(Much about men’s bodies and mansex, in plain language, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

On Shrove Tuesday (the 13th), the season of Carnival — etymologically, the time for putting away the flesh (for the season of Lent) — reaches its height. From NOAD:

noun carnival: a period of public revelry at a regular time each year, typically during the week before Lent in Roman Catholic countries, involving processions, music, dancing, and the use of masquerade: the culmination of the week-long carnival | Mardi Gras is the last day of carnival … ORIGIN mid 16th century: from Italian carnevale, carnovale, from medieval Latin carnelevamen, carnelevarium ‘Shrovetide’, from Latin caro, carn– ‘flesh’ + levare ‘put away’.

In the gay precincts of the world, we strive to put the carnal —

adj. carnal: relating to physical, especially sexual, needs and activities: carnal desire. ORIGIN late Middle English: from Christian Latin carnalis, from caro, carn- ‘flesh’.

into Carnival, to flagrantly celebrate the sins of the flesh. Recent bulletins: two Daily Jocks ads that largely abandon the pretense of selling comfort, support, and style in favor of providing outright soft gay porn; and a look back at a gay hard porn classic, Kristen Bjorn’s Carnaval in Rio, with a fond recollection of Gilvan Couto manfully coping with Caio Amaral’s astonishing 14″ uncut black dick (with some notes on race relations in the postcolonial world).

Pitsntits beefcake for Carnival. Combined with a cocktease — trunks pulled down to show the top of a black jockstrap. Open inviting mouth. All for Helsinki Athletica.

(#1) Take a sweaty Finnhunk to bed

Fargo adores his sleek body. Totally self-absorbed while performing a Carnival cocktease in his Code 22s. In public:

(#2) See me, feel me, touch me I

And admires his inflamed pouch:

(#3) See me, feel me, touch me II

Though this ad does come with high-style copy:

(#4)

Carnaval in Rio: a Fat Tuesday cock. From my 2/26/13 posting “Kristen Bjorn”:

I came to Bjorn through the 1989 Carnaval, which is a triumph of hardcore porn, beautifully constructed and photographed

That posting dwelt especially on a long scene pairing lovers Erico Ventana and Renato Soares, but had notes on all sections of the film, including a scene between Caio Amaral and Gilvan Couto, who first encounter each other dancing on the street. From the Bjorn website:

The samba school parade is in full swing in Rio’s famous sambadrome. In the midst of the amazing parade are a pair of hot studs: dark skinned, mega hung Caio Amaral, and fair skinned, handsome Gilvan Couto. After the parade, the two go back to Caio’s place, and before they even have a chance to take off their flimsy costumes, Gilvan pulls out Caio’s gigantic [14″ uncut] dick and swallows it as deep as he can [which is not very deep]. Caio then pins Gilvan against the wall, and slides his huge boner into Gilvan’s tight, pink hole. Caio fucks deep [again, not all that deep, only about halfway in], and pulls out just in time to park a load of cum on Gilvan’s ass. The two then shoot another hot load of cum into each others mouths before the fucking starts all over again. During this scene, Gilvan shoots four times, and majorly hung Caio squirts a total of seven pop-shots all over Gilvan!

It’s all about cock and cum, very intense. You can see Gilvan about to go down on Caio (both still in remnants of their samba costumes) in an AZBlogX posting yesterday “Caio Amaral’s 14 inches”. In a cropped version:

(#4)

From this scene alone, you can see that the 14-inch estimate has got to be close to accurate. One side benefit of Caio’s dick size is that his scenes with a receptive Gilvan are a feast for worshipers of visible cock, since Gilvan can take at most half of Caio’s meat down his throat or up his ass.

Then there’s the black-on-white aspect of the encounter. Not just black on white (though that’s how American viewers of the film will see things, through their own racial lens), but black on white in a modern Brazilian context, where there are three historically relevant social groups — descendants of the  indigenous peoples of Brazil, descendants of the colonizing European population (from Portugal, in this case), and descendants of sub-Saharan Africans brought to Brazil as slaves (plus descendants of various voluntary immigrant groups) — and various groups of multiracial people. Labeling for race and ethnicity is complex; from Wikipedia:

The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), that conducts censuses in Brazil since 1940, racially classifies the Brazilian population in five categories: branco (white), pardo (brown), preto (black) [the Brazilian Census System uses only these three], amarelo (yellow), and indigenous. As in international practice, individuals are asked to self identify within these categories.

… As the IBGE itself acknowledges, these categories are disputed, and most of the population dislike it and do not identify with them. Most Brazilians see “Indígena” as a cultural rather than racial term, and don’t describe as such if they are part of the mainstream Brazilian culture; many Brazilians would prefer to self-describe as “morenos” (used in the sense of “tanned” or “brunettes”); some Black and parda people, more identified with the Brazilian Black movement, would prefer to self-describe as “Negro” as an inclusive category containing pardos and pretos; and if allowed to choose any classification, Brazilians will give almost 200 different answers.

(In the Census system, Caio is preto and Gilvan blanco.)

In a postcolonial world, the details of race and ethnicity differ startlingly from place to place: the situation in the US in general is not the same as the situation in Brazil, Haiti, Cuba, or the British West Indies, and there are significant differences from place to place within these areas. In addition, populations move around, so that we now have (for example) significant groups of Haitians and Cubans in South Florida, and huge numbers of “blacks” in the UK, the largest portion of whom came from the West Indies.

In any case, Caio and Gilvan’s sexual encounter on-screen is racially charged — both transgressive and defiant — though not in quite the same way as it would be in an American or British context. (Kristen Bjorn — it’s a stage name — was born in London but raised in Washington DC, and makes gay porn for primarily American audiences, though set in locations around the world, using local men as actors.)

(Men in sexy underwear, primed for Hot Action Now, so not to everyone’s taste.)

A Daily Jocks ad to usher in the Year of the Dog:

(#1)

The ad copy makes a nod to comfort, but mostly it’s all about pulling guys in to your dick and butt, you dog:

The All New Cellblock 13 Velocity Jock Brief  takes your sexy fetish look up a notch. It features a textured polyamide/spandex pouch that showcases your goods just right, and the softness on the inside will feel great against your package. Butt straps give your ass that perfect amount of lift, and contrast colour banding throughout provides accent.

(It comes in blue, red, and orange, and as a trunk as well as a jock brief.)

The relevant sense of dog, from among the pages of senses in GDoS:

3. senses based on sexuality … (c) (orig. US) a promiscuous man or woman [1st cite 1885; representative cite: 1915 H.L. Wilson Ruggles of Red Gap … His lordship was by way of being a bit of a dog.]

Ad copy for the bodywear company, from Daily Jocks:

CellBlock13 is the raunchy big daddy to its founder Timoteo. Created with a unique style for the man that likes to get down and dirty in his underwear choices, you’ll love CellBlock13’s risqué and seductive designs.

Fantasy homowear. In the Velocity series, homowear for big butch scruffy hairy guys, not at all like the classic underwear model, who’s all sleek and smooth. Shots of the Velocity jock brief, front and rear:

(#2) Ventral view
(#3) Dorsal view

Furry chest, belly, forearms, legs, and butt. Plus an extraordinary fierce tattoo that begins on his right pec and shoulder and continues through on his back. Just the stuff to reel in his prey. Go, dawg.

(Men showing off their bodies. Racy but not X-rated.)

The main image from yesterday’s Daily Jocks ad, for a sale on Code 22 clothing — with my caption:

(#1)

Camo Traplat, the
Darling of the locker room,
Flexes for the boys, from
Pecs to glutes,
Sweats up his red-hot
Training tank top.

The front view:

(#2)

The ad copy, stressing the ineffable virtues of the clothing rather than its carnal attractions:

CODE 22 is an expression of defining men’s swimwear, underwear and sportswear design. CODE 22 gives meaning to the words balance, confidence and masculinity.

Now about the model and his excellent muscular body.

Musclehunks come in a number of varieties. The guy above is wonderfully fit, but notched up a degree into the homofantasy zone: a fantasy sexual partner for many guys, but a body you can appreciate as a beautiful object even if it’s too exaggerated to work as an actual object choice for you. Either way, the guy’s a creation, designed to appeal to men who can fantasize about being him, or doing him, or both.

This particular guy isn’t smooth and sleek like a standard male model, but instead projects a rough-edged butch masculinity: facial scruff and lightly furred body, plus the hyperbolic musculature.

Contrast this with a very different sort of body-type creation: the competitive bodybuilder. Serious bodybuilders aim especiallfor two things: sheer size of muscles, and clear separation of each individual muscle from the others. At its height, this gives us creations like the following:

(#3) Compare this rear view to the one in #1

Two quite different approaches to musclehunkitude.

(Men’s bodies and mansex, not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Yesterday’s Daily Jocks ad, for the Erebus line of underwear from the 2Eros company, an ad that spins out an fantasy of delicious dark sexiness. Two montages showing the new Nightmare color (dark violet) and the new Underworld color (dark blue) — earlier colors are Darkness (black) and Inferno (red) — with my perfervid caption below the fold:

(#1) Darko in Nightmare

(#2) Darko in Underworld

Darko serves Lord
Erebus as his
Acolyte in the
Subterranean world of
Secret mansex

Guiding men to
Delicious release in a
Dirty mensroom stall, to a
Noisy coupling in a
Dim orgy room at the
Gay baths, to that
Perfect explosive moment on the
Altar of sex in the
Bushes at night

Smells of crotch sweat,
Tastes of sweet salty cum

Eyes down in
Shameful pleasure,
Eyes forward in
Insolent knowledge of
Men’s desires

The ad is selling the fantasy of men’s bodies as objects of sexual desire —  that’s just standard for most brands of premium men’s underwear these days — but it’s also wrapping this in an elaborate fantasy of delicious dark dirtiness, made somewhat less outrageous by framing it all as coming from Greek myth. My caption plays up the outrageous.

