https://arnoldzwicky.org
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My second Sunday at Avant, beginning to refine old routines and create new ones. Did not celebrate with gay porn, but instead with an old favorite movie, the frivolous Astaire-Rogers delight The Gay Divorcee (from 1934). Your wife is safe with Tonetti / He prefer spaghetti. No Palo Alto Sacred Harp singing this Sunday, so I sang for two hours on my own, to Irish YouTube videos, eventually reaching peak loudness and passion. My tongue broke out in unknown strains / And sung surprising grace.…
I am reduced to reporting on the minutiae of daily life; everything else is overwhelming. (Half an hour this morning finding out where something I was absolutely sure had been moved had been stashed in my new place. At least I did actually find it. View this as a cautionary tale. I’m getting very little done, very slowly, and not very well, but it’s the best I can do, so I plug away.) It’s taken me a whole week to figure out how to walk through doors here. Well, the extremely heavy (because…
From yesterday, in the posting “nostalgie du ciel’, from an exchange with Hana Filip about nostalgia, with a reference to (from my father, long ago): guidebooks [to Alpine flowers], including a Swiss one with gorgeous color plates. Which are now inestimable sources of delight but also symbols of great loss. As you say, nostalgia. Now, an inventory of my postings about the one with those marvelous illustrations. — from 7/6/11, the posting “Flora” on two wildflower books: Taschenflora des…
Yesterday on this blog — in the posting “Merest note” — I whined about, among other things, the incredibly tedious task of getting books organized in my new digs. Hana Filip’s comment on Facebook about my dismay evoked a complex moment of nostalgia for me: — HF: I find it hard organizing, discarding all kinds of documents, books, letters from the past. Occasionally, there are wonderful surprises because I remember lovely things that I should have remembered, but forgot, but mostly it makes me…
Managed a shower, with improvised adjustments so I could sit down (though the shower is designed for a standing person) and also cope with a — surprise! — low-flow shower stream. All very edgy. Then began some attack on the books, which are all mixed up, arranged on shelves in totally new ways in new places. As with pruning my library way down for the move, this requires handling large numbers of heavy books, so that my hands now barely work, cramp up, and hurt like hell. Constantly having to…
Notes from my new life at the Avant independent living community. Still coping with piles of stuff moved from my old house and distributed more or less randomly over a completely different arrangement of rooms and built-in furnishings (or, in a startling number of cases, a lack of those built-in furnishings — or defective installations requiring repair and reworking). It’s been a long hard slog, still painfully unfolding. With some triumphs on Opal Armstrong Zwicky’s part; I was stunned and…
(time for some bad-taste Headline News for Penises, entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest) It starts with the at least superficially modest advertising slogan (underlined below), in a Facebook pitch for Creed Fragrance that came by me on 7/12: Aventus by Creed. Bright fruits and smoky woods, crafted into an unmistakable signature. Background. A smoky wood (or simply smoky) scent is the scent of wood smoke; Anfar and Aradous both make a Smoky Wood fragrance (perfume / cologne),…
In the face of impossibly large numbers of things to post about, rising by the minute, I will just pick little bits of stuff, so I will at least be telling you something. Now, about where I live now, on the third (top) floor of the Avant independent living community. On the side of #3003 facing the street (El Camino Real, a major city street — also California highway 82 — and the smaller El Camino Way running parallel to it) there’s the living room (a big space in the middle now housing my…
(I have so many things to write about that I’m just throwing up my arms and posting about the most trivial thing to come my way today; this is about my misreading of one word from an article in The Economist issue of 7/4/26). The item “American power: Strength in numbers: An empirical look at America on its 250th birthday reveals a country that is mighty — but becoming less dominant” begins with a compressed history of the American economy, from 1820 on. Then (with my misreading bold-faced):…
Yesterday (in “A new leaf”) I reported on moving house, ending with so, so tired — bone-exhausted — but extremely far from settled in [at Avant, my new place], just enough to take my meds and eat some food. Barely able to speak anymore. … Now it’s nap or pass out. But I digressed long enough to comment on the pleasures that a wall of windows affords me, among them … a beautiful big tree filling much of the space just outside my window I then had one of the world’s great midday naps, long and…
