(a posting that clearly will not to be to everyone’s taste)
From the Titan Men Store (an adjunct to the gay porn studio), among a huge variety of silicone sex toys currently on sale, this cute little item:
Archive for the ‘Toys’ Category
On the sex toy watch
March 22, 2026Toys, potatoes, and dogs
February 26, 2026The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip for 2/25: Mr. and Mrs. Potatohead with their Potatohead dog:
The toy: Mr. Potatohead and his detachable-bodypart family; the potato: the russet; the dog: the Jack Russell terrier (note russet as a potato-pun on the dog name Russell) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
To understand this cartoon, you need to recognize it as an instance of the potatohead cartoon meme, based on the toy. Now, some details.
Throw them a string of opals!
March 4, 2025My grandchild Opal Eleanor Armstrong Zwicky was born 3/4/04, so they’re 21 years old today, 3/4/25 — the final legal hurdle to adulthood in my country — and, wonderful coincidence, today is Mardi Gras (Shrove Tuesday, Fat Tuesday, the last day of Carnival, etc.), so we should be tossing them a string of opals. I suggest something along these lines:
(#1) A blue Australian opal necklace (with an electroformed copper chain), jewelry by Anaika from Etsy (US$50)
On antepenultimate December
December 29, 2024👴 👴 👴 three old men for antepenultimate December (3 days left), also the 5th of the 12 days of Christmas (five golden rings!) and the 5th of the 8 days of Hanukkah (so there’s still plenty of oil)
These have been difficult days — the latest rainstorm came in on a wave of low air pressure, felling me with joint pain and stopping up my ears so that I can barely hear (and I probably won’t be able to get help until sometime in the new year) — so I’m going to just randomly take stuff to post about and run with it, helter skelter.
First up: three seasonal presents from Ann Burlingham, in Pittsburgh, delivered to me yesterday by my grandchild Opal Armstrong Zwicky, who’s in town on break before their last semester at the University of Pittsburgh. In size, from the smallest to the largest:
Penguins at play
October 10, 2024Max Vasilatos had warned me they were coming, but I didn’t know when. But today was their day, and they were a cheering relief from the deep dysfunction that a week of extravagant heat has visited upon me: from the Play Visions company in Woodlinville WA (but, yes, made in China), the Club Earth Penguin Parade — 6 nesting penguins (the biggest only 5 inches tall, so they fit in easily with almost any home decor):
(#1) An ad display of Les Six Antarctiques; can you tell which of the six is the Swiss penguin (known professionally as Arthur Honegger)? What gives him away as a Swissie and not a Frenchie like all the others?
Pengrooms on parade
July 13, 2024A surprise from my tiny family this morning, as my grandchild Opal presented me with two gifts: the children’s picture book The Pengrooms by Paul Castle (Paul Castle Studio, 2022), together with an adorable plushie toy of Pringle the Pengroom — Pringle, who is grooms with Finn (both sporting rainbow bow ties, in case you missed the same-sex theme). The cover of the book, showing the couple atop a wedding cake, with the publisher’s blurb:
(#1) Follow Pringle and Finn, two penguins with big hearts, as they deliver wedding cakes to their friends in the animal kingdom. Each cake tells a story, and each [same-sex] wedding offers a challenge that Pringle and Finn must face together. The Pengrooms is an enduring tale about love, diversity, and the importance of working as a team.
Pringle is larger than Finn — couples differ in many ways — but they’re equal partners as a team. The Pringle plushie:
(#2) Pringle, with a really big bow tie
Nice guy with an American flag beach ball
July 7, 2024(Talk about men’s genitals, so not to everyone’s taste; it’s coming up fast, so if you want to avert your eyes, do it now)
For the 4th of July, welcoming us to the swimming pool, he’s projecting amiable niceness while exhibiting his attractive swimmer’s body, utterly naked, with that patriotic beach ball nestled against his thick pornstar penis. Which is amiably hanging straight down, as unobtrusively as possible for such a hefty professional tool, but still one of the focal points of the composition (alas, fuzzed out for WordPress modesty). He’s working his porn-actor skills to hawk Gay Room’s 4th of July 50%-off sale on their many videos. And he’s a sweet thing to see at the beginning of a hot summer day, even if it’s just in the day’s Hunt eZine mailing (for Falcon | NakedSword studios):
The bearded cartoonist, post-simectomy
January 17, 2023It begins with a Facebook posting by Bob Eckstein on 1/12:
BE: The Daily Cartoonist just ran this piece … and that is Sam Gross on the cover on the right:
(#1) The BE cartoon: a bearded fellow — I take him to be a cartoonist (since this is in The Daily Cartoonist) — in a hospital bed, post-simectory
Note simectory ‘the surgical removal of a simian’ — in this case not an actual simian, but the simulacrum of a monkey: a one-man-band-monkey toy. I hadn’t realized that such toys are still being made, but it seems that they are (classically they are wind-up metal — “tin” — toys, but now they appear to be battery-operated plastic, and considerably more durable than the vintage versions; I speak with recollected sorrow over the short life of my very own monkey-band toy, roughly 75 years ago).
Elfshelfisms
December 22, 2022Two especially satisfying examples of the elfshelfism, a riddle form presented visually:
(#1) Image: a cute furry mammal clinging to a bone. Punchline: lemur on a femur. (note: like elf and shelf, lemur and femur are (perfect) rhymes; unlike elf and shelf, however, they’re rare and remarkable nouns)
(#2) Image: a buxom woman reclining provocatively on a pile of Mexican food. Punchline: Dolly [Parton] on a tamale. (note: for most American speakers, Dolly and tamale are perfect rhymes, but for a substantial minority of American speakers, and for many others, they’re half-rhymes)
Plush life
September 11, 2022(Penis plush and dildos too, in detail, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
Breaking News for Penises: you can now purchase adorable soft-plush penis-simulacrum stuffed toys. Some for you to cuddle with. One that is, delightfully, a second-order simulacrum: a stuffed-toy simulacrum of a dildo, the dildo being a sex-toy simulacrum of a penis — and, even better, this one is a stuffed squeaky toy for dogs. Eventually, there will be a photo of Fido gently mouthing Peter Woofington, a gigantic plush play-dick in warm but unlikely flesh tones. With goofy crossed eyes.
As a bonus, you get two fabulous recordings of Billy Strayhorn’s jazz standard “Lush Life”: Ella Fitzgerald singing the words, John Coltrane transforming the music. Plus my confession that when I came across Peter I somehow missed the canine connection entirely and so fell to speculating about the anal life expectancy of a plush dick and to some alarm at the idea of taking into my body a dildo that squeaked (presumably with pleasure, but still).