Sunday’s pseudonym synchronicity

May 27, 2025

(Well-endowed porn actors and masturbation sleeves are on the menu, so this posting is unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

On Sunday, my e-mail once again brought me, by happy accident, two mailings (as it happened, back-to-back this time) on a theme (AMZ pseudonyms this time). As reported in that day’s posting, “Gigantic cylinders”, the earlier fortuitous confluence had to do with two gigantic solid-cylindrical things: one raunchy — porn actor Sir Peter’s gigantic penis — and one innocent — White Giant calla lilies — while Sunday’s pseudonymy theme involved, first a raunchy name — Baxxx, the name of a fitness model and gay porn actor (aka Baxter Linn), who’s now the spokesperson for the Fleshjack masturbation sleeve — and then, in the very next message, an innocent name — BigAlex, the trade name for a fancy walking cane that my friend Bonnie Bendon Campbell uses.

Both of these names fortuitously allude to AMZ pseudonyms. I am sometimes Alex Adams, or just Alex, and I am sometimes ba (for biiig arnold, a playful spelling for the jocular Big Arnold). I am also the creator of XXX-rated comic homoerotic collages, so I could be said to be baXXX. And then from Big Arnold and Alex for Arnold, we get Big Alex / BigAlex.

Knowing the history of my pseudonyms, Bonnie was entirely aware of the significance of the name BigAlex, so sent me a photo of her cane. Fleshjack’s guy being called Baxxx, however, was just a wonderful surprise — an onomastic windfall.

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Gigantic cylinders

May 25, 2025

(A good bit that’s totally unsuitable, in subject matter and language, for kids and the sexually modest)

This posting started out on 5/21 as two separate postings, each about extraordinary size, about a thing that caused viewers (me included, in each case) to marvel at its size.

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Movies

May 25, 2025

The product of an odd night, in which I slept from 7:30 pm to 4:56 am, with a waking period between 2 and 3, when I worked through ideas swirling in my head, demanding to be explored, plus sexual arousal that needed satisfying before I could drop back to sleep, slipping into wonderful dreams, about movies (who knows why; I was aiming for a fresh edition of one of my favorite affectionate sex stories, but that’s not what I got), until I woke feeling happy and refreshed  — but had to assemble notes on the movie stuff, so it’s 6:30 and I just got to my morning vitals (which are dramatically good) and now really really need breakfast, before I can tell you about the movies.

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The 5/26 New Yorker

May 24, 2025

The latest issue of the magazine has two cartoons I want to pick out for comment, one (by Mick Stevens) because it’s an addition to Arnoldia, the domain of things with the name Arnold; the other (by David Sipress) because it’s a pointed comment on this alarming and dangerous time in my country.

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Instruments of death

May 23, 2025

Today’s Bizarro brings us the percussion section of a marching band, a section composed entirely of Grim Reapers — yes, Reaper percussion, portmanteaued to Reapercussion:


Wayno’s title: “Halftime Dirge” — since they’re marching on a (US) football field (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

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Let’s recap

May 23, 2025

Yesterday on this blog, in “Not in a bad mood, just smart”, I looked at this cartoon panel that had appeared on Facebook:


(#1) Image plus text; the image was pretty clearly from Calvin and Hobbes (isn’t that Susie?), but the text (expressing a sentiment  that resonated with me in current times, packaged in a slogan, or tag line) was unfamiliar to me

Then the searches.

