The Hump Day Page

 



Yes, I know that Hump Day's about camels, not elephants. But symbols of any kind are always a puzzle. What do they mean and how do they help us understand anything? Why I decided to swipe the famous elephant painting done by the Chinese and rework it with a camel as the subject of blind men’s groping investigations.


Not that any of this is particularly important, but Hump Day is first and foremost having an entertaining distraction in the middle of the work week, something to cheer us up until the blessed moment when we are more than halfway to the weekend. The point of my plagiarized artwork is to demonstrate that camel anatomy is just as disjointed (pun intended) as the elephant’s. Every part is its own mysterious combination of shapes, movements, and textures. Beginning with the glorious camel nose, which has its own place in the metaphor lexicon.

I mean, Look at it. That’s a honker, you got to admit.

Not hard to see why it’s a striking image for something unbidden poking its way under the edge of a tent people rely on for shelter and security.

They don’t even need to show you the nose or explain the reference. We just know.

Then come those oh-so-impressive humps. (To be tedious and exacting, one hump is a dromedary, two humps is a Bactrian. Woo.)  Like the tent maker, we prefer the Bactrian. B’s are just funnier than D’s, don’t ask us why.

Don’t worry. There will be an animated version later.

When it comes to Wednesdays, the jokes just write themselves. Humping along. Put your hump into it. Yada yada. Just the word is a guaranteed laugh. Why even A. A. Milne — apparently regretting his choice of animal — named his scary creature the Heffalump, which rhymes with…?, and the art for the Heffalump movie makes the animal look more like a hump than a mountain.

No BFD. Just a little bit of a deal. (Just softening you up for 
NSFW language that’s on the way. Because there’s going 
to be an appearance by Taylor Swift soon. You know.

Times change and fashions change with them. The hottest bit of camel anatomy is now, if you can believe it, the toes.

They even made a number of appearances in the Presidential election, 
including one of the leading candidates, name of Kamela…

The election is over though. These days people are more influenced by Taylor Swift, who has also been celebrated for her sartorial nods to Heffalumpian podiactrianism:


Except that this fall, almost a year after the Kamela election failure, Taylor Swift seems to be declaring a radical shift in lifestyle. She’s getting married, it is said, and her desire now is to settle down, have kids, and give up the twerking and its wardrobe requirements. Maybe she’s getting more demure, or at least more discreet. There’s more than one way to experience the camel configurations in life.


If you catch our drift…

The first single from her new album has a lyric version which we mistakenly looked at first. The hint-hint take on the humps was reinforced by this stanza-ending burst of Swiftian directness.

That doesn’t seem too demure or straitlaced, does it?


Except we erred by skipping the official video, which was created with a whole different esthetic. That slinky red dress and elbow length gloves are nowhere in sight. The color scheme and the design sense are more, shall we say, middle eastern in affect. The recurrent figure in that video has been borrowed for our own artistic impression of the song, which really does look like it belongs here.

Now she looks like a desert princess mounted sidesaddle on her camelicious throne.

All that’s just paving the way for the, um, Official Video, which honestly looks like it has some distinctly Islamic (Pro-Palestinian?) touches you might not notice going on stylistically the first time through. But here goes. 


You have to admit there’s more than a passing resemblance to a harem esthetic. The earth tone color scheme, the ornate but timeless furniture looking like what a sheik of the desert might have, while Taylor’s beaded headdress and feathered semi-nudity seem submissively seductive. 


What raises the ante is the way the video is put together. All those transitions remind me of moving versions of Islamic geometric art, as briefly introduced here.




And if you have one more minute, see what the geometrically designed transitions in the video resemble in what you’ve just seen.




Now. Do you have some serious suspicions about what’s going on with Taylor Swift and the real direction of her change in lifestyle? Do you?

Me neither. It’s Hump Day, and by my clock we are definitely past the midway point of the work week. All the symbols and gimmicks have done their job for another week. So I think I’ll close the way I did last time I spent any time on Hump Day. Can you believe this happened while walking our terrier on a Wednesday?



Me neither. Good luck making it to the weekend. As to Taylor and her intended, I suggest we “leave them the fuck alone.” That’s enough of her music for a while too.















