In today’s Zippy strip, Zerbina and Zippy indulge their onomatomania — a love of certain expressions that leads the affected person to chant them over and over for pleasure — by slinging competing (trochaic tetrameter) product names at one another competitively, before falling passionately into one another’s arms:
Zerbina and Zippy sling trochaic tetrameter
July 26, 2023
Prometheus and the eagle: the statue
July 25, 2023Noticed in passing on Pinterest yesterday, this dramatic statue of Prometheus and the eagle, by German sculptor Reinhold Begas:
A male nude (unusual for Begas, whose specialty was monumental statues of public figures); I don’t know where it’s located
The eagle looks threateningly at the chained Prometheus, who shrinks back in terror, anticipating the eagle’s next feasting on his liver.
More Sally Thomason, and Anne Cutler too
July 25, 2023A follow-up to yesterday’s posting “The lost penguin art”, about Sally Thomason’s delightful creature-doodle art, with an excursus on Sally herself:
Sally is not just a good friend of very long standing, and an exceptionally talented creator of these creature doodles, but she is also an enormously distinguished colleague. I will now embarrass her by quoting excerpts from her Wikipedia page
… I stand in awe, while noting that she is one of the world’s nicest people, and very funny, but with a quite direct and penetrating manner that crushes foolishness and fuzziness.
As predicted, all this did indeed embarrass Sally, but I pressed my reasons for praising her this way, reasons that took me back to my appreciation of Anne Cutler, another “one of the world’s nicest people, and very funny, but with a quite direct and penetrating manner that crushes foolishness and fuzziness” (an appreciation that somehow never made it into a posting on this blog).
The program from here on: my (e-mail) exchange with Sally on embarrassment; an interlude on the American folk song “Give Me The Roses (While I Live)”, directly related to the Sacred Harp song Odem (Second); and then a bit of affectionate appreciation of Anne Cutler (who died, suddenly, last year).
The lost penguin art
July 24, 2023I wrote to Sally Thomason in e-mail earlier today:
While I have been recuperating (slowly) from gallbladder surgery, I have a wonderful helper León [León Hernández, in full León Hernández Alvarez] who does many useful thngs for me, though working from pretty rudimentary English. But his great passion is housecleaning, at which he is a remarkable demon. He is even able to dust things and put them back exactly where they were before (whether or not that’s where he would have put things). Having (I thought) cleaned everything there was, today he embarked on moving all the pieces of furniture in the living room and cleaning underneath them. Finding, in the process, a large range of lost things: long-dead pens, a lot of change, a knitting needle for thick yarn (which I didn’t recognize, but León immediately announced was a goncho, and we had to look that up together) (We do a lot of on-line searching together, especially about the trees and flowers we encounter on our neighborhood walks).
And a great prize: your first penguin doodle from many years ago, in a small frame, much bleached by time but still elegant and adorable. León has learned to live in Penguinland, and ManSexLand too — but by random good fortune, he’s gay himself, so the ManSex all over the place is just entertaining. However, he immediately appreciated your doodle as a work of art, and was so delighted to have found it under one of the couches that he brought it to me while I was shaving in the bathroom. I currently have its larger successor on display on the desk in my study, and we have now added the smaller one next to it.
What once was lost has now been found, and we rejoice.
The two penguin doodles, in a photo León took for me about an hour ago:
Side by side by Thomason
Addendum. Sally is not just a good friend of very long standing, and an exceptionally talented creator of these creature doodles, but she is also an enormously distinguished colleague. I will now embarrass her by quoting excerpts from her Wikipedia page:
Sarah Grey Thomason (known as “Sally”) is an American scholar of linguistics, Bernard Bloch distinguished professor emerita at the University of Michigan. She is best known for her work on language contact, historical linguistics, pidgins and creoles, Slavic Linguistics, Native American languages and typological universals. She also has an interest in debunking linguistic pseudoscience, and has collaborated with publications such as the Skeptical Inquirer, The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal and American Speech, in regard to claims of xenoglossy.
… From 1988 to 1994 she was the editor of Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). In 1999 she was the Collitz Professor at the LSA summer institute. … In 2009 she served as President of the LSA. In 2000 she was President of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas. She was also Chair of the Linguistics and Language Sciences section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1996, and Secretary of the section from 2001 to 2005.
… She is married to philosopher / computer scientist Richmond Thomason and is the mother of linguist Lucy Thomason. Her mother was the ichthyologist Marion Griswold Grey.
I stand in awe, while noting that she is one of the world’s nicest people, and very funny, but with a quite direct and penetrating manner that crushes foolishness and fuzziness.
Monday male photography: Vallantiro14
July 24, 2023(Images of the male body as sexual object, with discussion of male genitals and man-on-man sex in street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
Beginning the new week with some racy photographic celebrations of the male body from Vallantiro14’s Tumblr site. The first image, Sexy Gardener — of a young man wearing nothing but a fitted white shirt, in the process of watering seedlings in peat pots, viewed from behind so as to display his fine masculine buttocks along with his hairy legs (which promise a hairy chest and hairy forearms, concealed at the moment by the shirt) — came to me from Bill Stewart on 7/20:
(#1) A fine composition, carefully calculated to display the very desirable body of an ordinary guy (not a gym-built model) engaged in useful everyday work (not posing seductively for the viewer)
The fitted shirt shows off his broad shoulders, suggesting the pleasures of his upper body. Meanwhile, his naked buttocks — which are pretty much what the photo is about — peek out from beneath the tail of the shirt. This is what is called, in coarse slang, a hot butt, or in openly dirty talk, a fuckable ass. (As a young man I had such buttocks, often commented on by gay men; my buttocks were then an open announcement of my availability — I just loved getting fucked — and an invitation to guys who wanted to fuck me.)
But the temperature of the photo in #1 is low — just showing, not advertising, though we’re entitled to wonder why this guy is watering seedlings minus his pants.
Well, this is not a photo from everyday life, even a posed one, but a fantasy extension of real life. Vallantiro14 could have given us this photo with the guy in tight shorts that would still display the outlines of his attractive buttocks, but he chose instead to go with the fanciful, putting those buttocks on display.
From Bill Stewart:
title of [Vallantiro14’s blog] blog being “Fashionable”. Lots of pictures, mostly speedos and often in Rio de Janeiro.
That’s where I’m going now. These are hot sexy guys frankly posing seductively, but with their dicks, balls, and asses enclosed in (mostly hot-neon-colored) speedo-style swimsuits, sometimes with visible hard-ons, but always showing off their barely covered dicks and handsome asses. They are also all smooth-bodied and mostly inkless.
Today’s satiric artwork
July 24, 2023Also today’s food art. From Bill Badecker on Facebook this morning:
[The Orange Menace]’s lawyers have assailed the Georgia case in their efforts to derail it ahead of any indictments. “It is one thing to indict a ham sandwich,” some of his lawyers said in a recent court filing. “To indict the mustard-stained napkin that it once sat on is quite another.” – NYT, July 22
With this portrait of Helmet Grabpussy, a.k.a. Mustard Staining Cheesy Ham Sandwich:
Fond as I am of my own mocking names — do not utter the true name of the demon, lest you invoke him — Helmet Grabpussy and The Orange Menace — I admire Mustard Staining Cheesy Ham Sandwich. It is, alas, unwieldy, though I suppose it could be initialized to MSCHS (which has a nice rhythm). Or condensed to MusChee.
A recovery landmark
July 23, 2023(This is highly personal, very directly about the male body (mine) and sexual acts (mine), sometimes in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
The topic makes this very much a Mary, Queen of Scots, Not Dead Yet posting.
