Filed under: art, gay, in praise of athletic beauty, Norwegians, shameless self-promotion | Tags: art, beer, chicago, denmark, doctors without borders, football, haiti, lesbians, me me me me me, norway, sharon butler
I’m going to have some exciting news for you in a couple of hours, but first, here’s some newsy news to tide you over.
In the wake of the Haitian earthquake, more or less every single person on the entire internet has decided that they are an expert on Haitian economics and Haitian politics and the fiscal priorities of non-profits that most people hadn’t even heard of last week. But here’s a pretty good argument for giving unrestricted funds to a group like Medecins Sand Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders as opposed to, say, restricted funds to the Red Cross, or anything at all to Wyclef’s Yele organization. (Here’s another good article about Haiti, this one dealing with poverty and rice scarcity.)
I have never heard of any of the 10 Most Influential Norwegian Lesbians.
Where to pee when gallery-hopping in Chicago.
The future of art blogging by the ever-smart Sharon Butler.
Fact you probably didn’t know: Beer cans were illegal in Denmark until 2002. Now they’re all the rage. (My favorite Danish beers, the Ølfabrikken Porter and the coffee-ish Mikkeller Beer Geek Breakfast, don’t come in cans, though honestly I don’t know how I’d feel if they did.)
Sexy Joe Flacco and the Baltimore Ravens lost yesterday, so my Cardinals-Ravens Super Bowl prediction isn’t gonna happen. The Vikings are currently up against the Cowboys, though; that’s good.
Finally, In Carnal Nation stuff… MTV hopes underaged wang will continue their recent string of hits… Hawaii’s shooting for civil unions and the Christian right is freaking the fuck out… And a Kingston newspaper responds to anti-Jamaican sentiment in hate speech-sensitive Germany.
Filed under: in praise of athletic beauty | Tags: baltimore ravens, gary coleman, joe flacco, me me me me me, south africa
I’m off to a movie date (Sunset Boulevard! On the big screen!) so in lieu of a Sunday News update I just thought I would post this photo of dreamy Baltimore Ravens QB Joe Flacco again. Just look at his smoldering eyes checking out someone a little to your left. Swoon. The Ravens are beating the Patriots 7-0 right now, which surely you either know already or don’t care about.
If you’re looking for something to read, though, the subjects of both of my Carnal Nation stories today–about Gary Coleman’s penis and about a South African drug lord’s penis–are pretty interesting.
Filed under: hot, in praise of athletic beauty | Tags: professional wrestling, tag teams
For your visual pleasure, a little gallery of tag team wrestlers of yesterday and today. The Fabulous Kangaroos up there were Al Costello and Roy Heffernan; they started wrestling professionally in 1957. They actually were Australian, and were among the first of many, many pro wrestlers who playing up nationalistic (and racist) stereotypes. (Actually many, if not most, of the wrestlers didn’t come from the countries they associated themselves with. Rowdy Roddy Piper, who wore a kilt and entered the ring accompanied by bagpipe music, was actually Canadian. So were Nikita Koloff (the evil Soviet menace) and Abdullah The Butcher, the Madman from Sudan.
A lot of these wrestlers, especially those from the era before the WWF/WWE got really tacky in the eighties, were pretty sexy, and pro wrestling’s early use of harsh black-and-white photography (more like boxing photos than later, Trapper Keeper-ready shots) showed off the wrestlers’ rugged bodies in a very flattering way, even if there was some really gruesome stereotyping going on.
Some notably good-looking tag teams after the jump:
Filed under: gay, heterosexuals, hot, in praise of athletic beauty, movies, music, personal, porn, starfucking | Tags: baseball, blur, boys, celebrities, christmas, cocteau twins, conner habib, elizabeth fraser, ersan ilyasova, films, gift ideas, grady sizemore, lolita, manliness, milwaukee bucks, nabokov, pet shop boys, porn stars, sherlock holmes, taquitos, the internet
I think I may go back to writing on paper, because my brain is seriously not disciplined enough to sit in front of the computer all day. I write two sentences, then I check my Google Reader. Then I write another sentence, then I become incomprehensibly worried that my Tumblarity might have dropped. Then I delete that last sentence and spend the next hour looking at all the links posted by the 400 people I’m following on Twitter. It’s kind of really fucking annoying.
