Calendars - Part 79

 New Year's Day 2026

For New Year's Day, we present a 2026 calendar of paintings by Kenney Mencher.  This calendar is for sale in the EU and other countries, but not for sale in the U.S.

Click on each image to see a larger version.

The January painting is titled "9 AM."  February is untitled.

March is "Big Hands".  April is "Counterweighted Nude."  May is "Fallacious Arguments."

June is "Frisky Business."  July is "In the Stall Next to Mine."  August is "Out and Stout."

September is "Dress Shirt."  October is "Satyr."  November is "Summer's Last Chance."  December is "Twilight."

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My blog is now five years old.  Happy New Year!

Calendars - Part 63

 Rugby Helps Our Heroes Calendar

What could be more appropriate than to start the new year with a calendar?  This is the Rugby Helps Our Heroes calendar, put out by the rugby organization at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) in Sheffield, England.  The rugby players in the calendar are not students at SHU.  They are British amateur and professional rugby players.

The rugby players are not the heroes.  Before 2022, the money raised from selling the calendars was donated to Help For Heroes, a charity that supports wounded British military veterans.  Since 2022, each rugby player who appears in the calendar gets to pick one charity, and the calendar money is donated to those charities.

But wait a minute: this is a 2014 calendar.  Well, it turns out that 2025 starts on a Wednesday, and 2014 started on a Wednesday, and neither year is a leap year, so all the months in this 2014 calendar also work for 2025.

Above: January.

February.  Michael, a follower of my blog, sent me calendar images for many naked calendars, including this one.  Thanks, Michael!

And for this calendar, Michael also sent some "behind the scenes" photos.  So here's another view of Mr. February.

The calendar images, like almost all British naked calendars, are cropped or posed so as not to show frontal nudity.  But this "behind the scenes" image of Mr. February gives us a hint of what he's packing.

March.

April.

May.

June.

July.

August.

September.

October.

November.  The "behind the scenes" photos for Mr. November (who is also on the calendar cover photo) didn't reveal any more of him, but they revealed his name, Will Owen, and that he played rugby for the professional Moseley rugby team in Birmingham.

We end with December, which appropriately shows the same guys as January, only in January they were looking ahead and in December they're looking back.

Thanks again to Michael for the calendar photos, and Happy New Year 2025!

Chinese New Year 2024

Year of the Dragon

Today is Chinese New Year's Day, the beginning of the Year of the Dragon in the 12-year Chinese calendar cycle.

In Chinese mythology, the dragon is not an evil creature like the Western dragon.  Rather, it is a symbol of strength, good luck, and nobility.  The Chinese Emperors chose the dragon as their symbol, unlike England, where the patron saint is St. George, who killed a dragon.

The oriental dragon has a long-snake-like body, legs with claws, and a head similar to a Western dragon, but it does not breathe fire, and it does not have wings.

Above is a house decoration in Bhutan of a dragon and a penis.  We commented in a previous post why houses are decorated with penises in Bhutan.  This one adds a dragon for luck.

Dragons are also favorite subjects for tattoos, especially in Japan.  Above, a Japanese-style tattoo.

A guy on a nude beach showing his dragon tattoo.

This tattoo belongs to a guy who calls himself Onebig_tattoo on Twitter.  On his back is a dragon ...

and his one big tattoo wraps around his sides to his front.

Here's a dragon tattoo that extends all the way down to the guy's penis.

And this guy chose a much smaller but strategically placed tattoo of an oriental dragon.  Remember, it stands for strength and good luck!

We end with a clip from a video of a guy who calls himself Damian Dragon, and sure enough, he has a dragon tattooed on his chest.

Happy New Year to you all, and may the Year of the Dragon bring you good luck!

Events - Part 49

New Year's Dive

The Dutch have a New Year's tradition called Nieuwjaarsduik, or New Year's Dive.  On January 1, they run into the freezing ocean and back again.

The tradition started in 1960 when a swim club decided to start the year fresh with a dip in the sea.  It received national attention when a brand of soup decided to sponsor it.  Now, 25,000 people participate each year, including 10,000 people in Scheveningen, above, the most popular location.  Most of the participants wear swimsuits ...

but there's always that one guy (above, in Scheveningen).

The New Year's Dive is also done in many other locations, and in some of them the participants skinny-dip, like here in 2015 ...

and here in 2017 ...

and here in 2018 ...

and at least one guy here in 2023.

We end with a video clip from 2019.

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My blog is now three years old.  Happy New Year to all of you!