The myth. From Wikipedia:

(#3) Portrait of Erebus, by Lukartig on DeviantArt

In Greek mythology, Erebus, also Erebos (Greek: Ἔρεβος, “deep darkness, shadow”), was often conceived as a primordial deity, representing the personification of darkness; for instance, Hesiod’s Theogony identifies him as one of the first five beings in existence, born of Chaos.

The name Darko. It suits the character in my caption, but in fact the name has nothing to do with darkness. From Wikipedia:

Darko (Serbian Cyrillic: Дарко) is a common South Slavic masculine given name. It is derived from the Slavic root dar ‘gift’.

Think of Darko above as bringing the gift of darkness to troubled souls.

I don’t know how, but somehow I missed the ad videos from Dollar Shave Club — until Kim Darnell stumbled across their “Buttery Dunes” video a few days ago. A follow-up to “Butter Safe Than Sorry”. Those were in 2017. Back in 2013, DSC came out with “Let’s Talk About #2”, an ad for its line of butt wipes.

Full of double entendres, raunchy images, puns, and absurdity.

I’ll take them in reverse chronological order.

“Buttery Dunes”. From AdWeek on 11/9/17, “Dollar Shave Club Stays Ridiculous With a Visit to Creamy Shave Butter Dreamworld: A luxurious escape, even if reality is still awkward”, by Gabriel Beltrone:

(#1) In the creamy Shave Butter dreamworld; you can watch the video here

Dollar Shave Club wants you to know it’s [sic] new shave butter product feels so buttery good, it will make you hallucinate.

A 30-second ad opens on a young man shaving in a gym locker room. As he smears the product on his face, he sighs in ecstasy, and trust-falls backwards. The tile floor melts as he strikes it, enveloping him in a buttery dream world, where he slides and slithers around with surprising ease, grace and purpose, on buttery cloud-like dunes of [white] shave butter.

By the way, did the ad mention it’s buttery there, in shave-butter land?

But wait, there’s more — the spot packs it in. First, our hero passes a long-haired white pussy cat (get it?) hanging out on a luxurious silver tree limb. Then, he happens upon what appears to be Colonel Sanders’ younger, slimmer brother — who, you might be forgiven for thinking, clearly opted to become a literal pimp instead of guzzling fried chicken all day — standing towering on top of a buttery mountain, wielding a giant silvery straight razor.

In fact, it turns out this new character is actually some kind of exceptionally well-dressed scientist-wizard, who, based on his look, might also moonlight as the second most interesting man in the actual world … but is definitely the first most interesting man in this buttery dreamworld.

The sage — perhaps Dollar Shave Club CEO Michael Dubin in an alternate reality or some utopian future — with a mere breath and flourish of his hand, blows all the hair clean off the young man’s face. Also, off the pussy cat (get it?), and the [two] hairy coconuts (get it?) that you might not have seen dangling in the background, also from silver branches.

The voiceover trumpets, complete with melodramatic pauses, that the stuff “is going to change your life.”

Suddenly, the camera delivers a rude but hilarious cut back to the gym locker room, where a naked middle-aged man has struck an epic pose, one leg up on a bench, waving a blowdryer up the towel wrapped around his waist, his face the picture of perfect bliss.

“Well, the shave part of your life,” adds the voiceover, conceding that you will still probably be uncomfortable all the time, just for other reasons.

Meanwhile, a behind-the-scenes video, shot in 360 degrees for some reason, reveals that the star of the ad did in fact get to wiggle through a trough of buttery goop, albeit in front of a green screen.

Overall, it’s an absurdist, amusing tack that tracks back — in general humorous tone, at least — through the company’s advertising since it burst onto the market some five years ago. It’s also notable for giving a bigger role to the hairless cat, which was part of a larger ensemble in the the brand’s 2015 holiday campaign.

It just goes to show if you stick with it for long enough, you get the cream. Or at least, the butter.

What can I say? The sea of semen, the shaved pussy, the shaved balls, the guy blowdrying his crotch! And those are just the highlights.

The actual product, conventionally presented:

(#2)

Then, GDoS on butter and cream as sexual slang:

noun butter: 1 semen; thus buttery, semen-filled [implied in a 1594 quote, explicit in cites from 1668 on; Randolph & Legman Ozark Folksongs and Folklore, cite from 1928: Set on your butt, get a hold of your nubbin, / If you don’t get butter, just keep on a-rubbing.]

noun cream: 1 semen [1st cite c. 1629, in a ballad; G. Legman, The Limerick: There was a young Jewess named Hannah / Who sucked off her lover’s banana / She swore that the cream / That shot out in a stream / Tasted better than Biblical manna.]

“Butter Safe Than Sorry”. From AdAge on 5/26/17, “Brace yourself for Dollar Shave Club’s cringeworthy ads about grooming ‘down there’: ‘Butter Safe Than Sorry'” by Ann-Christine Diaz:

(#3) You can watch the video on the AdAge site

Dollar Shave Club first grabbed attention with its funny videos starring founder Michael Dubin, but its simpler ideas also pack a powerful punch. In fact, these new out-of-home ads about shaving “down there” will likely make you cringe.

Three posters use fruit and vegetables to suggest the male member — a banana flanked by kiwis, an eggplant standing between a pair of potatoes, a carrot rising from behind two beets. In each, one of the orb-shaped figures has a ghastly slash, as if a peeler dug a little too deeply into the flesh.

The point? To promote Dollar Shave Club’s Shave Butter. Tagline reads: “Butter safe than sorry.”

“Let’s Talk About #2”. You can watch this ad here. And the script for the ad is available on this site (and reproduced below).

(#4) The actual product

Hi. Me again. People ask me, “Mike, when are you gonna do video number 2?”. You want to talk about number 2? Great. Let’s talk, about number 2. Poop. Everyone makes it. And I don’t have time to jump back in the shower after a messy number 6. I’m an executive now. I have papers to sign. Fortunately, there’s a better way to wipe your messy bottom. They’re called One Wipe Charlies, and they’re butt wipes – for men.

Butt wipes, Mike?

Yeah, bitch. Butt wipes.

What’s a bitch?

Why do you need a butt wipe? Because you’re not an animal. And whatever you’re using now, is primitive. You’re leaving buried treasure behind! You want to get all the golden nuggets, don’t you? I’m talking about poop, Alejandra!

I know, Mike. We all know.

Ha ha ha! Plus, toilet paper takes forever. You shouldn’t have to be special forces to expect the bad guy with speed and precision. With One Wipe Charlie, you wipe once and get on with your life. I know what you’re thinking. Is all this fancy butt stuff gonna cost me an arm and a log? Does a bear sh*t in the woods? Not anymore. He sh*ts in the toilet and he pays just a couple bucks for a 40 pack. So clean up your act with the softest, manliest way to wipe your ass. Accept no substitute. It’s One Wipe Charlie!

Yes, “the softest, cleanest, fastest manliest way to handle your business”.

From AdWeek on February 1st, “Poseidon and a Couple of Mer-Bros Vouch for Gorton’s in the Best Fish-Stick Ads Ever: Plus, an incredibly grateful castaway” by Gabriel Beltrone:

MerBros appreciating the protein they get from the Gorton fisherman (not from his fish, mind you, but from the fisherman)

Gorton’s frozen fish is so good, even Poseidon, God of the Sea, loves it, says a new campaign from Connelly Partners.

The mythological Greek deity joins other unlikely — but ocean-savvy — endorsers in the comedic series of ads. There’s a bedraggled island castaway who’ll naturally evoke a more cracked-up version of Tom Hanks’ character from the 2000 film. And there’s a pair of fitness-obsessed “mer-bros” —  jacked surfer dudes with fishtails instead of legs — who just can’t get enough clean protein.

Perhaps most important, they all trust Gorton’s yellow-slicker-clad fisherman, who stars alongside them in the ads, under the tagline, well … “Trust the Gorton’s fisherman.”

The spots, shot on White Point Beach in San Pedro, California, and directed by Hungry Man’s Conor Byrne, are visually engaging and sharply written. The Gorton’s guy and Poseidon have known each other for a while, it turns out. He’s also giving the castaway — who after 20 years stranded on an island is somehow miraculously not sick of fish — a casual lift to a less hostile environment, earning the title of literal hero for the rescue (and figurative hero for the fish sticks).

The campaign’s real epic winners, though, may be the semi-aquatic meatheads, Chad and Brody. While bro jokes are played out, the merman twist is a delightfully random one, and breathes fresh life into the genre. Kind of like a squirt of lemon juice on frozen seafood.

The whole set of commercials is available on the AdWeek site.

(Hat tip to Kim Darnell, who pointed me to the MerBros commercial.)

Yes, pork cloud. What the Bacon’s Heir company has re-named their version of chicharrones, aka (fried) pork rinds, which they believe are so fluffy that they have to be thought of as pork puffs:

We take fresh pork skin, melt off the fat, cure the skin in salt, and rapidly puff it in olive oil [so: pork skin puffs]. The result is so outrageously fluffy we had to change the name.

