Caught on Pinterest this morning, this hot man-on-man kiss, from the illustrator Noah:
(#1) One of a great many of Noah’s gay cowboy drawings; the flowers in the holster are an especially nice touch
Regular readers of this blog will know that images of men kissing men are some of my favorite things; meanwhile, cowboys are a major theme of gay male fantasy. Noah celebrates the fact that, as Ned Sublette’s song has it:
Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other
Stability was the theme of my 5/15 appointment with Luis Alvarez (my nephrologist — who, since advanced kidney disease is my most salient affliction, has been in effect serving as my main physician). He was delighted with the most recent lab tests (everything holding at a good level) and with what he saw by examining and feeling various parts of my body and by observing my speech and behavior. He said to go on doing what I was doing and get an appointment in, wow, six months.
I allowed that I’d gotten used to the idea that death wasn’t very far off (every day is a surprising gift, to be treasured; my motto has been the Pythonic Mary Queen of Scots cry: Not Dead Yet), and he said that was reasonable before, but not now, since I probably had a long life still in front of me. And then we chatted for a while about the nature of diagnosis and prediction, as he and I are inclined to do.
Breezed past me on Facebook this morning, this Benjamin Schwartz cartoon (from the 5/6/19 issue of the New Yorker) that made me laugh out loud at its absurdity:
(#1) So festive! Transform any cocktail, in any kind of cocktail glass (the one in the cartoon is a coupe /kup/, a good glass for, say, a daiquiri), into a shrimp cocktail, by hanging some shelled, chilled cooked shrimp (such as anyone might just happen to have a pocketful of on them — this is where I dissolved in laughter) all around the lip of the glass
Even better: the classic shrimp cocktail is already an antic hors d’œuvre, a preposterously elaborate presentation of shrimp, sauce, and sourness (most often, from a lemon slice) that might have been served more simply on a tasty bit of bread, or in a small bowl or cup. With a name — shrimp cocktail — that’s a pun.
So what we see in #1 is in fact goofy-squared.
Passed along by two friends on Facebook recently, this Manchild Manor cartoon, deploying Kix breakfast cereal in a pun on the title (of the theme song for a tv show) “Get Your Kicks on Route 66”:
(#1) If you don’t know the song, this cartoon is incomprehensible
(I don’t know where or when this cartoon first appeared, and I couldn’t find it on the (sizable) Instagram page for the strip; I’ve appealed to the cartoonist, but in my experience, most artists view such queries as just a nuisance drag on their time, so they’re not inclined to reply. If he gets back to me, I’ll add his information to this posting.)
[Added on 5/22. Never assume. The cartoonist — Tim Thavirat, now living in San Diego CA after some time in Austin TX — has now replied, and even thanked me for sharing his work on my blog. This cartoon is from 10/25/18, early in the days of his cartoon page — a silly pun that tickled his fancy.]
The seasons come and go, but rather erratically, as indicated by the plants in my little patio container garden. Normally, the winter rains cease around the beginning of April and summer heat arrives here in the Bay area early in June, and then the flowers on my cymbidium orchids (which are winter blooming plants, in flower from January through May) gradually turn brown and drop to the ground, and the plants go into dormancy until December, when new flower shoots begin to appear; and at the same time my big-leaved hydrangea (H. macrophylla) sends up its flower stalks, to bloom in mid-summer.
This year has, on average, been warmer than usual, with occasional one- or two-day bursts of high heat. So, even though it’s not particularly hot at the moment, my plants have switched into summer mode. Quite spectacularly.
Joel B. Levin has sent me e-mail from a stopover in Reykjavik, where he enjoyed a tour “to see and smell sulfurous hot water at the original Geysir” and was treated to a viewing of the wrestlers statue outside the Geysir Glíma Restaurant. So, knowing my interest in artworks and also in men’s bodies, JBL sent me his photos of the sculpture:
(#1) Side view of the Glíma wrestlers
(#2) Front view of the Glíma wrestlers
At least four things here: the Viking sport of Glíma; the statue’s association with the restaurant; the statue as artwork; and the problematics of intimate contact between men’s bodies in wrestling.
Today’s Sunday Bizarro by Dan Piraro, yet another Bizarro Psychiatrist cartoon, this time with a guy in need of a shrink ‘act of shrinking’, appealing to a shrink ‘headshrinker, psychotherapist’ (so it’s a pun cartoon too):
shrink ‘psychotherapist’ has become so ordinary a term in American English that its connection to the change-of-state verb shrink and the noun headshrinker is no longer salient to many speakers, with the result that the pun has some genuine surprise value (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page)
Earlier today, Pinterest offered me this arresting painting by American artist John Koch:
(#1) Koch’s After the Sitting: the artist and his male model
Koch (1909 – 1978) was famous as a painter of New York society, but also produced studies of the male body, including male nudes (also female nudes, but that’s not my focus here), and many of working-class men. This made him an American 20th-century counterpart to the French 19th-century painter Gustave Caillebotte (1848 – 1894), another society painter who did startling male nudes and depictions of working-class men. And to some degree comparable to the American society painter John Singer Sargent (1856 – 1925), who also produced many male nudes and sketches of working-class men.
… take 2. Previously on this blog (in my 5/11 posting “The gay handshake”), a quote from GoNakedMagazine and Travels, on the Medium site, “The Gay Handshake: 5 Reasons Why Blowjobs [Are] Good for Your Health” … with this wonderful photo of a handsome young Latino character enjoying an especially long and thick churro filled with vanilla cream:
(#1) Chavo con churro (Mexican nickname Chavo ‘kid’), as I’ve come to think of him, in a photo I’ve been unable to find the source of
And then in the last few days I’ve been blitzed with tv commercials for Subway footlong snacks to accompany their footlong subs. From the Subway newsroom:
Subway® Reveals Sidekicks, an Irresistible Collection of Footlong Cookies, Churros and Pretzels
Three beloved snacks — Subway’s chocolate chip cookies, Cinnabon® churros and Auntie Anne’s® pretzels — take on a new, iconic footlong form, exclusively at Subway restaurants starting January 22.
In today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, the punning portmanteau pontiff no return:
pontiff ‘the Pope’ + point of no return ‘point at which turning back is no longer possible’ = pontiff no return ‘the Pope will not return (for some time)’ in a simplified register — foreigner talk, caveman talk, Tonto talk, etc. (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