Here is just a smattering of the things that are distracting me today:
A hairy gay creative writing professor/vegetarian porn star who likes The Dismemberment Plan, The Cardigans AND Patricia Highsmith? Hello, Dreamy McDreamsicles! Or Conner Habib, which I guess is what he technically answers to. (Oh, and did I mention that he’s effing gorgeous?)
Speaking of people with whom I’d like to make whoopie, I’m a little smitten today with Ersan Ilyasova of the Milwaukee Bucks. I don’t know anything about basketball, but at some point just before bed last night I found a photo of him here.
Also in sporting news, sometimes when I see iPhone photos of famous people I can’t distinguish them from iPhone photos of unfamous people. So forgive me for not recognizing baseball player Grady Sizemore the first 5 times I first saw this visual pun about teabagging. Actually, who am I kidding? I have no idea who the hell he is.
Kind of like how when I stumble across celebrity porn fakes there’s about a 90% chance that I won’t be able to actually identify the person whose head is photoshopped on. (The Daniel Craig one is pretty hilarious, though.)
I want more or less everything in the Art of Manliness Holiday Gift Guide. But mainly Filson’s Mackinaw Cruiser, the tweed radio and the leather bag. You know, if you were wondering.
The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at boys.
There’s a Blur documentary coming out early next year, in the UK at least. This is the kind of thing I would fly to the UK to see, if I were a wealthy jetsetter and not an underemployed “creative.”
Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins does her first interview in forever.
The Pet Shop Boys have a Christmas EP coming out soon, and they’re releasing parts of the new Christmas single a little bit each day.
Natalia Antonova writes about Lolita over at The Second Pass. (Sadly, her thoughts on the novel aren’t accompanied by a Sasha Grey spread the way that Roger Ebert’s was.)
And finally, Videogum gets to the heart of something that’s been on my mind for weeks now: What the hell is the deal with those Sherlock Holmes Taquito ads at 7-11?
[Connor Habib photo via his Facebook]
Filed under: books, in praise of athletic beauty, magazines | Tags: asterix, bobbleheads, culture, france, gay, new hampshire, peyton place, spandex, the 00s, wrestling
[Because I spent most of the week reading about prostitution in Rhode Island, this news update is abbreviated.]
The Village Voice called wrestling organization Ring of Honor the Best Place To See Straight Men Get All Homoerotic. Wrestling fans responded, obviously, by calling for the death of people from the Village Voice.
Grace Metalious, author of scandalous fifties bestseller novel Peyton Place, has been honored with a bobble head by the New Hampshire Historical Society. That’s pretty cool, although I’m more excited by their Old Man In The Mountain bobblehead. [via Largehearted Boy]
The Telegraph has a list of 100 cultural moments that defined the decade. It’s interesting to read British ideas of what’s culturally important, because we’re so alike and yet so not. I can’t imagine something like The Beethoven Experience capturing American hearts and breaking sales records, for instance, or any American calling “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor” a significant cultural moment.
Finally, Asterix, the plucky French comic hero, turned 50 this week.
[image from Glory By Honor VIII: The Final Countdown]
People were writing lengthy breakdowns about Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize starting about nine seconds after Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. Between this and Kanye West and Roman Polanski and David Letterman I’m pretty sure I am over the internet, at least as far as personal essays go. (That’s why, incidentally, I haven’t actually presented my opinions about any of them. Though I’m tempted to, of course.)
A California couple lost their teenaged daughter to liver cancer after their insurance company denied her a liver replacement. The angered mother went to insurance company headquarters to ask for an apology, and was literally given the finger.
Swedish group Maskinen have a new video out featuring Marina Gasolina, formerly of Bonde do Role.
A lesbian single mother’s response to gay pride. Despite the fact that I have few inhibitions I pretty much agree with everything she says.
I have no patience for horrorcore as a musical style, but I think it’s pretty shitty that the media’s angling some grizzly murders in Virginia as representative of the genre.
[photo via Flickr; this user--who goes by Morgan--photographs small town high school football games in Montana and Wyoming. As with most Flickr albums, I wish there were only about a third of the photos, because some really great images get lost in a sea of so-so ones. But it's definitely worth browsing. He's got a blog, too. These are some spectators at a game in Montana.]
