discardingimages:

flying penis monster 

Decretum Gratiani with the commentary of Bartolomeo da Brescia, Italy 1340-1345.

Lyon, BM, Ms 5128, fol. 100r

flying penis monster auto-reblog enabled.

check out this selfie that i just took (i’m the one on the right).

i’ve been live tweeting* the boston mayhem on the twitter service for much of the morning.

*note: live tweets are on a time delay to protect the young ones from profanity.

and in what outfit does mr. r. ganan dress his little dog (muffin man) when they cruise around town in their bronx book wagon?

a: steampunk roadster goggles and a hooded cape designed by the house of gucci out of old 49ers jerseys.

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from: a gay dog: the story of a foolish year (1905) written and illustrated by cecil charles windsor aldin.

a further correction: the w and h is for wystan hugh and not—as i have long maintained—walrus handjob auden. 

the allahakbarries

if you were like me growing up and populated all of your fantasy sports teams not with famous athletes but famous writers, then you will derive a modest amount of non-sexual arousal from the allahakbarries—a super group of edwardian literary cricketeers.

j. m. barrie founded the sports club in 1890, naming it a bizarre portmanteau of his surname + allāhu akbar. its membership consisted of:

• arthur conan doyle, a character in several sherlock holmes stories
• jerome k. jerome, a person notable for his his name
• a. a. milne, who was obsessed with pooh
• p. g. wodehouse, [p. g. stands for pussy gangster]
• paul du chaillu, the “discover of gorillas*”
• charles tennyson, a lesser tennyson
• as well as a bunch of editors from punch, a humor magazine acquired by rupert murdoch in 1919

barry wrote a book on the team (allahakbarries c.c.) which was published via vanity press in 1899. there is also this recommended account by modern author, kevin telfer.

in conclusion: the allahakbarries were the rock bottom remainders of the literary cricket set.

everytime i shake somebody’s hand, i think of this undated oskar andersson cartoon from 1902.

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source: mannen som gör vad som faler honom in (1902)
previously.

flea-fly-flu: know your spanish flill in the blanks

i asked my local witch doctor for a little spanish fly (to lace muffins with) and instead received a little spanish flu and now all my guests are very sweaty and throwing up their denver omelets. what a brunch!

subsequently, take note:

• spanish flea - a 1965 #1 hit by herb alpert and the tijuana brass. it became the bachelor theme on the dating game.
• spanish fly - a beetle. its dried carapace is said to be an aphrodisiac. if you consume it, you’ll be a dog in heat, a freak without warning. 
• spanish flu - a 1918 influenza pandemic which infected over 500 million people including lavinia swire from downton abbey.

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other distinctions

for herbal: the chasteberry

once upon a time, i was freebasing an aphrodisiac in the changing room of a j.c. penney in one of those ohio cities that starts with c. all of the sudden some idiot clerk opens the door and gets up in my grill about freebasing an aphrodisiac and then has the nerve to bounce me from the place without even letting me buy the loafers i was there to buy in the first place. so i spent the next 18 weeks plotting a fitting revenge when all the sudden it struck me: if this idiot clerk was cockblocking me from my aphrodisiac, i could slip her an anaphrodisiac—which instead of inciting one’s libido would  quell it.

i never did get around to tricking the clerk into freebasing an anaphrodisiac (married her instead) but i did investigate a long list of supposed anaphrodisiacs. it was my old pal, pliny (the elder) who suggested that the chasteberry was the very revenge for which i was looking. consider »

Pliny, in his Historia Naturalis, reports the use of stems and leaves of this plant by women as bedding “to cool the heat of lust” during the time of the Thesmophoria, when Athenian women left their husbands’ beds to remain ritually chaste.

At the end of the thirteenth century John Trevisa reports of it “…the flowre…maketh men chaste as a lombe”. Chaucer, in “The Flower and the Leaf,” refers to it as an attribute of the chaste Diana…

More recently, this plant has been called monk’s pepper in the thought that it was used as anti-libido medicine by monks to aid their attempts to remain chaste. There are disputed accounts regarding its actual action on libido, with some claims that it is anaphrodisiac and others that it is aphrodisiac. Because of the complex mechanism of action it can be probably both…

so is the chasteberry an aphrodisiac or the opposite of one? let us grab the skeleton key to all j.c. penney changing rooms and find out. 

thaumatrope party

one relationship of interest which i failed to mention during a previous post dated 12 march is that the greek word θαυµατ has also found its way into the english word thaumatrope—with a literal meaning of “wonder-turning.”

before there were gifs, indeed before there was even the phenakistiscope there was the thaumatrope »

A disk or card with a picture on each side is attached to two pieces of string. When the strings are twirled quickly between the fingers the two pictures appear to combine into a single image due to persistence of vision.

above is my effort to reanimate an undated thaumatrope disc from 1876. watch along as sir wimber clownpants is like “dat ass.”