To my ear, the name is risible, very close to oxymoronic.

(Hat tip to Kim Darnell.)

Pork Cloud comes in six flavors: rosemary sea salt, Malabar pepper, habanero, pepper, garlic thyme, and cinnamon Ceylon.

From my 3/19/16 posting “Cheech”, on Cheech Marin:

[Wikipedia:] … Marin’s nickname “Cheech” is short for “chicharron”, a fried pork skin that is a popular snack in Mexican cuisine and a favorite of marijuana smokers afflicted with “the munchies”, and the nickname’s alliteration with Chong’s surname made “Cheech and Chong” an obvious choice for the name of the duo.

The nickname. It might strike you that pork rind is an odd nickname, but then chicharrones are a homey, much beloved food, and then there’s the pot-smoking connection, certainly relevant in Cheech Marin’s case. From Wikipedia:

Chicharrón … is a dish generally consisting of fried pork belly or fried pork rinds; chicharrón may also be made from chicken, mutton, or beef.

And on the title of this posting, from Wikipedia:

“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (also commonly known as “Daffodils”) is a lyric poem by William Wordsworth. It is Wordsworth’s most famous work.

On the MillerCoors blog yesterday, “Henry’s Hard Soda unveils new television ads in time for summer hard soda spike” by Peter Frost:

(#1) Both ads can be viewed via the link

Henry’s Hard Soda this week is releasing two new television ads in an effort to jolt consumer awareness ahead of hard soda’s biggest selling season.

The new ads, which each end with the tagline “Good Hard Fun,” are part of a multimillion-dollar investment to grow the brand’s leadership position in hard sodas, says Josh Wexelbaum, marketing director for the brand.

The product-centric spots feature bottle shots of the brand’s three colorful flavors: Orange, Grape and the newly released Lemon Lime, and carry a lighthearted tone. “Henry’s is all about fun,” Wexelbaum says. “You’re going to see us embracing our bold colors, familiar soda flavors and connecting with that sense of personal nostalgia that makes this brand tick.”

Some relevant senses of hard from NOAD:

adj. hard: 1 solid, firm, and resistant to pressure; not easily broken, bent, or pierced … 5 [a] (of liquor) strongly alcoholic; denoting distilled spirits rather than beer or wine. [b] US (of apple cider) having alcoholic content from fermentation. [c] (of a drug) potent and addictive. [d] (of radiation) highly penetrating. [e] (of pornography) highly obscene and explicit.

Hard sodas are hard in contrast with (non-alcoholic) soft drinks, but they aren’t hard liquor; instead, they are comparable to hard ciders and lagers: Henry’s is 4.2% alcohol by volume, hard ciders 4.5-4.7%, lagers 4-5%.

But then the new Henry’s ads introduce a potential double entendre through the slogan good hard fun, in contrast to the cliché good clean fun — the contrast suggesting that Henry’s is dirty (‘risqué, salacious, sexual’) fun, which in turn evokes a sexually specialized subsense of NOAD’s sense 1. From OED3 (June 2005):

adj. hard:  i. Of the penis, clitoris, or nipples: erect. In later use also of a man: having an erect penis. Cf. … hard-on adj. and n. [1st cite: a1660  in G. R. Quaife Wanton Wenches & Wayward Wives (1979) vii. 166 (modernized text)  [He] did take forth his privy parts in his hand and..told her that it was a good hard thing.

And the title of this posting? It has still another sense of hard, ‘difficult’, in a Woody Guthrie song (sung from a woman’s viewpoint) that begins:

There is a house in this old town,
And that’s where my true love lays around.
And he takes other women right down on his knee
And he tells them a little tale he won’t tell me.

It’s a-hard and it’s hard, ain’t it hard
To love one that never did love you?
It’s a-hard, and it’s hard, ain’t it hard, great God,
To love one that never will be true?

(#2) You can listen to this 1944 Guthrie performance here

A piece languishing in my posting queue since the beginning of December. The title alone should tell you that this posting is not for kids or the sexually modest. There will be plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex, and decidedly racy (though not actually X-rated) pictures.

Offered in two sales from TitanMen: the 2014 compilation Cumshots Vol. 1; and among several new releases, Muscle Daddies. So, in addition to notes on the gay porn flicks, linguistic notes about the compounds cumshot (ambiguous between reference to an act and to a depiction of this act in a photograph or film) and muscle daddy (referring to a gay sociotype, combining muscle-hunk and daddy).

As a bonus, a note on a cocktail called, among other things, the Cum Shot.

Cumshots Vol. 1. Muscle daddy TitanMen (apparently) contemplate Tom of Smurfland:

(#1)
(#2)

#1 (the cover of the Cumshots compilation) has been cropped to eliminate the arc of flying jizz than defines a cumshot, as well as the third man stretched out below the jizzmen, waiting to receive the gift of their hot cum on his body. The cropping makes it appear that they are studying Tom of Smurfland and his magnions (ordinary guys have minions; muscle daddy Tom has magnions); any entertaining image can be plugged in in the place of #2.

The full cover image can be viewed as a 10/29/17 posting “TitanMen shoot their loads” on AZBlogX.

Enthusiastic ad copy for the compilation:

Splat to the face! The very first ever TitanMen Cumshots compilation, jam packed with over 3 1/2 hours of nonstop cum-spurting cocks! We’ve pulled together over 140 of the finest TitanMen, shooting tons of cum for your pleasure. These TitanMen all-stars shoot load after load, erupting in some of the biggest and best cumshots in TitanMen history. If you love the sight of fat, hard cocks shooting jiz then you can’t afford to miss this first ever TitanMen presentation.

Muscle Daddies. The front cover:

(#3) Jesse Jackman, Luke Adams (in back), Dallas Steele

On these performers:

Jesse Jackman on AZBlogX: from 1/9/13 in “Cockature”; and from 5/11/13 in “Titan Rough”.

Luke Adams displaying himself:

(#4)

And Dallas Steele on this blog, on 4/1/17 in “Hitchhiking”.

On Muscle Daddies (released 9/27/17):

Director: Jasun Mark. Performers: Jesse Jackman, Steve Roman, Jason Vario, Liam Knox, Dallas Steele, Luke Adams

Older. Wiser. Hornier. When it comes to sex, salt and pepper are the best seasonings. Watch TitanMen exclusives Jesse Jackman, Liam Knox and Dallas Steele prove that age and experience make Muscle Daddies the biggest catch in town.

How do you guzzle a huge, thick dick? Dallas Steele and Jason Vario show you how it’s done before Dallas bends over and gets his sweaty ass slammed.

Big daddy Jesse Jackman gets what he wants, the towering top taking charge of bearded bottom Steve Roman in a grunt-filled suck and fuck.

As their big bulges burst out of their jockstraps, Liam Knox and Luke Adams kiss their way through a passionate poolside flip fuck with a memorably wet ending.

Cum and cumshots. There’s a Page on this blog on cum, including items with cum shots and cum facials.

One central AZBlogX posting on the topic: from 4/6/15, “Cumshots and cumfaces”, with cumfaces in #2-#5 and this text:

The minimal cumshot [photo] shows only a cock and the ejaculatory spray of cum; the masturbator (not shown) could be either the man depicted or someone else. I have posted some of these on this blog. Their porn power comes from the imaginative identification of the viewer with the ejaculator or from the viewer’s attraction to, appreciation of, cum (or, of course, both).
Three additional ingredients that can boost the power of the image, by making it more human: one, the hand of the masturbator (either self or other); two, the face of the ejaculator (his come face or O-face; on the terminology, see this Language Log posting); three, the face of the masturbator, especially if it’s appreciative.

On the relevant noun shot, from NOAD:

noun shot: a photograph: she took a shot of me holding a lamp near my face;  a film sequence photographed continuously by one camera: the movie’s opening shot is of a character walking across a featureless landscape.

And on cum shot, from GDoS:

cum shot (orig. US) in pornographic film-making, the moment of ejaculation, invariably performed (for the camera) outside the partner’s body [cites from 1990 (seems awfully late)]

A bit more detail in Wikipedia:

A cum shot is the depiction of human ejaculation, especially onto another person. The term cum shot is usually applied to depictions occurring in pornographic films, photographs, and magazines. Cum shots have become the object of fetish genres like bukkake. Facial cum shots (or “facials”) are currently regularly portrayed in pornographic films and videos, often as a way to close a scene. Cum shots may also depict ejaculation onto another performer’s body, such as on the genitals, buttocks, chest or tongue.

The term is typically used by the cinematographer within the narrative framework of a pornographic film, and, since the 1970s, it has become a leitmotif of the hardcore genre.

This is confused. A facial is an act, not the depiction of an act. “Cum shots … are … regularly portrayed in pornographic films and videos” is nonsensical if cum shot refers to a depiction. The point here is that cum shot / cumshot can refer to either a photo of ejaculation or to ejaculation outside a partner’s body, not necessarily caught on film. On the latter, from Urban Dictionary on cumshot:

To ejaculate [well, ejaculation]. Typically on a part of the body. For example, on the face (i.e. facial), in the mouth, on the breasts, on the legs or buttocks. Some fetishes even shown ‘cumshots’ on leather boots. Cumshots typically refer to a male ejaculating on a female but also include ejaculation on another male, inanimate objects, animals, or simply into the air (the cum falls where it may). The cumshot is very popular in pornography perhaps due to its explicit sexual nature which excites many. Silvia Saint took a beautiful cumshot all over her face and tits. (by darkavenger 5/10/04)

(Some UD entries have it just as ejaculation, esp. male ejaculation; typical examples offered have a man firing a cum shot into vagina mouth, or anus.)