Gods, Myths and Heroes - Part 25

 Happy New Year
or
The Story of Chronos

The image of the old year, or Father Time, being replaced by the baby new year has been around for a while.  We see it above on this 1911 cover of the Saturday Evening Post by the great gay artist J.C. Leyendecker.  But did you ever wonder why the old year is always carrying a scythe?  The answer goes back to Greek mythology, and it involves castration, cannibalism, and confusion.

Originally, Chronos (above) was the Greek god of time, especially cycles of time, like the zodiac or the cycle of the year.

Now bear with me.  According to the ancient Greek writer Hesiod, before the gods of Mt. Olympus such as Zeus existed, the primeval god was Uranus (Ouranos).  He was the son and husband of the primeval earth goddess Gaia.  He fathered 12 gods called Titans, including one called Cronus (or Kronos – there are several variant spellings, but we'll go with Cronus).

Now, Gaia had gotten fed up with her son/husband Uranus, and she made a sickle out of adamant and asked Cronus to castrate Uranus, which he did (above).  Cronus then became the head god, replacing Uranus, who disappears from the story.  Apparently you can't be the head god if you don't have any balls.

Even in ancient times, people confused Chronos (the god of time) with Cronus (the Titan), so Cronus got associated with time as well.

Above: Castration of Uranus by Caravaggio, c. 1530.

By the way, according to Hesiod, Cronus threw Uranus' testicles into the sea, and the goddess Aphrodite (Venus) arose from them.  Above, I have slightly modified Botticelli's famous painting The Birth of Venus to reflect this myth.

But wait, there's more!  The Roman god Saturn was originally a god of agriculture, hence the scythe that he carries for harvesting grain.  Saturnalia was a Roman harvest festival.

Above, Saturn by Bernard Picart, Amsterdam, 1734.

When the Romans conquered Greece, they identified the Greek gods with corresponding Roman gods.  For example, Aphrodite was identified with Venus.  The Titan Cronus was also a harvest god, so Cronus was identified with Saturn.  Above is a section of the strange painting The Mutilation of Uranus by Saturn by Giorgio Vasari in the 1500s.  If you were going to castrate someone, you certainly wouldn't reach for a scythe, but Saturn was associated with the scythe, so we get this strange mixture of Cronus and Saturn.

In the Greek myth, Cronus was warned that he would be overthrown by his own child.  His wife was Rhea, another Titan.  Every time Rhea gave birth, Cronus ate the new baby god.  Above is the gruesome Saturn Devouring His Son by the Spanish painter Goya, c. 1820.

Rhea didn't like her husband devouring all of her children, so when the next baby god, Zeus, was born, she hid him and substituted a stone in swaddling clothes, which she gave to Cronus and he ate, as depicted on this vase c. 460-450 BC.  Of course, Zeus later overthrew his father Cronus and became the head god.

So, putting it all together, the god of time got confused with the god who castrated his father and ate his children, who got confused with an agricultural god carrying a scythe.

The 17th century painting above, Chronos and His Child by Giovanni Francesco Romanelli, exemplifies this by calling him Chronos (the time god) but giving him the attributes of Cronus (who killed his children) and Saturn (who had a scythe).  Yet, in a way, this painting is the direct ancestor of our image of the Old Year and the baby New Year.

And that's why the old year carries a scythe.

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My blog is now two years old.  Happy New Year to all of you!

Gods, Myths and Heroes - Part 9

 New Year's Day
Adam & Eve (& Steve)

On New Year's Day, it's appropriate to talk about new beginnings, so what could be more fitting than the Biblical story of Adam and Eve?

According to Genesis chapter 1, "And God said, let us make man in our image, i.e. with a penis.  And behold, God saw what he had made, and it was very good."  (I'm paraphrasing.)

Adam and Eve has been a favorite subject for artists, not just for the religious significance, but because it was an excuse to depict a naked or nearly-naked man and woman.  In an earlier post I showed the painting above, Adam in Paradise, by Kristian Zimmermann, 1914.

Some artists used branches or leaves to conceal frontal nudity, but not all.  Above are two frescos in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence by Masolino da Panicale, dating to 1425-1427, the early Renaissance.  At left is The Temptation of Adam and Eve, showing the serpent with a human head, and at right is The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden.  Interestingly, for hundreds of years these paintings had fig leaves covering the frontal nudity, but the fig leaves were not original.  They had been added in the 1700s.  A restoration in 1990 removed the fig leaves.

Apparently, Michelangelo had seen da Panicale's frescos.  Above is Michelangelo's version of the same two subjects, painted in the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican (1508-1510).  Note the similarities, and note that Adam and Eve are also frontally nude.

This is Adam et Eve by French artist Gustave Courtois, painted in the late 1800s.  Adam's nudity is at least partially concealed by flowers.

