How does Wilderrama sleep at night?

September 4, 2021

From the tv series NCIS, Season 14 Episode 6, “Shell Game”, an exchange between the NCIS-Agent characters Tim McGee (played by Sean Murray) and Nick Torres (played by Wilmer Valderrama, whose name I am forever telescoping into the portmanteau-like Wilderrama) that turns on joking with senses of the interrogative adverb how — in McGee’s question “How do you sleep at night”, intended to convey modal + means how ‘by what means is it possible?’; and Torres’s response “On my back. Naked.”, conveying truth-functional + state how ‘in what state?’.


(#1) Torres and McGee in the NCIS episode “Love Boat”, Season 14 Episode 4

Then I turn to WV the man, as a hunk with a wonderful smile (two things I post about on a fairly regular basis), and as a performer with a notable actorial persona.

Read the rest of this entry »

From the culture desk: images

September 3, 2021

Or: Pomodoro will get you Bellows, and Monet too. (Backward in time ran the artists until reeled the mind.)

A passing mention of Arnaldo Pomodoro recently — I don’t even remember where — took me immediately (but electronically) to the Columbus Museum of Art, where back in the 1980s the artist installed one of his Sfera con sfera sculptures in a prominent place (the central  courtyard of the museum, as I recall), where I visited it often, to admire it: big, solid, reflective (both literally and figuratively), complex (worlds within worlds).


(#1) Sfera con sfera in Trinity College, Dublin

Searching on Pomodoro and the CMA together then brought me to the Joy of Museums site for the CMA, which promised a Virtual Tour of the museum — but offered only thumbnail sketches of three of the museum’s holdings, not showing them in their settings or giving the history of their acquisition. (The site does offer whatever documentary footage already exists about the museum, but it doesn’t create its own tours of museums.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Briefly noted: the Steeds entertain

September 2, 2021

In the 9/6 New Yorker, Edward Steed offers his own Desert Island cartoon, in which the DIslanders are ready for guests — party hats! a table set for eight! with candelabra! — but none are on the horizon:

Read the rest of this entry »

From the culture desk: admirable words, admirable things

September 2, 2021

(Plain-spoken appreciative references to penises and fellatio, plus an extended and explicit man-on-man sex scene, so not appropriate for kids or the sexually modest.)

Gastronomy, essays, calliphallicity, poetry. Starting with the New Yorker on 9/6/21 — “Food & Drink: An Archival Issue” — in a “Gastronomy Recalled” column there. From the print magazine, the head and subhead for the piece:


(#1) From the great gastronomic essayist M. F. K. Fisher

Then from the on-line magazine, this version, with the accompanying photo (by Carl Mydans / The LIFE Picture Collection / Shutterstock) and its caption:

(#2)
One does not need to be a king to indulge his senses with a dish.

But, with my imperfect aged eyes — I now misread things so often I’ve pretty much stopped cataloging my errors — and my penis-attuned brain — I am an unapologetic phallophile —  what I read was:

One does not need to be a king to indulge his senses with a dick.

Read the rest of this entry »

Clash of the titular Peppers

September 1, 2021

Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, a cartoon that would be totally incomprehensible without several pieces of pop-cultural knowledge:


(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)

Read the rest of this entry »

The snow border collie

September 1, 2021

🐇🐇🐇 It was 8/30, and the comic strip Mother Goose and Grimm went POP!, exploded in a phrasal overlap portmanteau, the one in the title:


(with the snow-sliding dog seen doing an airborne trick in the second panel of the strip).

Not your everyday POP, because it works straightforwardly in pronunciation but works only imperfectly in spelling:

snowboarder + border collie = snow border collie

Distinct spellings, boarder vs. border, homophones in both AmE and BrE (but see below).

Read the rest of this entry »

A stone solid pro

August 31, 2021

(Largely about male prostitution, so distasteful to many, but not, I think, actually over any lines.)