Drinks. First, from NOAD:

noun shot: a small drink, especially of distilled liquor: he took a shot of whiskey.

And then this sense can be combined with metaphorical cum, used to refer to creamy drinks; this is the reverse of metaphorical cream used to refer to cum. In any case, that gives us Cum Shot cocktails: typically, butterscotch schnapps mixed with something creamy (cream, Bailey’s Irish Cream, creamer, whatever), optionally topped with whipped cream.

(#5)

If layered, it’s also known as a Cowboy Shot, Cock Sucking Cowboy, or Buttery Nipple.

(Underwear guys, gay male culture, lots of pink, but nothing pointedly carnal. Use your judgment.)

The spur is yesterday’s Daily Jocks ad, for a Marco Marco pink sequin jock-thong, here in two views, with my caption poem:

(#1) Perfectionist in pink sequin
(#2) Patrick’s pouch

Patrick dreamed he
Pranced at the Pansy Party in
Nothing but his
Pink sequin ballcap, his
Pink leather harness, and his
Pink sequin jock-thong

Still shopping for the
Perfect
Pink sequin pumps

The garment. From DJ about Marco Marco, and from Marco Marco about the garment in #1 and #2:

[DJ:] Marco Marco is an American men’s underwear, swimwear, and sportswear manufacturer named after its founder and head-fashion designer Marco Morante. The brand is arguably best known for its underwear, which include street, sport and fashion lines.
Sparkle in the new Sequin Jock-Thong or feel the Island Vibes in the Tropical collection.

[MM, not edited:] A little sparkle and flash never hurt anybody. The JOCK-THONG is a first of it’s kind for us. Combing our comfortably secure jockstrap leg elastic with our sexy and stylish thong. It’s the best of both worlds. Featuring pink sequin fabric which is sure make eyes drop and lined with our super soft core fabric.

Patrick’s Pansy Party ensemble. His ballcap, which he wears backwards (Patrick is a seriously butch pansy):

(#3)

His harness:

(#4)

Finding the perfect footwear. Even if you’re otherwise completely naked at a Pansy Party, your feet need protection. Patrick has yet to find the perfect item, though he’s attracted by these two possibilities, one more butch, one more fey:

(#5) Christian Louboutin glitter mens high top sneakers in light pink

(#6) Toms glitter slipper in light pink

Patrick’s streetwear. For streetwear, Patrick has a pink sequin wardrobe — among them, these two garments:

(#7) hot pink sequin tuxedo vest

(#8) hot pink sequin tuxedo jacket with black lapels (from Alberto Nardoni)

The Pansy Party. The allusion here is to gay circuit parties. From my 6/22/10 posting “Rivers of Babylon”:

A circuit party is a one-day main event involving intense dancing for 24 hours, with accompanying sex, drinking, and (often) drugs, plus preceding events and following ones. Almost all of the participants (up to 20,000 of them at a really big party) are young gay men, many of them shirtless (or in underwear, or naked) most of the time.

Most circuit parties have color names: the White Party in Palm Springs, the Blue Ball in Philadelphia, etc. Yes, there are Pink Parties; here’s a poster for one in 2010:

(#8)

Also Purple Parties. Here’s a shot from the Dallas Purple Party in 2018:

(#9)

As far as I can tell, there is no actual Pansy Party, though pansy is both a color name and a reference to gay men. From my 8/28/10 posting “Pansies”, with subentries from the OED:

The colour of a pansy; spec. a deep shade of blue or purple.

“frequently derogatory” pansy ‘a male homosexual, an effeminate man, a weakling’

Pansies, the flowers, come in a wide variety of colors, including pink:

(#10)

Perfectionist in pink sequin. The title of this posting is a play on two fixed expressions, both titles: Pretty in Pink and Nights in White Satin.

From Wikipedia:

Pretty in Pink is a 1986 American romantic comedy film about love and social cliques in American high schools in the 1980s. A cult classic, it is commonly identified as a “Brat Pack” film. It was directed by Howard Deutch, produced by Lauren Shuler Donner, and written by John Hughes, who also served as co-executive producer. It was named after the song by The Psychedelic Furs.

In my 11/3/17 posting “The Pink Fellowship”, a reference to Knights with pink pouches (men in skimpy pink underwear), taking off on the title of the Moody Blues song “Nights in White Satin”.

Patrick’s dream. Finally, my caption begins “Patrick dreamed he went to the Pansy Party in nothing but…” In my 7/21/17 posting “Getting into harness”, my caption for #2 there is a take-off on the long series of “I dreamed I Xed in my Maidenform Bra” ads from the 50s and 60s. Here it is again.

Coming past me every so often on tv, a commercial for the Car Gurus company, in which the pronunciation of the company name varies from a clear car gurus, [ˈkarˌguruz], with a secondary accent on the first syllable of gurus, to something like cargaroos, [ˈkargəruz], with this syllable unaccented and its vowel reduced to schwa — indeed, including the intermediate variant [ˈkargʊruz], with that syllable deaccented and its vowel laxed but not reduced to schwa.

My ears perked up at the pronunciations with deaccented second element, because they sounded so odd — because they effaced the identity of the guru component of the name, which is surely semantically important to the image of the company, which proposes to offer gurus, in this sense from NOAD:

noun guru: an influential teacher or popular expert

From Wikipedia:

The company logo

CarGurus is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based automotive research and shopping website that assists users in comparing local listings for used and new cars, and contacting sellers.

You can watch the commercial, “The Detective”, here. And, of course, listen to it.

Accent levels and vowel reduction. The conventional view is that within words, English has three degrees of distinctive accent: primary (indicated by a raised tick at the beginning of the relevant syllable), second (a lowered tick), and unaccented (no mark). Phonetically, accent is realized by lengthening of a syllable and (rather less reliably) by increased loudness and raised pitch.

All three of these prosodic dimensions lie on continua phonetically; speakers’ productions vary along these continua, potentially confounding hearers’ categorizations of the acoustic phenomena. In any case, there’s variation in the productions of the gu syllable of gurus in car gurus, and it tips some of them into cargaroos territory for me.

Meanwhile, the range between “full” vowels and “reduced” ones  is also a continuum phonetically, although (once again) hearers’ perceptions are of a small number of discrete categories:  high back tense close /u/ (Wells’s GOOSE vowel, here a full vowel); lower, more central, laxer, and more open /ʊ/ (Wells’s FOOT vowel, here a partially reduced vowel); and even lower, central, lax, and open /ə/ (Wells’s commA vowel, a reduced vowel). (Notice again that a number of phonetic dimensions are in play here.)

The generalization is, crudely: less accent, more reduction.

Deacccenting. Another generalization, again a crude one: the more familiar a word, the more likely it is for syllables with secondary accents to lose their accent, to become unaccented. So what was historically a secondarily accented element town [ˌtawn] ends up as [tən], eventually spelled as ton (Newtown eventually becomes Newton though the usage of locals).

From a 7/8/12 posting:

Mike Pesca, talking about strikeouts and curveballs, introduced the Higgs boson as a metaphor and ran it into the ground. All through this, he gave boson the accent pattern primary accent + unaccented, rather than the standard pattern primary accent + secondary accent.

… Presumably, for Pesca the word boson had become so familiar that the final syllable was deaccented, as in outsider-pronunciations of Oregon with /ˌan/ vs. Oregonian pronunciations with /ǝn/.

So it is with CarGurus: people who are most familiar with the name are likely to deaccent and reduce [ˌgu] to [gʊ] or [gǝ] — even though this works against their corporate interest.

(From June 2017. Underwear men, Catalonia, gay life, Barcelona beaches, art and architecture, and, eventually, food. First, underwear with my captions.)

The saints of Catalunya
Pretty in purple and pink

(#1)

Sant Jordi the savory in heat
Stretched out on rocks
Homage to Barceloneta
Between sail and fish

(#2)

Sant Joan the sweet
Celebrant of gay pride
Summer solstice confection
Of fruit and nuts

It’s all about Barcelona, the beach, and swim briefs.

(Note: Joan is the Catalan counterpart to John, Jordi the counterpart to George. Between sail and fish will eventually be explained, as will the reference to fruit and nuts.)

NIT swim briefs. #1 (with a purple and pink swim brief) is from a Daily Jocks ad from late in May, announcing a sale on NIT swimwear. The DJ ad text, taken from NIT’s own copy:

NIT – The New Swimsuit: NIT was created six years ago; since then the brand has been in constant evolution in the swimming sector as well as in quality and technology. All products are 100% Made in Barcelona.

#2 is from the NIT site: the Mario style swim brief in pink.

Men’s swimwear comes in several cuts, just like underwear: thongs, briefs, boxers, trunks, shorts. Some have drawstrings, some do not; the rough generalization is that the longer the legs, the more likely the swimwear is to have a drawstring, and vice versa. NIT swim briefs, like the ones above, usually lack drawstrings; they have a trim, clean, sleek look.

