A Frank Cotham cartoon from the New Yorker on 3/2/20:
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In my unfortunately frail old age, I’m not exactly doing research, and I’m certainly not going to get it in a book. But I collect stuff — ideas, images, experiences — and turn them into daily essays on my blog, much quirkier even than the stuff I used to publish. It’s a new kind of life.
In a time of great distress (the sadness of so many deaths, punctuated by flashes of extraordinary hope), two delightful Wayno/Piraro Bizarro strips to divert my attention: from yesterday (8/11), a sweet strip in which the Pied Piper takes his son into the family business; and from today (8/12), an outrageous pun on the geographical name the Greater Antilles:
(Obviously not for kids or the sexually modest. In fact, it’s deeply, unimaginably, not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Another chapter in the big book of positions for mansex, about a type of three-man encounter. From my AZBlogX posting of 3/31/13, “Threesomes and more”:
A gay spitroast, or spitroasting — or taking it at both ends — involves a man being fucked by one man while sucking another man’s cock. The metaphor is to the spitroasting of meat (pork, lamb. chicken)
… Spitroasting is not particularly hard to pull off, and if you’re the fortunate pig on the spit, the thrusting of the guy fucking you can push your mouth onto the cock of the guy you’re sucking, making the three of you a single sexual engine. In my wild younger days, I was the pig a number of times; it’s a total cockpig experience.
This assumes the canonical gay spitroast, in which the pig’s body is horizontal, and facing downward (so that his ass is easily available for fucking). Yes, there’s also an upward pig variant, and a vertical pig variant too. Illustrations on AZBlogX (in the 8/11/20 posting “Spitroast chronicles”), since hardly any of them could be cropped for this blog; after all, the practice is all about dicks, so its representation in gay porn abounds in penises.
The cover of the 8/17 New Yorker (not yet on the stands), “Double Scoop” by Wayne Thiebaud. Ice cream for the hot summer days.
Not about language, but another tribute to the pleasures of Thiebaud’s art.
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A tour of contrasting, also complementary, ideals of male beauty, and hence of male desirability, as they are played out in the fantasy world of gay male pornography. Apollo (or Adonis) vs. Dionysus (or Bacchus or Priapus), Ganymede (the prototypical catamite) vs. Zeus (the prototypical inseminator), beautiful boy vs. powerful man, worked into conventional forms of porn for men, and then complexly subverted by role reversals in which Apollo penetrates Priapus.
Yes, there’s a site (Twink Top) for that — there’s specialist porn for pretty much every fantasy — as well as at least one site (Fun Size Boys) intensifying and celebrating the boy/man dichotomy (featuring little guys taken sexually by really big guys).
This posting is drenched in mansex discussed in street language and so is utterly inappropriate for kids or the sexually modest.
(There will be a brief dip into a mansex-steamy Tom of Finland drawing, which might offend some readers.)
Today’s Zippy, in which philandering and philately are confounded:
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Word confusions are very common; sometimes they are momentary failures to retrieve the intended word; sometimes they are misapprehensions about the target. Zerbina’s error is apparently of the first type, but she nevertheless has a complaint about Zippy’s attentions to her, though the cause isn’t philandering but philately.
The two words share an etymological component, the phil(a)- (originally ‘love’) part, seen also in philosophy, philodendron, pedophilia, Philadelphia, and much more. But this is scarcely obvious to modern speakers of English.
… mostly fauna, the birds and creatures, squirrels especially. From the little world that I see in my long confinement (now into its sixth month), on the narrow patio outside the big window by my work table. The view from that window on 6/27:
(#1) From the inside of the house: the bird feeder, attached to the outside of the window; in the foreground, succulents (notably a silver Echevaria); a planter with tall-standing calla plants; and an assortment of cymbidium orchid plants; with an ivy-covered wall in the background
The Wayno/Piraro Bizarro from 8/7 features a housefly couple telling the story of how they met:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
Where to begin? Well, it’s a decidedly meta cartoon, in which the characters know they are cartoon characters and comment on that fact. And it’s a cartoon in which parallel worlds are aligned and translated from one to the other: a world of conventional American domesticity (in which couples meet and form relationships, and entertain friends in their home); and a world of fly jokes, turning on the appearance of houseflies in soup at restaurants.
All this held together by a story type in film-making: the meet cute form, in which unlikely accidents of meeting lead to romantic involvements.
(Racy talk and joking about men’s bodies, so probably not to everyone’s taste.)
The background story is an error committed by the Imperator Grabpussy in reading from his text recently, with /θaj/ for /taj/ ‘Thai’, thereby introducing us all to the wonders of Thighland. (Details below.) Wags seized on the error for jokes, and on Facebook Tim Evanson offered photos of the King of Thighland, showing his massive muscular thighs and focusing our attention on the crotch they surround:
(#1) Thigh Guy: Kevin Cesar Portillo, who is all-around massive (he’s 6′5″), a former college basketball player at Miami-Dade CC, Mississippi Valley State, and Ave Maria Univ., now working as a male model (projecting smouldering sexiness) and fitness consultamt
Yesterday, in my posting “Cucumber soup”, it was cucumber and yog(h)urt soups, a topic that led Kathryn Burlingham to post a recipe from the August 2016 issue of bon appétit magazine, for a cucumber-tomatillo gazpacho — “A cool green zingy soup; pack it in a thermos on ice and take it picnicking or to the beach” — that sounds absolutely delicious (with the tomatillos supplyng crucial acidity), and comes with a fabulous piece of food photography (ba regularly produces masterpieces of the genre):
(#1) Cucumber-tomatillo gazpacho