Which leads us to our next subject, Adam and Steve.  I was unable to identify the artist who did this clever variation of Courtois' painting.  No concealment by flowers here.

The slogan "God made Adam and Eve, not  Adam and Steve" dates back to 1977 (a picket sign at an anti-gay rally) and has been used by bigots ever since.  Let's examine it for a moment.  What evidence is there that God created Adam and Eve?

None.  Because, of course, it's not true.  It's yet another Biblical story written by ignorant Bronze Age tribesmen in the Near East who didn't even know that the Earth is round.  Overwhelming fossil evidence proves that humans and apes and every living thing on Earth evolved from common ancestors, and our lineage goes back all the way to something more primitive than a bacterium, as beautifully explained in The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins.  Scientifically, there was no Adam and Eve.

But let's examine the story, not from the standpoint of scientific accuracy, but as a myth.  Ah, that's another story.  Literally.  Jewish lore includes another story that Adam's first wife was Lilith, and Eve was his second wife.  Isaac ben Jacob ha-Cohen wrote in the 11th century that Lilith had sex with the archangel Samael and then refused to go back to Adam in the Garden of Eden (after which, presumably, Adam got together with Eve).

What's my point?  If Bronze Age tribesmen can make up a story about Adam and Eve, and a medieval rabbi can make up a story about Adam and Lilith, we can make up stories about Adam and Steve.  As myths, they're all equally valid.

Here are depictions of Adam and Eve by Albrecht Dürer in 1507 in the Prado, Madrid.

Of course the real significance of the myth of Adam and Eve lies in the story of the apple.  God tells Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of a certain tree, or they will die.  The serpent tells Eve that they won't die, but their eyes will be opened and they will know good and evil.  Adam and Eve eat the fruit, they don't die (so God was lying), but now they know good and evil (so the serpent was telling the truth).  God is furious with them for disobeying him, and they are driven out of the Garden of Eden.

The moral of the story is to do what God tells you.  If you don't, you'll be punished.

I draw a different conclusion.  Does God get punished for lying?  Does the serpent get rewarded for telling the truth?  No, the serpent gets punished, and Adam and Eve get punished for following the serpent's advice (which was the truth) instead of God's (which was a lie).  In my view, the moral of the story is that God is a lying bastard, and you shouldn't trust anything he says.

Here's a depiction of Adam and Steve, based on the Dürer paintings, by Murat Urlali, 2018.

As I noted earlier, we can make up our own stories about Adam and Steve that are just as valid (as myths) as the Biblical myth of Adam and Eve.  Here's my story of Adam and Steve:

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In the beginning, God created Adam with a penis, and God saw what he had made, and it was good.  Then God said, "It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a help meet.  Get it?  Help meat."  Then God took one of Adam's ribs, and made a companion for Adam named Steve.  You were thinking it was Eve?   Of course not.  Adam's rib was genetically XY, not XX, so any person made from it had to be male, not female.  And Adam and Steve were both naked, and they took one look at each other and fell in love.

God said to Adam and Steve, "Do not eat the fruit of this apple tree, or you will die."  Then the serpent said to Steve, "God is a lying bastard.  You can eat the apples and you won't die, but you will know the difference between good and evil."  So Steve picked an apple from the tree and offered it to Adam, saying, "You can have this apple if you suck my cock."  And Adam picked an apple from the tree and offered it to Steve, saying, "You can have this apple if you suck my cock."  Then they both ate the apples and sucked each other's cocks.  And behold, it was very good.

Then God came upon Adam and Steve sucking each other's cocks, and God said "Well, well, what have we here?  Stop it; it's an abomination."  And Adam said "No, it's not.  We ate the apples, so now we know what's good and what's evil.  Sex and love are good, not evil.  On the other hand, God, you lied to us when you said we would die if we ate the apples.  Lying is evil.  You, God, are a lying bastard, and you're evil."

Then Adam reported God for inappropriate touching (see the first image in this post), and God got pepper-sprayed.  Then God disappeared, and Adam and Steve lived happily ever after.

(Thanks to Franco at Vellohomo for the pepper-spray image.)

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Note: naysayers might object, where did the cop come from who pepper-sprayed God?  Well, where did Cain's wife come from?  Honestly, naysayers, you'll have to do better than that!  Then they might object that my myth doesn't explain how the world got populated, since Adam and Steve were both male, but that's not a problem.  Genesis says that Adam and Eve's son Seth "begat sons and daughters," but there is no mention of Seth having a wife at all.  Apparently Seth had children by magic without the need for a woman.  In my myth, so did Adam and Steve.  So there!

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It has been one year since I started this blog.  I wish you all a Happy New Year!