The company’s ads have the homoerotic sensibility of many high-end men’s underwear firms, and that fits well in Barcelona, which is in a sense the gay capital of Spain, but the company seems not to be flagrantly queer — unlike another Barcelona men’s underwear firm, ES, that I’ll talk about below, which is entertainly outrageous; consider this ad from an ES “Proud of Barcelona” campaign a few years ago:

(#3)

Abs, packages, and lots of attitude.

The NIT name. It almost always appears in all-caps, so I thought it must be an acronym. I spent hours searching NIT sites, but none explained it.

Eventually it came to me thar it was just the Catalan word nit ‘night’. Sigh. (As an English speaker, I had to push aside the association to the noun nit ‘the egg or young form of a louse or other parasitic insect, especially the egg of a head louse attached to a human hair’ (NOAD)).

The ES Collection. That’s es, as in the country code for Spain.

For the company’s new underwear 2013/14 campaign PROUD OF BARCELONA, this sexy and playful video, showing hunky factory workers wearing nothing but ES underwear and then modeling their wares. Text:

The new campaign strives to come back to the begining, 1958 when the company was created. The video shows how ES Collection produces underwear in the old factory placed in Barcelona like fifty years ago, manually with the best fabrics to obtain the best fit and quality.

In this new underwear collection you will find amazing colors, designs and newly developed fabrics. This will provide self confidence, comfort and sensuality, just try it and you will know!

“This campaign makes us feel proud of our beginings, which will push us to continue with our heritage. This feeling is the only way to achieve the best product ever”, says Eduardo Suñer, ES Product Manager.

Background: geography, language, culture. On Catalonia, from Wikipedia:

(#4) Catalonia up close

Catalonia (Catalan: Catalunya, Occitan: Catalonha, Spanish: Cataluña) is an autonomous community of Spain located on the northeastern extremity of the Iberian Peninsula. It is designated as a nationality by its Statute of Autonomy. Catalonia consists of four provinces: Barcelona, Girona, Lleida, and Tarragona. The capital and largest city is Barcelona, the second-most populated municipality in Spain and the core of the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union. Catalonia comprises most of the territory of the former Principality of Catalonia (with the remainder Roussillon now part of France’s Pyrénées-Orientales). It is bordered by France and Andorra to the north, the Mediterranean Sea to the east, and the Spanish autonomous communities of Aragon to the west and Valencia to the south. The official languages are Catalan, Spanish, and the Aranese dialect of Occitan.

… After [Francisco] Franco’s death in 1975, Catalonia voted for the adoption of a democratic Spanish Constitution in 1978, in which Catalonia recovered political and cultural autonomy, restoring the Generalitat (exiled since the end of the Civil War in 1939) in 1977 and adopting a new Statute of Autonomy in 1979. Today, Catalonia is one of the most economically dynamic communities of Spain. The Catalan capital and largest city, Barcelona, is a major international cultural centre and a major tourist destination. In 1992, Barcelona hosted the Summer Olympic Games. [The Olympics will become significant below.]

… A controversial independence referendum was held in Catalonia on 1 October 2017, using a disputed voting process. It was declared illegal on 6 September 2017 and suspended by the Constitutional Court of Spain because it breached the 1978 Constitution.

The political crisis continues.

On the Catalan language, from Wikipedia:

Catalan is a Romance language derived from Vulgar Latin and named after the medieval Principality of Catalonia, in northeastern modern Spain and adjoining parts of France. It is the national and only official language of Andorra, and a co-official language of the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, and Valencia (where the language is known as Valencian, and there exist regional standards). It also has semi-official status in the commune of Alghero, situated on the northwestern coast of the island of Sardinia (Italy), where a variant of it is spoken. It is also spoken with no official recognition in parts of the Spanish autonomous communities of Aragon (La Franja) and Murcia (Carche), and in the historic region of Roussillon/Northern Catalonia, roughly equivalent to the department of Pyrénées-Orientales in modern France. All these territories are often called Catalan Countries.

… Catalan shares many traits with the other neighboring Romance languages (Italian, Sardinian, Occitan, and Spanish). However, despite being spoken mostly on the Iberian Peninsula, Catalan has marked differences with the Iberian Romance group (Spanish and Portuguese) in terms of pronunciation, grammar, and especially vocabulary; showing instead its closest affinity with Occitan [in the south of France] and to a lesser extent Gallo-Romance (French, Franco-Provençal, Gallo-Italian)

… Since the Spanish transition to democracy (1975–1982), Catalan has been institutionalized as an official language, language of education, and language of mass media; all of which have contributed to its increased prestige. In Catalonia, there is an unparalleled large, bilingual, European, non-state speech community. The teaching of Catalan is mandatory in all schools … There is also some intergenerational shift towards Catalan.

Then there’s gay Spain. Barcelona and Madid vie for the title of gay capital of Spain. Other gay sites in northeast Spain: Sitges (in Catalonia), Ibiza (third largest of the Balearic Islands), Benidorm (in the Alicante region). On the map:

(#5) Northeastern Spain; note Madrid, Benidorm, and the Balearics

On the islands, from Wikipedia:

The Balearic Islands are an archipelago of Spain in the western Mediterranean Sea, near the eastern coast of the Iberian Peninsula.

The four largest islands are Majorca, Minorca, Ibiza and Formentera. There are many minor islands and islets close to the larger islands, including Cabrera, Dragonera and S’Espalmador. The islands have a Mediterranean climate, and the four major islands are all popular tourist destinations. Ibiza in particular is known as an international party destination, attracting many of the world’s most popular DJs to its nightclubs.

As for Sitges, this note from the city’s tourst guide:

17 beaches, some for families, some for all groups, some nudist, one gay

There is one main gay beach in Sitges – Platja de la Bassa Rodona. It sits at the centre of Sitges’ row of beaches. It is often one of the busiest beaches along the strip.

If you are a gay couple and you don’t fancy limiting yourself to just Platja la Bassa Rodona, you will feel comfortable on all of the beaches in Sitges. As a famously gay town, there is an open attitude towards openly gay couples throughout the town and beaches.

[8  –  12 June 2017. Gay Pride Sitges 2017: annual gay pride in Sitges, a beach resort only 30 min from Barcelona and very popular with gay tourists. With parties and other events and a Gay Pride Village at the promenade.]

Barceloneta beaches. From the Barcelona tourist guide:

This page contains pictures and information on the golden sandy Barcelona beaches. There are 4.2 km of golden sandy beaches only 10 minutes from the city centre and 4 main beach areas.

Some notable features: the W hotel, looking like a giant sail against the sky, and then from Wikipedia:

Amongst the attractions on Barceloneta’s beach are German artist Rebecca Horn’s “Homenatge a la Barceloneta” monument, and, where the beach gives way to the Port Olímpic, Frank Gehry’s modern “Peix d’Or” sculpture.

(#6) W hotel

(#7) Horn’s homage to Barceloneta

(#8) The Gehry goldfish

#6: W hotel. From Wikipedia:

W Barcelona, popularly known as the Hotel Vela (Sail Hotel) due to its shape, is a building designed by Ricardo Bofill is located in the Barceloneta district of Barcelona, in the expansion of the Port of Barcelona. … The building … stands in 7 hectares of land reclaimed from the sea surface in the construction of the new entrance to the harbour.

#7: the homage to Barceloneta. On the artist, from Wikipedia:

Rebecca Horn (24 March 1944, Michelstadt, Hesse) is a German visual artist, who is best known for her installation art, film directing, and her body modifications such as Einhorn (Unicorn), a body-suit with a very large horn projecting vertically from the headpiece. She directed the films Der Eintänzer (1978), La ferdinanda: Sonate für eine Medici-Villa (1982) and Buster’s Bedroom (1990). Horn presently lives and works in Paris and Berlin.

… In the 1990s a series of her impressive sculptures were presented in places of historical importance. Examples are the Tower of the Nameless in Vienna (1994), Concert in Reverse in Munich (1997), Mirror of the Night in an abandoned synagogue in Cologne (1998) and Concert for Buchenwald at Weimar (1999). In Weimar, the Concert for Buchenwaldwas composed on the premises of a former tram depot. The artist has layered 40 metre long walls of ashes behind glass, as archives of petrifaction. At the same time, the theme of bodily vitality, which the artist had been exploring since the seventies, was developed in site-specific installations that investigated the subject of the latent energy of places and the magnetic flows of space. This cycle comprises High Moon, New York (1991); El Reio de la Luna, Barcelona (1992); Spirit di Madreperla, Naples (2002). For the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Horn was commissioned to create the steel sculpture L’Estel Ferit.

On the sculpture:

The sculpture L’Estel Ferit (The Wounded Shooting Star) consists of four twisted cubes, stacked seemingly at random. Most people refer to this popular landmark as “the cubes”, and it is a clear reflection of Barcelona’s penchant for ground-breaking art during the Olympic period. However, its symbolism is inextricably linked to the past of the Barceloneta district.

