Pointed to Alex Norris’s Webcomic Name — that’s its name — by Max Meredith Vasilatos (to choose her web name) some years ago, I stumbled on his strip LIFE DRAWING of 10/6/17 — about, in some sense of about, genitals — which I’ll display for you in a moment. But first I need to put this strip in context.
Understanding genitals
June 4, 2024Suddenly high summer
June 4, 2024I wrote a little while ago about how my plants had decided that summer was upon them, weeks before summer beckoned on the calendar: the cymbidium orchids went into summer dormancy, and the hydrangea (which flourishes in mid-summer) sent up gigantic flower stalks, quickly crowned by green flower buds that will turn to bright pink.
Today (June 4th) was indisputably, quite suddenly, a high summer day, with a high temperature of just over 90F. The hydrangea is loving it. Alarmingly.
Today’s hybrid mail
June 3, 2024A flyer for a 2025 concert series — Chamber Music San Francisco’s season in Palo Alto — which I was about to toss without further attention (it’s been many years since I’ve been able to go to concerts), when I looked at the address: it was mailed to Conrad Zwicky at my home address in Palo Alto.
How did that happen?
P&G feel the agony of St. Sebastian
June 2, 2024That’s Pierre et Gilles, the French collaborative artists — playful, way gay, outrageous, and exceptionally fond of sailors — and their approach to what I called, in a 5/20/11 posting, that
widespread and powerful homoerotic subject in artworks, the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian
From that posting, a P&G depiction of the arrow-pierced, agonized saint:
(#1) Saint Sebastian (1987), focused on the beauty of the young male body; this saint seems more anxious about the future than writhing in agony, and the composition is otherwise restrained
P&G have used StS as a subject at least seven times. I was moved to post on their treatments of the saint by encountering a remarkably campy depiction of him on Pinterest this morning:
Not Super or Elmer’s, but almost
June 1, 2024Today’s Zippy strip, with a burlesque of a 1982 Elvis Costello song, notably covered by Chet Baker in 1987:
(#1) Zippy burlesques the first lines — Almost blue / Almost doing things we used to do — and the final lines — Almost you / Almost me / Almost blue — but in the middle he goes off, not into the wild blue yonder, but, stickily, into the glue
In case you didn’t get the allusion, Bill Griffith gives us a hint with his title “Almost Chet Baker”, pointing to a remarkable performance of “Almost Blue” by the jazz trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker.
The Queen’s indigo
June 1, 2024🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit, busting out all over (as these prolific creatures are prone to do) for June
A follow-up to yesterday’s posting “Queens Pride”, about this digital composition:
(#1) Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, in the 7 ROY G. BIV, or Newtonian rainbow, colors, rather than the 6 Pride Flag colors — so the composition was probably not intended to celebrate the wonderful LGBTQ+ness of June; but let’s just disregard that
Well, QEII #7 is in purple, not violet. Then there’s #6, which should be indigo (a famously elusive color) but strays far from Newton’s rainbow band of that name, so provoking a Facebook exchange between Joel B. Levin (JBL) and me (AZ):
Queens Pride
May 31, 2024To mark the eve of Pride Month, this digital composition passed on by Steven Levine on Facebook today:
Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, in the 7 ROY G. BIV, or Newtonian rainbow, colors, rather than the 6 Pride Flag colors — so the composition was probably not intended to celebrate the wonderful LGBTQ+ness of June; but let’s just disregard that
Now, the composition supplies a number of tokens of the Queen Elizabeth II type, so I had to consider whether my title for this posting would be Queen’s Pride (one QEII type) or Queens’ Pride (many QEII tokens). This is a familiar sort of problem, cropping up annually when Mother’s / Mothers’ Day and Father’s / Fathers’ Day come around, and I’ve chosen the same solution for my title that I chose for those two commercial holidays: axe the damn apostrophe. It’s Queens Pride.
Cited!
May 31, 2024🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for ultimate May, slavering to devour the steamy rabbits of June; but first, a drama of citations
It started on 5/27, in my posting “Extremely famous in a very small world”, where my rheumatologist reported that he had come across me cited, in Kory Stamper’s Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries (2017), as an an authority on linguistics (for my writing about the recency illusion).
To which Mike Pope, a technical writer and editor currently at Google, responded on Facebook with a comparison to his 2022 book Crash Blossoms, Eggcorns, Mondegreens & Mountweazels: 101 Terms About Language That You Didn’t Know You Needed.
In the can
May 30, 2024Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro takes us to the world of talking tennis balls, where one of them commits a bathroom pun on the noun can ‘cylindrical metal container’:
(#1) Cylindrical metal containers are highly salient to tennis balls, because such cans are how they’re sold (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
Meanwhile, Wayno’s title for #1 — “Today’s Ballsy Cartoon” — offers a different pun, on (tennis) balls, a mildly raunchy one: ballsy ‘tough, courageous”, a derivative in –y (tricky < trick, mushy < mush, etc.) from crude slang balls ‘testicles’. And my title for this posting (“In the can”) offers another pun on cylindrical container can; from NOAD:
phrase in the can: informal on tape or film and ready to be broadcast or released: all went well, the film was in the can.
Now for some details.
Q: What’s woolly, engorged, and good at scaffolding?
May 29, 2024for the antepenultimate day of May …
A: The Mammoth Erection company, providing scaffolding design and erection services, based in the northern Toronto suburb of Aurora ON. A genuine company that’s been around for several decades but was only this afternoon brought to my attention (on Facebook). My delighted attention, given that I’m a serious fan of both mammoths (of the woolly sort) and erections (of the penile sort).
One of the company’s enormous trucks, for transporting piles of scaffolding material:
(#1) The company name embraces a pun on the adjective mammoth ‘huge’, as you can see from the company logo in close-up:
