Kim Darnell reported to me this morning that while walking her dogs she’d come across a hydrangea garden with one variety she’d never seen before. With a bit of effort, I identified it as the ‘lacecap’ variety of the bigleaf, or snowball, hydrangea, Hydrangea macrophylla:
(#1) Floral fireworks!
While searching for lacecap images, I stumbled on something even more remarkable: hydrangea cakes.
(Guy in a minimal swimsuit from the Colombian company Jor, suggestive text, but nothing at all hard-core.)
The Daily Jocks sale ad yesterday, with my caption:
(#1) JOR: LATINO SPIRIT
Jor, son of Toro and Jordache
Lovingly hand-made
Lean, festive, resilient
Shines sexily in the sunLies proudly under Panama,
Has jungle liaisons with
Pacific Ecuador,
Caribbean VenezuelaBoasts cheekily in Bogotá
Of his tough style
Saturday night was Midsummer’s Eve (St. John’s Eve), yesterday Midsummer Day (St. John’s Day) — so that last night was Midsummer Night, when the fairies frolic. (As they did indeed, at SF Pride events.) Meanwhile there are cartoons: a Bill Whitehead Free Range cartoon from 9/6/17, in the July 2018 issue of Funny Times; a John Atkinson Wrong Hands cartoon that came to me from Eleanor Houck; and a Scott and Borgman Zits cartoon in today’s King Features feed.
First come the cartoons, then come the holidays. (Apologies to Brecht and his Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral — pleasure first, then the serious stuff.)
The Bizarro/Wayno collaboration on the 21st is another exercise in cartoon understanding (but a relatively easy one):
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
You need to know the basic outline of a European legend (the major clues to which are the reference to ridding a town of rats and the unusual word pied in the title), and you need to know something about musical instruments (to recognize that the sousaphone — named in the title — plays the role of the (musical) pipe in the legend).
Then there’s more to be said about the parallels between the cartoon world and the legend world, with special reference to wind instruments (of which the sousaphone is the largest). Which leads me to the rich world of the legend and its connection to the real world. And the fictivity of stories; there’s a fair amount of factuality, or at least real-world context, in the legend. And from there — surprise! — to St. John and Paul’s Day next week (June 26th). And from there — another surprise! — to eunuchs and the social world of the Roman Empire.
This Instagram photo by Eric Darvoy @Pixdar on Twitter:
(#1) Soies Zwicky & Co. door at 36 Boulevard de Sébastopol, Paris
The Zwicky silk thread company (of Wallisellen in Canton Zürich, Switzerland), most recently visited in my posting on the 19th, “A Swiss thread”. Apparently, in the 1940s, the company had an office in Paris, with these imposing doors.
Pride Saturday in SF today (including some events that my grand-daughter will take part in); then the parade tomorrow (which I will watch via the miracle of live streaming by KPIX); then on Monday the 25th, the birthday of Saint George Michael of the Beverly Tearoom, the patron saint of parks at night; and finally on Thursday the 28th, actual Stonewall Day (recalling the Stonewall Inn riots of 1969).
For today: two kinds of rainbow food (rainbow cupcakes and rainbow roll sushi); Pride underwear, including two lines of rainbow underwear; and an entertaining accessory (a pink triangle pin, another creation in a long tradition of slogan buttons, stickers, patches, banners, etc. as well as nonverbal designs: the various Pride flags, the plain pink triangle, lavender-colored objects, etc., including my Forever Gay pin).
This morning’s name: the verb pixelate. Based on the noun pixel, with at least three senses, in NOAD:
verb pixelate (also pixellate or pixilate): [with object] [a] divide (an image) into pixels, typically for display or storage in a digital format. [b] (be pixelated) (of an image on a computer screen or other display) be enlarged so far that the viewer sees the individual pixels that form the image, the enlargement having reached the point at which no further detail can be resolved. [c] display an image of (someone or something) on television as a small number of large pixels, typically in order to disguise someone’s identity.
It’s sense c that I’m especially interested in here. That, and the ambiguity of
/ˈpɪksəletəd/
between pixelated, the PST/PSP of this V, and a very different Adj pixilated.
(Men in underwear, racy references, but otherwise unthreatening.)
A recent Daily Jocks Underwear Club brings us more of the 2eros model in #1 of my June 6th posting “Now We Are Nine, a Journey to the East”:
(#1) Up in the air, sky-high, sky-high
“Aeroflotation has
Transformed my life”, writes
Satisfied user RoRo F.
“For one thing, my
Sex life has improved
86% in only two weeks.”
This week’s Drunk Cartoon from Bob Eckstein brings us the Oddburgercouple.:
(#1) The Burger King and Ronald McDonald share a moment of post-coital bliss
Two creepy mascots for competing burger behemoths seize a moment of forbidden love — Romeo coupling with Julio, Tony with Mario — and share an after-cliché.