Just to reassure you that I did get moved into the Avant community yesterday, mostly with things in a disorganized mess. At the moment, so, so tired — bone-exhausted — but extremely far from settled in, just enough to take my meds and eat some food. Barely able to speak anymore. I love the room I work in. Full of light, with a wall of windows looking out from the third floor onto the neighborhood, with the foothills looming in the distance, El Camino Real and the smaller El Camino Way right in…
The backstory, from my 7/5 posting “A Catch-22 of sorts”: Now, I understood that this particular Sunday was going to be part of a long solitary holiday weekend, so I thought to lay in extra supplies. I would, in fact, give myself a holiday gift: Naked Sword’s well-crafted gay porn DVD Spain in the Ass 3 (2026) — sorry about the regrettable name — which I put in a rush order for, so it would arrive before Sunday (today). But then [because my Xfinity tv account had been closed at Ramona St.…
Mail from me to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky (who is, in principle, away on holiday with Opal Armstrong Zwicky for the Independence Day weekend), sent at 6:06 am on 7/4 (hugely expanded here): AMZ > EDZ at 6 am on 7/4. Slept, very uneasily, only from 8:30 pm to 3:54 am. Turned on the tv for news and got an error message: Something is not quite right. Please give us a call at 1-800-Xfinity and we’ll get this fixed for you. I have now spent about 2 hours on the phone with Xfinity. It turns out…
In today’s mail, a big card from the United States Postal Service; the crucial sentence is bold-faced: Official Change-Of-Address Validation The Postal Service has received a Change-Of-Address order asking us to forward mail from this address for ARNOLD MELCHIOR ZWICKY … The Postal Service utilizes two-factor authentification to verify Change-Of-Address requests. The purpose of this notification is to provide additional opportunity to confirm this request to forward mail is correct. If you are…
Yesterday — in my posting “National days”, a Peruvian (delivering food to my house) celebrated US Independence Day on my behalf: My dinner for June 27 was delivered by a courier bubbling over in delight about the coming Fourth of July, which he identified as my national day (adding that he was Peruvian and his national days came at the end of July…) In the posting, I played things the way the courier framed them and didn’t appreciate that he was probably also full of delight in America’s…
My dinner for June 27 was delivered by a courier bubbling over in delight about the coming Fourth of July, which he identified as my national day (adding that he was Peruvian and his national days came at the end of July — surprising details below). I suppressed my complex reservations about American Independence Day (some of which I will unload later) and chose not to add that we were at the eve of one of my people’s celebratory days — Stonewall Day, June 28 (the tank top I was wearing had a…
rabbit rabbit rabbit, the sultry bunnies of July! But they are no match for Mononga Hela, the monstrous snake that swallows fat Carnegie melons, prodigious feral boars, and of course entire railway trains whole — the fearsome creature that in popular lore is said to have consumed all of western Pennsylvania in a fit of pique. Mononga Monga Ooga Gila Hellmouth! But first, the Zippy strip from 6/27: Beyond spelling: Zippy appreciates the power of the name Monongahela; and of course potrzebie, but…
tiger tiger tiger to bring June to a close, anticipating the hot summer rabbits of July In the days of the Arnold and Isaac Seminars on Belief that have animated my Ramona St. condo in recent months — Isaac’s a deeply pious fundamentalist Fijian Christian and I’m an amiable non-believer, with an excellent early life in mainstream, socially progressive American Lutheran and Episcopal churches — every so often we hit a note that resonates deeply for both of us. In my 6/24 posting “Jesus pyjamas,…
Difficult night last night. Slept uneasily from 6:30 only to 2:10, and with a substantial break in the middle. Took a levothyroxine tab, then needed to wait an hour before eating breakfast. Fresh news: results of the blood test for TB — an absolute legal requirement for admission to a living community — had come in, negative as expected, so everything can go forward. Meanwhile, I spent the time marking still more things (like wastebaskets and power cords) as to be moved and others as not to be.…
Things rush on. The move from my Palo Alto condo (which Jacques and I moved into almost 40 years ago) to an independent living suite at The Avant of Palo Alto is scheduled to start at 8:30 am on Wednesday July 8th. Very complex preparations: what gets moved (a small select amount); versus what stays (a monumental pile of stuff), to be disposed of by the family phalanx over some period of time. This is not your standard moving experience. I have been more clearly marking the two sets of things,…