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Not in a bad mood, just smart

May 22, 2025

The abbreviated form of a slogan, or tag line, that I came across on Facebook this morning, in what appeared to be a panel from a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon (see the Watterson signature), or could be an extract from such a panel with the tag line added (we live in a world that has both old Photoshop and new AI, so such things are trivially easy to arrange):


(#1) I had a thought of using this as a visual distillation of my attitude towards the current US government, but I wanted to get the credit right; that became a problem I haven’t yet solved

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The Vouch Joke

May 22, 2025

(Warning: this will end up with a naked man on all fours, in a display that’s meant to be sexual rather than jocular)

I had occasion this morning to vouch for Scott Schwenter (Ohio State professor of Hispanic linguistics) having gotten a PhD from Stanford, and in doing so alluded to the Vouch Joke, which I heard many years ago from Paul Benacerraf (Princeton professor of philosophy, especially the philosophy of mathematics, and the director of my senior thesis in mathematics back in 1962). PB told the joke as Alonzo Church’s only known joke (AC, a distinguished professor of mathematics at Princeton, was another of my professors and was on my thesis committee); relevant to PB’s telling of the joke, AC was one of the most earnest, least playful people I have ever known (but he was good-hearted and not without his quirks, one of which was a passion for murder mysteries, another a meticulous enthusiasm for atlases and gazetteers), and he was an American WASP Christian, a lifelong Presbyterian, while PB was a Jew, a genuinely cosmopolitan one, with an early life in Paris and Caracas before establishing firm roots in New Jersey as a teenager.

All this religious stuff is important because the joke as AC told it was thoroughly whitebread. It has two main characters (both male): the vouchee, the subject of the joke, who is interrogated by some kind of authority about his status (“Who are you?” and “Why are you here?”); and the voucher, the person the subject offers as someone who can vouch for him — two characters that AC gave WASP names to (an ordinary name like Harold for the subject and Richard for the voucher). In telling me the joke, PB prefaced it by giving the names AC used, but then actually performed the joke as a Jewish joke, in which the subject was called something like Abie and the voucher was named Moishe.

“Moishe will vouch for me; get Moishe!”

In my opinion, this makes it funnier — as a general principle, Jewish jokes are funnier than other jokes, because Jewish jokes originate as stories told by Jews for other Jews, and they are affectionate or self-deprecating or instructive or some combination of these, neither aggressive nor contemptuous — and even more delightful as a kind of commentary on AC’s whitebread version.

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Drikkende gutt

May 21, 2025

A mid-week refreshment.

Coming up repeatedly in my Pinterest mailings, Per Palle Storm’s Drikkende gutt (Drinking boy) (1930), a male nude statue set in a fountain in Oslo. A remarkable study of powerful masculine muscularity while conveying youth and vulnerability at the same time. Two views:


(#1) From the front


(#2) From the rear

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Morning Italian jobs

May 20, 2025

(This will, somewhat surprisingly, eventually veer into men’s bodies and some man-on-man sex, recounted in street language, so it’s not for kids or the sexually modest; I’m sorry, but not even the best of Verdi opera and Italian tennis can quite counterbalance naked guys going at it with one another)

Today’s morning names were Rigoletto and Sinner, and for a change I knew exactly why they were in my head: Rigoletto is the name of an opera by Verdi (from which the magnificent quartet Bella figli dell’amore was playing on my music feed during my 2 am whizz break); and Sinner is the surname of someone who turns out to be an astoundingly famous Italian tennis player but was known to me only from a Sergio Scalise Facebook posting yesterday in which this Sinner was identified as a great champion who does commercials for De Cecco, Lavazza, and La Roche — I am, famously, deeply ignorant of sports; and also, despite Sergio’s occasional attempts at educating me, neglectfully ignorant of matters social, cultural, and political in today’s Italy (I’m not merely not au courant, but actually inert). This is Jannik Sinner; I had never laid eyes on him until this morning (I’ve been entertained by a recent Lavazza commercial, but it’s one for the American audience and doesn’t have Jannik Sinner in it). I go on at such length about JS because my readers from or connected to Italy will find it impossible to believe that I had no idea who Sinner — that athletic and cultural phenom — is.

Now, the coming program: about Rigoletto, briefly; about Jannik Sinner, at greater length, with a note about Lavazza coffee commercials; a side note about Google searches; and then a raunchy digression on the Italian jobs of the title.

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