Funeral flowers for Mr. Shimmer

In this cartoon from the latest (5/4/26) New Yorker, Ms. Duck and Ms. Rabbit mourn their versatile paramour, Mr. Shimmer the duck-rabbit (or rabbit-duck); see my 8/24/25 posting “Shimmer is both a floor wax AND a dessert topping”, and reflect on versatile gay men, who are bottoms or tops, depending on how you approach them: (#1) The widows weep for their bi-stable beloved; meanwhile, the famous illusion that lies at the very center of their world turns out to be a lifelong preoccupation of the cartoonist Background on ambiguous images. First, from Wikipedia: Ambiguous images or reversible figures are visual forms that create ambiguity by exploiting graphical similarities and other properties of visual system interpretation between two or more distinct image forms. These are famous for inducing the phenomenon of multistable perception. Multistable perception is the occurrence of an image being able to provide multiple, although stable, perceptions. One of the earliest examples of this…