A stone solid pro, a street hustling boy, plying his trade for a better grade of customers, comfortably indoors, in his sexy Water Briefs, at a pool bar:


(#1) [from the Daily Jocks e-mailing of 8/30; ad copy:] Skip through the beach club line ups and go straight to the pool bar in the new PUMP! Water Briefs. The wide waistband on this low-cut cut brief gives you comfort at the waistline. The customised multi layered leg elastic offers the ultimate support and accentuates the butt.

You don’t see an impudent cruise face like — not his real name — Joe Dallesandro’s every day. For the use of his body and his company, you pay $400 (cash) an hour (extra for a few special services), plus the cost of a hotel room at the beach club’s hotel and the expense of a background check on you (he’ll give you references from his regular clients, and, as part of the background check, he has ways of getting references from your previous escorts — JD’s an independent contractor, and a sharp businessman; don’t let that boyish face fool you).

Most high-end hustlers make contact with new johns electronically, but, having come up from working the street as a sassy teen — risky  but thrilling — JD still prefers the physicality of face-to-face negotiation. That also allows him to show his skills at figuring out your desires and fashioning himself into the man who will satisfy them. The cruise of death is just an opening gambit, a kind of best guess as to what you need; experience tells him that most men, especially successful and powerful men, want to be dominated and used.

Read the rest of this entry »

Briefly noted: famous or heinous?

August 30, 2021

Caught in passing on tv, a reference to heinous crimes in which the /h/ of /hénəs/ was so brief that the pronunciation came very close to /énəs krájmz/ anus crimes. I reflected for a moment on what those might be, passing over the obvious and distressing possibility ‘anal rapes’ to consider merely improper alternatives, like farting in public, or crimes that were only figurative, like anal bleaching, that crime against fashion.

But then my attention was caught by the rhyming phrase heinous anus, and I fell into musings about meanings for the expression — see below — until Famous Amos hit me (notes on Wally and his celebrated cookies further below). Oh my, now I had

the Famous Amos heinous anus

and my day was complete.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sweetly earnest and pleasantly gay

August 29, 2021

(A posting that dwells analytically, but also lovingly and in detail, on men’s bodies and man-man sex, so it’s thoroughly unsuited for kids and the sexually modest.)

Sweetly earnest and pleasantly gay, also, a superhunky muscle bottom (descriptors the man himself laughingly accepts as compliments); a “voracious bottom” (or eager receptive, to put it in more distanced technical terms), as an interviewer put it a while back; and something of a queen (a descriptor he occasionally uses of himself as well as the other “queens in recovery” in his alcoholism support group). This is gay pornstar Beau Butler, who appeared earlier on this blog in my 5/3/21 posting “With knitted brows”, because brow-knitting is one of his Serious Faces, frequently displayed during sex with other men, in particular while he’s being pronged by a Raging Stallion co-worker on a mensroom sink in the porn flick Show Hard. I write co-worker because though Butler is indeed an eager receptive, both personally and professionally, he also views his sex work as a job — requiring specialized skills, attention to the tasks at hand, and teamwork, and following demanding routines and schedules — a job that he approaches with a serious work ethic.

Butler gets another blog posting because of the way he looks — amiably faggy — in a Raging Stallion e-mail ad (for the flick The Territory) that came to me on 8/27 (without identification of the actors in it). And that opens the way for more musing on gay male identities and personas; and more musing on the way personal and social lives are structured in the making of gay porn.

Read the rest of this entry »

Desert Island Days

August 28, 2021

And still they come — for good reason, I’ll argue below. Desert Island (or DI [*note]) cartoons (DIcs), two in today’s catch: a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro DIc from 8/26 (with a contentedly solitary DIslander); and a JAK (Jason Adam Katzenstein) DIc from the 8/30 New Yorker (with two DIslanders contemplating a pile of unread messages in a bottle). Plus a bonus appendix on that great icon of DIslanders, Ben Gunn.

[* as I’ve started to call them, begging the tolerance of any Detective Inspectors who might be reading this blog]

Read the rest of this entry »