Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Terrible things happen: the people we love most, and those that we especially admire, sicken and die; our highly competent bodies are overwhelmed by an avalanche of painful disabilities and disfigurements (I can no longer play the piano or assemble collag…

From a note about my late friend Steve Isard: his family name before was Issersky or Isserski, altered on immigration [to Isard] But the name Isard was not just picked out of a hat; isard is the name (in several languages) of an actual creature, an alpine…

A follow-up to yesterday’s posting “Certified queer”, a riff on a t-shirt that I posted about in 2022; the message on it is the playful 100% Certified Queer, and it has the the label QUEER in it.

I am late for the Rosh Hashanah / New Year train; my life is overfull, but I press on, with brevity to the max: 5787 Shana Tovah!

The first of two postings about message-bearing t-shirts.

Arriving a bit after the day itself (9/6), a big (two 8 x 12 panels) greeting attached to the handle to the front door of my apartment.

Well, yeah, a spoiler.

A while back I lamented to Sacred Harp singers Leigh Cooper and Mark Godfrey (wife and husband; some of us come in couples) over no longer being able to sing face to face, in one another’s company (instead, having to sing along alone at home via Zoom).

A little work of postcard art sent to me by Ann Burlingham as sexy, juicy fruit!

[I started this posting a few days ago, but was balked from moving ahead by bad juju in both Facebook and WordPress.

It’s 9/8, Anton Dvořák’s birthday (1841), which will serve as a lead-in to a fabulous performance of music (by Purcell, not Dvořák) that Ellen Kaisse e-mailed to me as a (9/6) birthday present, stroking one of the passions — for music — that animate my li…

You say it’s your birthday / We’re gonna have a good time — the Beatles, Birthday (1968, from The White Album) [evoked for me in e-mail by Brian Joseph] for (US) Labor Day, the flexed biceps of a manual worker (like my two grandfathers: Bethlehem Steel (m…

The big scheme is Pleasure as Therapy: something I do for pleasure (or play or engaged curiosity) turns out to be excellent therapy, alleviating some affliction of mine or extending my life.

It’s Labor Day weekend in my country — unofficially serving also as the end of summer — and we are supposed to be celebrating ordinary working people (OWP).

Well, the special birthday zone, embracing my 9/6 birthday and the 10/26 birthday of my first male lover, Larry Schourup, a time suffused with delighted memories of our coming together in the spring of 1969, the way that changed both our lives, and how it…

Two absurdist anthropomorphized animal cartoons from the latest New Yorker (of 9/7/26, the Dolly Parton issue): Jared Nangle’s beaver resolutely doing what it’s programmed to do; and Joe Dator’s mountain goat trying to take a NYC cab to the nearest precip…

Today’s (9/4) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro offers an elegant but complex pun: Model chip (the snack), pun chimp (the ape) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page) All tied to Potatohead toys —…

(fecal matters in street talk; you might find it offensive) Previously on this blog, in my 9/1 posting “Send in the rabbits”: Made it back to my apartment, at which point the enema kicked in and I pretty much exploded with shit, everywhere, in piles.

Another little posting on the minutiae of my daily life.

I’m attached to my FN Arnold — because it comes from my father and grandfather, who I am pleased to honor.