The sculpture L’Estel Ferit pays tribute to Barcelona’s fishing district, the Barceloneta [hence the alternative name Homenatge a la Barceloneta ‘homage to Barceloneta’], and has become one of its iconic landmarks. The German artist Rebecca Horn heralded a new phase in the decoration of the city’s streets and squares. It was 1992, and the city’s most neglected neighbourhoods were in need of a clean up, while they opened up to the sea and adorned themselves with sculptures that were often innovative. In this case, Horn sought to immortalise the legendary seafront bars and restaurants, or xiringuitos, which just a few years before had dotted the Barceloneta coastline. The xiringuitos were shacks that had fallen into disrepair but still retained their essential charm. However, by the time the pre-Olympic city was being refurbished they had seen better days and were removed. Some people say that the cubes represent the [30m-squared] apartments…

Whatever the interpretation, there’s no denying that the artist created an impressive 10-metre-high sculpture, comprising four steel blocks that rise up from a concrete base. Each block, with its glass windows, comprises an individual module. Stacked one on top of another, these cubes look like they’re performing a fragile dance and are held up by chance. Locals and visitors alike don’t seem to fear the apparent instability of the structure, which is silhouetted against the background of the sea.

The name “homage to Barceloneta” is itself an homage of sorts. From Wikipedia:

Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell’s personal account of his experiences and observations in the Spanish Civil War. The first edition was published in the United Kingdom in 1938. The book was not published in the United States until February 1952, when it appeared with an influential preface by Lionel Trilling.

#8: the Gehry goldfish. From Wikipedia:

La Vila Olímpica del Poblenou (The Olympic Village of Poblenou) is a neighborhood in the Sant Martí district of Barcelona, Catalonia (Spain). It was constructed in the late 1980s and early 1990s for the 1992 Summer Olympic Games which took place in Barcelona. Its construction was devised by Oriol Bohigas, David Mackay and Albert Puigdomènec as a residential area in the otherwise industrial and working-class district of Poblenou, which underwent regeneration but involved massive expropriation, as well as the destruction of a sizeable portion of the district, including Industrial Revolution factories of architectural value

… The [high-rise building] Torre Mapfre is located in this neighborhood, while the Hotel Arts, the Casino Barcelona and the “Peix d’Or” (goldfish), a large metal sculpture designed by Frank Gehry, are located at one edge of the Barceloneta neighborhood, close to the border with the Vila Olímpica del Poblenou.

Also in the neighborhood, from Wikipedia:

Palau Sant Jordi (English: St. George’s Palace) is an indoor sporting arena and multi-purpose installation that is part of the Olympic Ring complex located in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. Designed by the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, it was opened in 1990. The maximum seating capacity of the arena is 16,670 for basketball, and 24,000 for musical events. It is the largest indoor arena in Spain.

The Palau Sant Jordi was one of the main venues of the 1992 Summer Olympics hosting the artistic gymnastics, handball final, and volleyball final events. Today, it is used for all kinds of indoor sport events as well as for concerts and other cultural activities, due to its great flexibility. [And it includes Piscina Sant Jordi, a public swimming pool.]

A swimming pool where you can show off your NIT swimwear. In any case, we’ve cycled back to Sant Jordi, St. George, in #1.

As for Sant Joan, St. John, in #2: his celebrations mark midsummer, the national day of Catalonia, and (for gayfolk) a high point of Pride Month. From Wikipedia on the traditions of Catalonia:

June 23: Midsummer. Revetlla de Sant Joan: Celebration in honour of St. John the Baptist … takes place in the evening of June 23. Parties are organised usually at beaches, where bonfires are lit and a set of firework displays usually take place. Special foods such as Coca de Sant Joan are also served on this occasion.

June 24: St. John’s Day. Dia de Sant Joan; Christian feast day celebrating the birth of Jesus’ likely cousin, Saint John the Baptist. This is considered to be the national day of the Catalan Countries.

And so it ends with food. From Wikipedia:

(#9) Coca de Sant Joan, sweet coca with candied fruits and pine nuts, typical of Catalan summer solstice celebration

The coca is a pastry typically made and consumed in Spain. [It] is just one way of preparing a dish traditionally made all around the Mediterranean.

The Catalan word coca — plural coques — comes from Dutch during the Carolingian Empire, and shares the same roots as the English “cake” and the German “kuchen”

There are many diverse cocas, with four main varieties: sweet, savoury, closed and open. All of them use dough as the main ingredient, which is then decorated. This dough can be sweet or savoury. If it is sweet, eggs and sugar are added, and if it is savoury, yeast and salt. As regards the topping or filling, fish and vegetables are usual at the coast whilst inland they prefer fruit, nuts, cheese and meat. Some cocas can be both sweet and savoury (typically mixing meat and fruit).

… Coca de San Joan, a sweet coca most typical of Catalonia, eaten on La revetlla de Sant Joan, St John’s Eve.

Catalonian midsummer fruitcake. Patriotic and gay.

From Aric Olnes a while back, a 5/31/17 piece from Hint Magazine, “Weird & Wonderful Men’s Underwear Ads”:

Hilarious and ridiculous, sure, but some of these vintage men’s underwear ads are downright hunky — they just take a little adjusting…

Hint is a fashion magazine covering men’s fashion as well as women’s. The logo:

(#1)

Earlier on this blog: from 11/6/16 “Wearing the 1970s”, with a set of entertaining ads and links to other postings.

Four examples from Hint, with my captions (and some comments):

(#2)

Bruce and Joe had a
Wonderful relationship,
Except for those pesky elves

This is (I think) the weirdest of the four. The text appears to be a play on get into s.o.’s pants, and it’s easy to read the visual as a sexual interaction between two men. But then there are two extra, smaller, legs in the photo, one of them tied to Joe’s right leg, as in a three-legged race. My conceit is that these extra legs belong to elves. I have no idea what the ad agency had in mind.

(#3)

The locker room parties were
Fantastic, though there were
Spirited disputes about
Pitching and catching

The notable element here is the glove in the right-hand guy’s left back pocket. Marking him as a top?

(#4)

Sam in his
Fig missile briefs,
On the town with his
Sexbuddy Greg, that
Wild animal

Especially worth notice: the moose-knuckle fig leaf.

(#5)

Each of them had found the
Nothing But Socks Club by his
Own route, but then it was
Immensely satisfying

Everybody with legs positioned so as to conceal their packages.

These were from the 1970s, when most underwear ads featured “regular guys” relating to each other as buddies (though these presentations sometimes went awry). Since then, premium men’s underwear firms have veered into porn territory, with models presenting themselves as sculpted lust objects, as in this Daily Jocks ad for Supawear from 10/27/17:

(#6)

Note the seductive facial expression and inviting open mouth. One on one between the model and you.

Today’s Zippy takes us to 449 S. Winchester Blvd. in San Jose CA (more or less next door to the Winchester Mystery House and across the street from Santana Row):

(#1) The title is an allusion to  McDonald’s Happy Meal for kids

Two things: the location; and the goofy dispute over the meaning of the initialism B.L.T.

The Flames Coffee Shop. The place a few years ago:

(#2) Outside

(#3) Inside

But now it’s closed. From the CBS Channel 5 KPIX site on 9/26/16, “Beloved San Jose Restaurant Shuts Its Doors” by John Ramos:

If you looked closely, the smiles of the waitresses held just a hint of sadness at Flames Coffee Shop Sunday morning.

That, and the empty bakery cases, were the only signs that anything out of the ordinary was happening.

“We didn’t know that this was the last day,” said Carolyn Durandette, who says she’s a regular customer. “We were VERY surprised to find out.”

Twenty five years ago, Flames moved into what had been the first Bob’s Big Boy in Northern California and the new owners decided not to change a thing.

“We don’t even have computers in here,” said hostess Connie Amezcua. “We still write tickets by hand.”

It’s an old-fashioned place that fries hash browns by the acre and no one goes home hungry, but Flames sits across the street from trendy Santana Row and someone thinks what this place needs is a million square feet of office space so the coffee shop is standing in the way of progress.

The nondescript office space that succeeded Flames:

(#4)

That’s the end of the story. But there’s a backstory, and I’ve told it on this blog. Before the place became Flames in the 80s, it was a landmark of 1960s California car culture (built in 1965). From my 10/12/12 posting “Bob’s Big Boy”:

Some time ago, while I was having dinner at the bar of the Three Seasons restaurant in Palo Alto, a conversation involving customers and the staff somehow focused on the Bob’s Big Boy restaurant on S. Winchester Blvd. in San Jose. One diner and the bartender were locals and remembered the place with great affection. I was interested in it architecturally, as an example of demotic design for the world of California car culture.

That posting has the architect’s rendering (1966) of the restaurant; the Big Boy mascot for the chain; and its Flames successor from a different angle than #2 above.

Unpack that initialism! The nutjob customer in #1 rants that a B.L.T. is a Bigwig, Loathsome Talkfest, and his sandwich supplies none of these ingredients. Now, joke versions of initialisms are common, but this is way beyond the pale.

On the other hand, companies and organizations are forever messing with initialisms: devising them, declaring them to be orphans, reinterpreting them.

On a small scale, take what is now primarily a drugstore chain, CVS. From Wikipedia:

CVS began as Melville Corporation, formerly based in Rye, New York. The CVS name once stood for Consumer Value Stores; though Thomas Ryan, CVS Health’s former CEO, has said he now considers it to stand for “Convenience, Value and Service”.

In between, CVS was an orphan initialism, which the company maintained was just a name, not standing for anything.

Other cases, from a Slate article by Seth Stevenson on 5/3/04, “Alphabet Soup: Now what does KFC stand for?”:

[Things get] more nuanced when the abbreviation stays put while the meaning shifts beneath it, like some sort of signifying shell game. Way back during the mid-1980s frozen yogurt wars, there was a chain called I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt, which sued competing chain TCBY because the letters stood for This Can’t Be Yogurt. Unperturbed, TCBY deftly shifted its underlying name to The Country’s Best Yogurt, kept the well-established abbreviation, and went on its merry yogurt-peddling way.