The background is that ever since puberty hit me early, at the age of 10, 72 years ago, I’ve had a very high sex drive, which since 2006 (when I last engaged sexually with another person) I have been satisfying myself entirely on my own, by jacking off. Mostly in brief sex breaks (comparable to coffee breaks or snack breaks), occasionally in longer, drawn-out enjoyments with the spur of favorite gay porn on DVD. In recent years, one to three times a day. Uncomplicated and satisfying, and not at all time-consuming.
Now: it turns out that my sex drive is a powerful indicator of the state of my body. If I am sick in any way, it just shuts down. (My ordinary afflictions have no effect, though when my wrist and hand joints are inflamed and aching, jacking off can be painful — but within tolerable limits, and the rush of hormones from coming briefly wipes away the pain.) When I stop wanting to get off, it’s a big warning sign.
I have been seriously sick for some months now, so no sex.
Day before yesterday, I woke in an all-stops-out sex dream, consumed by desire. But I was in bed, and my dick and balls were confined in an adult diaper, and there was no route to satisfaction. Then up and into all the routines of the day, and soon helpers arrived, so I was never on my own.
This morning I blocked out a time after breakfast and snack and before my helper would arrive. Pulled down my diapers and shorts, spit-lubed my dick, and enjoyed the fantasy of some porn, while talking dirty to myself. Smooth route to a satisfying climax. It was wonderful.
Then some cleanup, rearranging my clothes, and I looked like a clean old man again. Who’s back on the recovery train.
Practiced singing from the Sacred Harp along with videos of the Ireland conventions — great stuff, beautifully produced — for half an hour this morning. (It’s pure pleasure and lung therapy, actually prescribed by my doctors.) With an amazing powerful voice that just astonished my helper León, who couldn’t believe this voice was coming from me, like I’d suddenly turned into a different person. Then did two hours of shapenote singing with the Palo Alto Sacred Harp singers, 1 to 3, on Zoom (I hear them, but I’m muted from them) Didn’t do all the songs, mostly because I couldn’t keep up with sight-reading unfamiliar songs, but I did most of them, without flagging, chose four of the songs, and then the two hours flew past.
So I’m getting back in the world again, bit by bit.
Golf caps
July 23, 2023Just working through my response to a comment on a posting of mine (from earlier today), which took me to some new places. Innocently falling into the question of what a golf cap is, something of a morass in the world of categorization and labeling (that, at least, is a recurrent subject on this blog, with a Page here about my postings about it).
So: the posting of mine is “Collard shirts: the backstory”, on golf club dress codes, and the comment came from Robert Coren:
[quoting:] Golf courses usually only permit baseball caps (clean and not beaten up) or straw hats to be worn by players.
[RC:] This surprises me, as it does not seem to include what is generally called a “golf cap”.
It occurred to me that these sites think of golf caps as a separate but related species to baseball caps, rather than viewing them as a subtype of baseball caps (as I was inclined to do).
Collard shirts: the backstory
July 23, 2023From my 7/21 posting “Collard shirts”:
Just went past me on Facebook, a funny-mistake posting (which I didn’t immediately save and now can no longer find) in which a dress code for men stipulates that they must wear a collard shirt (for collared shirt — that is, no t-shirts or tank tops allowed).
Ah, but FB keeps doggedly re-posting old stuff, so the original image has come around again:
No, I don’t know which golf course this is from, but that turns out not to be particularly important, because this mis-spelling is quite common in the world of golf club dress codes.
First, notes on golf course dress codes. Then three examples of such codes (from specific golf clubs) that require collard shirts.
The Flensburg “Primavera”
July 22, 2023From Hana Filip on Facebook yesterday, on these two artworks:
(#1) On the left in HF’s presentation
(#2) On the right[HF] Zeitgeist: “Primavera” (Fritz During, mid 20th cent.), left. The European University of Flensburg removed this statue from its foyer, because the statue has “hips that overemphasize a woman’s reproductive function”. Next to it is a detail from Dürer’s (1504) “Adam and Eve” (where Eve is a typical representation of Dürer’s naked women with wide hips). It does raise questions about what is art, and its reception.
