue Guy, resplendent in their gorgeous intense colors — is illustrated here? Tell us their story!
A Mark Thompson cartoon in the 1/20/25 issue of the New Yorker offers a foxy goulash of cultural forms: cartoon memes, joke forms, story formats, and conversational routines:
(#1) The Dog in Bar cartoon meme (with a fox instead of a dog), the Walk Into Bar joke form (a fox walks into a bar,…), the Fox Eludes Hound(s) story format, and the Tell Them I’m Not Here conversational routine
Well, I fell into this. In this morning’s posting “Removed!”, I reported myself as at the end of several tethers, one of which I addressed in this observation:
I’m not sure whether I can bear watching the news any more, and I’m not sure whether I can bear not knowing about what’s happening. For the moment, I’ve retreated into letting all six seasons of Major Crimes (which I’ve seen several times) go past me in the background while I work.
Ellen Kaisse then wondered about the show, and I embarked on an appreciation of it. And ended up with something worth expanding on a bit and posting on this blog.
(#1) An early poster for the show (+ marks characters I’ll discuss below): +Sharon Raydor in the upper right; then in four rows, left-to-right: in each row — 1st row: Detective Lieutenant Andy Flynn (Tony Denison), Detective Lieutenant Louis Provenza (G. W. Bailey); 2nd row: +Rusty Beck, +Fernando Morales; 3rd row: Civilian Surveillance Coordinator (videographer for crime scenes and interrogations) Buzz Watson (Phillip P. Keene), Detective Amy Sykes (Kierran Giovanni), Detective Lieutenant Michael Tao (Michael Paul Chan); bottom right corner: Assistant Chief Russell Taylor (Robert Gossett)
I’m not going to give you an account of the whole show, which ran for six years in hourlong episodes, but just notes on a few of the characters and a few bits from some of the story lines.
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, in which a prince grouses, over a tipple, about his amatory career, to a nobleman, one of his courtiers:
It seems the prince was once a frog and could rake in the chicks with nothing more than a few commanding ribbits; those were the days of easy scores (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
What do women want?, the princel wonders with a whine, recalling that once upon a time a short squat body, moist smooth skin, and long hind legs for leaping used to drive them into an osculatory frenzy. It’s all so damn unfair. (Wayno’s title for the cartoon: “Unhappy Ending”.)
Thanks to Facebook friends who provided a link to an xkcd cartoon from way back (5/27/11): #904 Sports:
The point is that sports color commenators treat essentially random day-to-day fluctuations as indicators of trends — because they have lots of time to fill and not a lot of substance to fill it with (play-by-play coverage is something else), and because like all of us they are narratophiles (lovers of story) and seek to find a coherent narrative in pretty much anything that happens. Meanwhile, color commentators can fall back on all that accumulated data, to wield fan statistics as another time-filler.
Yesterday’s Calvin and Hobbes:
From a 4/4/09 posting:
Human beings are story-tellers. As Erving Goffman once observed, we spend an enormous amount of time telling each other the stories of our lives. We use stories to make sense of things.
And we tell the stories of our own childhoods to our children and grandchildren, hoping to give them some sense of history and change, My daughter and I often do this with her daughter — who, unlike Calvin, seems to welcome the stories, even when she finds some of it incredible: did we really grow up in neighborhoods, and go to schools, that had essentially no racial or ethnic diversity? What, no Chinese or Indians, even? (In my case, no Jews, all the way through high school.)