… Anyway, the key in all this is keeping the brand identity strong, straight through the name transition. That’s what KFC is banking on as they take those three famous letters, stripped of their meaning 13 years ago, and attempt to reinfuse them with a nearly opposite meaning. It won’t work unless the consumer goes along for the ride.

This wasn’t so much of a problem when Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC [just KFC, an orphan initialism] — lots of us already called it that [and the company was anxious to avoid the negative associations of fried]. But just to make sure, KFC boosted the profile of Colonel Sanders, their familiar brand icon. The Colonel became more prominent in the KFC logo. In one unfortunate campaign, he even became an animated character — with the voice of Randy Quaid — and, in a dark chapter in KFC history, launched into a hip-hop dance while chanting, “Go Colonel! Go Colonel!”

Still, the KFC brand identity stayed intact. Will consumers follow again as they’re asked to believe in “Kitchen Fresh Chicken”?

Of course we will, if we hear it enough as it blares from our televisions. Branding is at times a delicate alchemy. And at other times it’s just spending lots of money. (Like when KFC tried to convince us fried chicken was a health food.) You hammer away at us with your insultingly wrongheaded message until our resistance wears down and we throw up our hands and we accede that yes, we suppose this chicken does come from a “kitchen” of sorts and, OK, by some tortured definition it could possibly be referred to as “fresh.” It’s all so finger-lickin’ sad.

A recent ad campaign for Blue Diamond almonds proclaims:

Don’t deny your cravings. Eat them.

(Well, actually, Eat ’em.)

(#1)

You can view one (somewhat overwrought) ad here.

Yes, it’s straightforwardly about food, but still, many will detect a double entendre in the exhortation to eat your cravings. Well, I went right for it, but then my thoughts incline that way.

From the San Francisco Business Times on 2/26/18, in “Blue Diamond Snack Almonds Inspires Consumers to Crave Victoriously with New Campaign, Brand Relaunch; Don’t deny your cravings. Eat them:

Sacramento, Calif.– Blue Diamond, the world’s leading almond marketer and processor, today launched a new brand campaign – Take Back Your Crave – to inspire consumers to embrace their snack cravings.

The campaign comes at a time when snacking has become more prevalent for Americans than ever. Snacking can bring moments of joy, but can also leave consumers with “snacking guilt” as they struggle with the conflict between whether or not they should eat the snacks they want.

“To crave is human. But they say you’re supposed to deny, control and fight your cravings. At Blue Diamond Almonds, we think differently,” said Blue Diamond Senior Vice President, Global Consumer Division Raj Joshi. “With Blue Diamond Almonds you can Crave VictoriouslyTM. With this campaign we’re putting a stake in the ground for conflicted snackers: ‘Don’t deny your cravings. Eat them.’”

Blue Diamond offers more than 20 flavors of almonds – from bold varieties like Sriracha or Salt ‘n Vinegar to oven roasted varieties like Dark Chocolate and Salted Caramel. With so many craveable flavors to discover and 5g of protein per serving, snackers don’t need to worry about sacrificing taste for a satisfying snack.

We take almonds seriously in California. They’re a big business, and around here there used to be almond groves all over the place. Handsome small trees in the rose family (most closely related to the peach), with very pretty white or pink blossoms in the spring. From Wikipedia:

(#2) A commercial almond grove (photo: Almond Board of California)

(#3) Ornamental pink almond trees in bloom

The almond (Prunus dulcis, syn. Prunus amygdalus) is a species of tree native to Mediterranean climate regions of the Middle East, from Syria and Turkey to Pakistan, although it has been introduced elsewhere.

Almond is also the name of the edible and widely cultivated seed of this tree. Within the genus Prunus, it is classified with the peach in the subgenus Amygdalus, distinguished from the other subgenera by corrugations on the shell (endocarp) surrounding the seed.

(Underwear guys, but nothing shocking.)

Yesterday’s Daily Jocks ad, for the company Modus Vivendi, with its inflated ad copy (“not just a product or just a brand, it reflects a lifestyle”) and a short caption of my own devising:

(#1)

Their name, Modus Vivendi, is their philosophy. From Latin, Modus Vivendi translates to lifestyle or way of life. Their name reflects their design and manufacturing approach to everything they make; it is not just a product or just a brand, it reflects a lifestyle.

My skivvies are my lifestyle my
Crotch my world I
Reach out to
Draw you in

The guy in #1 seems to have a pretty conventional lifestyle, standard tighty-whitey living, not anywhere near la vida loca. But MV goes lots of other places. You can, for instance, embrace la vida de culito in their C Through number:

(#2)

or playfully troll the beaches of the Côte d’Azur in their polkadot delight:

(#3)

(Guys in sexy underwear, yes, but no more than that. Plus a recent slang idiom.)

Daily Jocks yesterday:

   (#1) SLIDE IN OUR DM’S!

We are looking for hot new influencers to promote DailyJocks products, follow us & like our most recent post for the chance to become a DailyJocks influencer.

We will be sending out products for you to take pictures in & share with the world!

Lots of smiling — I’m big on smiles — in these amateur underwear photos, as compared to the sturdy studly pro shots.

The slang initialism DM (for direct message) I already knew, but the larger idiom slide in(to) (y)our DMs was new to me (but I’m so far from plugged into new things that I should be treated as permanently unplugged).

From the Know Your Meme site:

Slide Into Your DMs (permutations are common and may include: Slide Into Her DMs, Slide Into Yo DMs, Slide Into the DMs, often with the word “like” after the phrase) is a catchphrase which refers to the act of direct messaging another person [whether stranger or acquaintance] on a social media platform, usually for romantic reasons, in a smooth or cool way. While the phrase can be used literally, it is often parodied by being attached to videos or photographs of people engaging in awkward behavior [especially involving sliding].

It’s currently unknown where the term originated. The first online examples, including some GIFS with the tag and a Yahoo answers post, seem to appear in November 2013. At that point, the only social media platforms that allowed direct messaging were Twitter and Facebook; Instagram introduced direct messaging in December of 2013, and Vine premiered the feature in April of 2014.

One of the first popular examples of the term was this hip hop single by M-Boy titled “Slide Into Your DMs,” which was released on January 8th, 2014 [available on the Know Your Meme site].

So slide your body into sexy underwear and offer yourself to DJ customers romantically — but in a smooth, cool way.

As it happens, there are at least three D.M. men’s underwear companies, all into sexiness.

One, just D.M., source of (among other things, this smiley brief:

   (#2) Front view

   (#3) Rear view

Then Don Moris, offering Turkish delights, including this rainbow thong:

   (#4)

From their website (as is):

Welcome to our website. We appreciate your time no matter you are  purchasing or just looking. We are happy to introduce ourselves as a famous professional manufacturer and supplier of sexy men’s underwear ..

We come from Turkey, the manufacturing center in the world and our company, Don Moris, is one of the largest sexy men’s underwear manufacturer. We have what you are looking for and more.

We supply all types of fine sexy underwear such as: boxers, thongs, jockstraps, briefs, bikinis, sexy men’s panties, men’s panties, slips, erotic underwear, swimming wear.

Finaly, Danny Miami / DannyMiami, all beach sweaty-sexy, as here:

   (#5) The leopard

From the website, earnest burbling:

I am so excited you are here and I cannot wait to see you rocking your DannyMiamigear!

It all started with a dream to express my creative vision through fashion. From a very early age, I loved the beach. The beach has always been the ideal place for me to unwind and relax. In younger years, I was obsessed with obtaining the perfect tan. I remember looking at myself in the mirror and wanting to have the perfect body to complement that tan.I knew a little sun made a big difference. It just made me look better all-around specially in swimwear and undies.

Seeing myself in undies after the right tan was everything….. but the underwear itself was always soooo boring. I wanted to wear a piece that felt unique in every way, but my taste was too extravagant for what was out in the market. And that is how everything began.

The idea of having my own underwear line took years in the making. I took designing these pieces very seriously and educated myself in the craft. Additionally, I searched for the best fabrics with the most flattering fits. For me creating incredible patterns was also a must. In all it took years of intense labor and dedication, but in July 2015 DannyMiami.com came into fruition. Hard work paid off and from the start it became an instant success. All pieces were sold out within a month. The receptiveness of my original designs inspired me to continue creating even more remarkable pieces, thus giving rise to the fashion name of DannyMiami.

(Underwear guy, allusions to sexual practices. Imbibe with caution.)

Yesterday’s Daily Jocks ad, an “X-rated Sale” for Mothers Day weekend, with a caption of mine:

  spent husk

drained from a
day in hard harness
sprawled half-conscious
tits jutting codpiece
glistening abs
huge elegant feet
hazy hint of that
hole of male delight

An odd sale offer for Mothers Day weekend, but maybe (as I’ll suggest in another posting) it’s really for Muthuhs Day. That would work.

The ad copy:

GET 15% OFF OUR TOP BACKROOM BRAND THIS WEEKEND.
CellBlock13 is the raunchy big daddy to its founder Timoteo. Created with a unique style for the man that likes to get down and dirty in his underwear choices, you’ll love CellBlock13’s risqué and seductive designs.

The company specializes in fetishwear, but especially harnesses and codpieces. See my 7/23/17 posting “Codpieces on Cellblock 13”.