Filed under: in praise of athletic beauty, starfucking | Tags: football, joe flacco, kurt warner, nfl predictions
I can’t sleep and I’m insanely bored, so I thought now would be as good as time as any to post my NFL predictions for this season. Though I did better than usual at caring about football last year, I’m still not really qualified to say anything about the strengths or weaknesses of any one team because I don’t pay attention to things like trades and injuries and who retired and all those other things that real fans care about. So my predictions above are based entirely on the relative cuteness of the starting quarterback. Religious zealot or not, in my crazy fantasy world the Cardinals’ Kurt Warner is just dying to do unspeakable things to me, and the Ravens’ Joe Flacco isn’t far behind. (A little surprisingly, my choices don’t at all overlap with the most symmetrical faces in the NFL. I ranked Matt Ryan 23rd out of the 32 starters, and Roethlisberger, Collins and especially fugmaster Philip Rivers all finished last in their divisions.)
After the jump, my predictions for each division, with visual evidence:
Filed under: in praise of athletic beauty, not hot | Tags: 1999, death, jfk jr
Tomorrow marks the tenth anniversary of the death of John F Kennedy, Jr. The most athletic Kennedy is someone I never thought about much at the time, which in retrospect is kind of surprising: he was in the tabloids every week running around with his shirt off, and as a teenager I was not picky about hairy shirtless celebrities.
Kennedy was a child star in many senses, one whose father might have become as much a demanding stage dad as his grandfather before him. He grew up in front of cameras, unwittingly leaving his greatest mark at the age of three, when he saluted his father’s coffin. From a young age the press called him John John, a name they didn’t let go of until his death. I know the women of America were enamored with him, and that his behavior was fairly laddish. Yet despite whatever romantic trysts he was having, or magazines he was publishing, or whatever, he almost always seemed to be on vacation. Work, at least as the media portrated it, was a mild distraction from endless beach-going and working out. In photos he’s usually moving, running or swimming or climbing rocks, but he hardly ever seems to be going anywhere.
JFK Jr was a prep school frat boy, exuding an unmistakable aura of old-money privilege in nearly every photo. Even his death–crashing a propellor plane that he was flying to Martha’s Vineyard–has a narcissistic air about it. They say he neglected calls from ground control, and some speculate that he was fighting with his wife, causing him stress that led to his crashing the plane. That’s something that happens to rich people in unimaginative melodramas, not in real life.
Filed under: hot, in praise of athletic beauty, starfucking | Tags: detroit red wings, henrik zetterberg, hockey, starfucking
Though I would be lying if I told you I had more than the most superficial interest in hockey, that’s not to say that I’m completely ignorant of its charms. It’s pretty much the only sport I like to watch in person, for one, and NHL games make a lot more sense to me now that half the games don’t end up with a tie. I still don’t understand why the season drags into June when it should be over by, I don’t know, early April, but really who am I to say.
Anyway, the Stanley Cup might be decided tomorrow. Detroit’s up 3-2 over Pittsburgh in the finals, and if the Red Wings win tomorrow they’ll keep the trophy for the second consecutive year.
One of Detroit’s superstar players–and the reason I’m writing this post–is Henrik Zetterberg, the Swedish left wing. Last year he won the Conn Smythe trophy, which goes to the most valuable player in the post-season, and this year he’s scored 24 points during the playoffs. More importantly, he’s a total hunk. After the jump, Exhibits A-I, showing why this man does things to me. He’s a little bit Jared Leto-y, as many have noted, but clean-shaven he also looks a lot like Bobby Briggs. Obviously I prefer him with his beard, though.
(nb: That’s his girlfriend, Emma Andersson, in the next picture. Holy botox!)
Filed under: in praise of athletic beauty
The Harry E. Winkler Collection of boxing photographs at Notre Dame contains over 7500 images of boxers both in and out of the ring, mainly from the thirties through the fifties. Their online archive has some pieces of the collection, and it’s a nice enough way to spend the afternoon when you’re looking for excuses not to have to re-examine your resume or clean your filthy, filthy apartment (as I just did.)
photo: Carmen Barth on rowing machine.]