Briefly noted. From my posting yesterday (6/26) “Enjoy your night in Tunisia”, in response to Lise Menn, a comment about: the music; I wanted to open up “A Night in Tunisia”, encourage people to discover the early [Dizzy] Gillespie-[Charlie] Parker collaborations, maybe to go on to discover that words got added to it [more than once, in fact] and it was eventually performed and recorded by almost every jazz or just jazzy vocalist(s) there is (Ella did it, Manhattan Transfer did it) and that…
The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip of 6/26: (#1) He’s a good man, who’ll give you hot licks on his saxophone while lavishing care on your car during your dinner; enjoy your night in Tunisia, light on the harissa (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page) A complex joke pun on the name of the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker (Wikipedia entry here), in which the Charlie Brown character from the comic strip Peanuts is presented as a…
(fellatial fun — and disrespectful of religion as well — so not for kids or the sexually modest) Yesterday on the Facebook group soc-motss (for same-sex-inclined folk and their friends), Ellen Evans forwarded a 6/24 FB posting from Derekh Baruch Von Geiger on Facebook: The ultimate source for this image is not identified; it could just be an invention, but it looks like a Christian church service borrowing from Jewish practices, in particular what’s customarily translated into English as the…
From Toni Borowsky (in Australia) on Facebook on 6/24: Jesus PYJAMAS! Ffs I am seeing ads for Jesus pyjamas. (AuE / BrE spelling PYJAMAS, AmE PAJAMAS) In response: — AZ > TB: Links! Pix! We need stuff to see, Toni! But I add that, despite my genuine regard for the Sacred Harp music I sing, I keep hoping that someone will create a site of Jockstraps for Jesus. (I am, um, fond of jockstraps, front and back; but also moved by the both the texts and tunes of SH music; I suspect that I have an…
From Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky (my daughter) on 6/20, completely out of the blue: Re: Assessment Thursday 10:30: The assessment visit is at the Avant. All their departments meet you to make sure you’re a fit. I think it takes about an hour. Somebody will take you. The summons. I am Josef K, summoned to appear before the Agency, unnamed and unidentified judges who will oversee my case. The Agency requires that I supply them with a packet of evidence, print-outs of responses to a long series…
(about the holiday, and masculinity, and enough man-on-man sex to make this posting out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest) First take: the long pan. From my 6/16/19 posting “On this day in 2019”: (US) Fathers Day. For some of us, this is a day to remember our fathers with affection. I’m one of the lucky ones; I’ve written about mine several times, most extensively in my 1/30/11 posting “It Gets Better / Wonderful dad”. It’s also an American commercial holiday that might better be…
In the New Yorker‘s 6/15/26 issue, a “Talk of the Town” piece “The Boards: Like Willy Wonka” by Zach Helfand on the theatre director Michael Arden experiencing indoor skydiving at a facility in Queens (in preparation for his latest show, “The Lost Boys”, which includes actors in intricate flying sequences). Then: In his acceptance speech for his first Tony, in 2023, Arden recounted being a bullied queer theatre kid in Texas, and then said, “All I can say is that now I’m a faggot with a Tony.”…
… from the New Yorker issue of that day: a Liana Finck cartoon on the never-done work of women; and an Ellis Rosen cartoon featuring a fully-accredited monster. The Finck. A young mother, frazzled by the care of a newborn, faces the thoughtless assumption that she is there to serve others: (#1) Dark, murderous, thoughts flit through her mind, but she’s a genuinely nice person, so she will make lunch for her appallingly dense visitors; but they’ll be the first to go down when the revolution…
(a note on taboo avoidance and euphemism, but with enough explication of the raw reference of various expressions to make this posting unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest) A poster wrote: I am a male corn actor. — adding that he had worked in adult entertainment before getting into corn. Just enough background information for me to exclude, oh so reluctantly, a wide range of colorful but unlikely understandings of corn, in favor of its just being an intentional replacement for porn to…
Just 3 days ago (6/15), it was the mantric pleasures of my ball: Key lime cheese ball, Key lime cheese ball, Key lime cheese ball. And then today (6/18), the Pinhead citizens of Dingburg have taken to chanting for their remarkable flange: galvanized steel socket flange, galvanized steel socket flange, galvanized steel socket flange. Respect their flange! onomatomania, onomatomania, onomatomania! Coming soon: the steel flange cheese ball, a triumph of textural contrast. Rivaling the US capital’s…