Then there’s spent husk. From a 1/3/18 posting, “More spent husks”:

SH8: Seized by an empty shell

In my 12/31 posting “El Bruto commands” there appeared two of my collages on the theme Spent Husks (SH #1 “The Wages of Dissolution” in #2 there, SH #2 “The Lost Boys” in #3 there). The theme of the set is the folk-medical idea that ejaculation is using up, spending, a portion of a finite stock of the essence of masculinity, of male strength; in this view, a man has only so many shots in him, so that frequent masturbation and other sexual activity depletes the stock, eventually reducing a man prematurely to a spent husk, an impotent, desexed shell.

Couple this idea with the belief that gay men are extraordinarily profligate sexually, and you get the view that even young, vital-seeming gay men are just pretty, but rapidly degenerating, husks of humanity. Et in Arcadio ego.

From this spring the SH collages.

… (A subtheme in the collages is that of male prostitution, indicated by symbols of financial exchange in [some of] the collages: the idea is that stud hustlers (and other male sex workers) have even more sex than the rest of us, depleting both themselves and their johns.)

… at King Features Syndicate, or so it seems. In my feed today, three cartoons (of my five regulars from King) with a psychoanalyst and his couch: a Bizarro/Wayno with an empty couch; a Zippy with Zippy on the couch; and a Mother Goose and Grimm with the dog Grimm on the couch.

(#1) Generic psychiatrist, empty couch (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page.)

(#2) Zippy-World’s God as psychiatrist, Zippy on the couch

(#3) Freud-like psychiatrist, Oscar Mayer Grimm on the couch

#1: The Beautiful Couch is Empty. A turn-about cartoon that’s paradox-funny and also touching.

My title here plays on the title of a novel of homosexual reminiscence, a combination of themes that would take you to a psychoanalyst’s couch, if of course you existed. From Wikipedia:

The Beautiful Room Is Empty is a 1988 semi-autobiographical novel by Edmund White.

It is the second of a trilogy of novels, being preceded by A Boy’s Own Story (1982)and followed byThe Farewell Symphony (1997). It depicts the adolescence and early adulthood of its protagonist, and documents his experience of homosexuality in the 1950s and 1960s, ending with the Stonewall Riots of 1969.

#2: Grant me this one wish, and I’ll grant you eternal life. Genies can grant you wishes (see below). Priests can grant you absolution. Psychiatrists can, sometimes,  grant you relief from unhappiness:

[Freud’s 1935 letter to a mother:] What analysis can do for your son runs in a different line. If he is unhappy, neurotic, torn by conflicts, inhibited in his social life, analysis may bring him harmony, peace of mind, full efficiency, whether he remains homosexual or gets changed.

But the Christian God can grant you eternal life — and so, apparently, can Zippy-World’s God. Zippy-God is willing to do that, but only if you’ll stop annoying him by coming to your therapy appointments. (Zippy-God is a testy fellow.)

(I’ll get to the Fenwick in the third panel of this cartoon in a separate posting.)

#3: Be careful what you sing for. This one won’t work at all unless you know both about genies and their fabled ability to grant (three) wishes — the basis for a family of jokes — and also a crucial bit of American popular culture: the Oscar Mayer Wiener Song.

On this blog, the 8/11/12 posting “Annals of phallicity: Wienermobile, banana slug split” sets some background, but what’s key in #3 is the song that trails the Wienermobile:

I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Weiner
That is what I truly wish to be
Cause if I were a oscar mayer weiner
Everyone would be in love with me

(You can watch the 1965 version of the Oscar Mayer commercial here. And experience a wonderful barbershop-quartet version of it here, with Julien Neel singing all four parts.)

What could be more fitting for a patient on a psychiatrist’s couch than to express a heartfelt desire to be loved?

Then of course there’s the wish to be incarnated as a symbolic penis, how Freudian is that?

(Note on English morphosyntax. The original version of the OMW song has counterfactual if-clauses using a special CFT inflectional verb form (with I were), but a great many people recall the song as having the more modern, now essentially standard, PST form in counterfactual if-clauses: I wish I was an Oscar Mayer wiener.)

It started on cable tv (in a commercial) and ended in England’s industrial Midlands (with birds — wrens and a finch — and a museum). All to cook eggs.

Plastic cookers. The image:

(#1) You can watch the Egglettes commercial here

On the name, which has a variant of the suffix –ette. From Michael Quinion’s Affixes site:

–ette forming nouns [Old French –ette, feminine of –et.]

A common use is to suggest a diminutive: kitchenette, a small kitchen or part of a room equipped as a kitchen; statuette, a small statue or figurine; diskette, a small removable computer data storage disk; novelette, a frequently derogatory term for a short novel; courgette (French courge, gourd), in British English the immature fruit of a vegetable marrow, a zucchini. However, many words that once had this sense have lost it: cigarette; omelette (literally, a little knife blade, from its flatness; French amelette, from lemele, knife blade). Others never had it: launderette; etiquette (French étiquette, a list of ceremonial observances of a court).

Egglettes has the variant –lette, with the L from omelette ‘a dish of beaten eggs cooked in a frying pan until firm, often with a filling added while cooking, and usually served folded over’ (NOAD).

There are other brands of plastic egg cookers, for example Eggies. On the Egg Lover site

(#2)

Another derivational suffix. From the Quinion site:

–y (also -ieand –ee): forming affectionate or pet names, or nouns that imply smallness [Scots -ie, used in names but of uncertain origin, taken over in Middle English.]

Porcelain coddlers. From the Chairish site:

(#2) I have four of these; Ann Daingerfield Zwicky and I bought them about 50 years ago

Vintage Royal Worcester Egg Coddlers – A Pair

This darling matched pair of Royal Worcester fine porcelain egg coddlers in the Wrens & Finch pattern are the perfect addition to your breakfast table! They are circa 1970 from England. The base is a lovely white porcelain and the wren is on one side, and the finch on the other. The lids have rings to remove them from the water! A nice find for the naturalist bird lover with these ‘Audubon type’ images on porcelain.

With the tops off, and showing both wrens and finch:

(#3) Not being a bird person, I can’t identity the species of wren and finch depicted here

On the verb coddle, from NOAD:

[with object] 1 treat in an indulgent or overprotective way: I was coddled and cosseted. 2 cook (an egg) in water below boiling point. ORIGIN late 16th century (in the sense ‘boil (fruit) gently’): origin uncertain; coddle (sense 1) is probably a dialect variant of obsolete caudle ‘administer invalids’ gruel’, based on Latin caldum ‘hot drink’, from calidus ‘warm’.

More on coddling eggs, from Wikipedia, with the connection to Royal Worcester:

In cooking, coddled eggs are gently or lightly cooked eggs. They can be partially cooked, mostly cooked, or hardly cooked at all (as in the eggs used to make Caesar salad dressing, which are only slightly poached for a thicker end-product). Poached eggs are eggs that, arguably, are coddled in a very specific way: they are poached in water.

There are two methods of coddling eggs. The first is to cook the egg in its shell, by immersing it in near-boiling water. This can be done either in a pan where the water is kept below boiling point, or by pouring boiling water over the egg and letting it stand for 2 to 5 minutes, based on starting temperature of the eggs, number of eggs cooked at once and amount of boiling water used.

The second method is to break the egg in an egg coddler, porcelain cup or ramekin with a lid, and cook using a bain-marie. The inside of the egg coddler is first buttered in order to flavor the egg and allow it to be removed more easily. A raw egg (sometimes with additional flavorings) is broken into the coddler, which is then placed in a pan of near-boiling water for 7 to 8 minutes to achieve a solid white and yolk.

Coddlers … have been manufactured by Royal Worcester … since at least the 1890s, and may have been invented there. Many companies now make egg coddlers, some of which are collectors’ items.

On the company, from Wikipedia:

Royal Worcester is believed to be the oldest or second oldest remaining English porcelain brand still in existence today, established in 1751 (this is disputed by Royal Crown Derby, which claims 1750 as its year of establishment). Since 2009 part of the Portmeirion Group, Royal Worcester remains in the luxury tableware and giftware market, although production in Worcester itself has ended.

Technically, the Worcester Royal Porcelain Co. Ltd. known as Royal Worcester was formed in 1862, and wares produced before this are known as Worcester porcelain, although the company had a royal warrant from 1788. The enterprise has followed the pattern of other leading English porcelain brands, with increasing success during the 18th and 19th centuries, and a gradual decline during the 20th century, especially the latter half.

… The factory’s former site includes the independent Museum of Royal Worcester (formerly known as the ‘Dyson Perrins Museum’ and ‘Worcester Porcelain Museum’) owned by the Dyson Perrins Museum Trust. The Museum houses the world’s largest collection of Worcester porcelain. The collections date back to 1751 and the Victorian gallery, the ceramic collections, archives and records of factory production, form the primary resource for the study of Worcester porcelain and its history.

(#4) The severely Victorian museum building in Severn Street, Worcester, Worcestershire

Worcester, England, source of Worcester MA and Worcestershire sauce. Not far from Birmingham, the great manufacturing city of the 18th and 19th centuries and the center of the industrial Midlands. On the map:

(#5) Wales on the left, England on the right

The map takes in considerable territory, to show Stoke-on-Trent (famous for its pottery industry) on the north and the port city of Bristol on the south (the Lund and Miller porcelain factory of 1750-51 there was bought out by Royal Worcester in 1752.)