Comments

Post a Comment

Readers also liked…

The Friday Follies, Indian Summer Edition

Image
You know, that age-old phenomenon of a sudden resurgence of hot weather after school starts… Yes, it’s been a hot week at home and abroad. Something(s) incendiary but instructive every single day. Not so unusual really. When you take the long view, every week brings us stuff that is hot and scary but also dumb as a Jimmy Kimmel joke. You know what I mean. You got to take time out to just laugh at some things. Like this past week. As bad as a lot of the news was, the silly still bubbles to the surface like a rueful chuckle. Our humor highlights this week come from reliable topics like religion, politics, race, money, and hats. That’s a combination that’s hard to beat. Most of the references are derived from FB posts, but reconfigured as convenient to be less informative than funny here. The weekend’s upon us. Who needs informative? Saturday, Sept 27 Bill Maher had an up and down week. He’s still torn between the divided religious household he grew up in and the secular solipsism he has ...
Read more

Closing the Gap

Image
  It’s a long story that’s been through many vicissitudes, and only recently has reached a crisis point in the nation’s emotional stability. In the early days of the mass media age, women’s quest for respect from men led them to pursue intellectual accomplishment with lots of reading and whatnot. This led, understandably, to more women who needed glasses to be competitive at work and general mixed company. Sadly, one of the longest lived memes (before people knew they were memes) of that era was the Dorothy Parker quip above.  As women invaded television news in the media explosion of the late Twentieth Century, the invention of contact lenses made it possible for the biggest female stars of journalism to appear elegantly finished without attraction-diminishing spectacles. Nancy Dickerson, Barbara Walters, and Diane Sawyer managed to look both smart and glamorous. All eyes were upon them, even to the point of siring the term ‘nipslip.’ Why the incidence of women wearing eyegla...
Read more

My World and Welcome to It

Image
     This post was last updated at 2:30 PM., Sunday, October 26.  Latest entries are “A Thing We Meticulously Don’t Talk About,” “What’s Going to Happen on ‘No Kings’ Day?”and “A Skirmish in the Gender/Family Wars.” The Instapunk Times is on the newsstand [STRIKE ISSUE!] Undernet Black was updated October 24. This will be a pinned post in perpetuity, but it will be updated continuously, just like all of our lives. The title — “My World and Welcome to It” — is stolen happily from James Thurber, who is known as a humorist, unabashedly untrained cartoonist, and dog lover. He was also subject to melancholy, a drinker of note, and something of an outsider (in his own damaged eyes at least) as an Ohioan, born and educated, who became a fixture in the glamorous Algonquin Roundtable of Manhattan writers and playwrights. I can relate to all of that but the fame and the lifelong journey to blindness. I believe he was likely the best writer of the gang that gathered in the Algo...
Read more

What’s Going to Happen on “No Kings Day”?

Image
 It could go a bunch of different ways. It could be signs and quiet crowds like the big Tea Party rallies It could be dominated by the womyns. On Instagram and X they seem the maddest. It could be clashes between protesters and law enforcement officers. Scuffles but non-lethal. It could be full-boat Antifa with violent intent. It could be hellfire, like the George Floyd riots. It could be Robert de Niro and a few of his very cross elderly friends and admirers. What do YOU think? Which is also important in and of itself. Investigating your own predictive imagination in this might be a helpful exercise in determining just how big a threat we are facing from the Deep State. I don’t know what’s going to happen. All I can do is share with you the factors I regard as the most telling. How they all shake out or come together is a mystery that can only be answered in the unfolding of events. But here’s what I think... The mass media want a giant national day of angry protest against the Tr...
Read more

Trump Playing Pickleball

Image
  They make fun of Trump’s ability in racket sports. What he’s been playing  in  the Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine wars in his second term. We explain. There’s a mass of loud keyboardists outside the beltway who develop and fanatically promote their own memes about the President of the United States. The recent news that Trump had had his second physical at Walter Reed fueled an immediate leap to the conclusion that he was at death’s door. People who had trouble spelling ( congenitive heart defect) were busy diagnosing presidential health with the expertise they’d already demonstrated by refusing to believe that there was anything physically or mentally impaired about the 80+ year old Biden. According to a flurry of breathlessly repeated inferences from brief mass media summaries of the Reed checkup and flu/COVID boosters, Trump was suffering from the results of a stroke, a serious blood disorder that was causing red blotches on his hands, and the penalty of a long lif...
Read more

A Thing We Meticulously Don’t Talk About

Image
I’ll be quoting directly in chunks here, so there can be no claim that I am cherry-picking facts, situations, narratives, or contexts. It’s an old subject for me, as you’ll see, but I’m writing now because my wife gave me a hard time about surfacing the racial issues surrounding the mass shooting at Lincoln University, which I raised because she told me the report she’s read did not include the fact that Lincoln is one of the surviving Historically Black Colleges. This is important because the mass media are fastidious about concealing pertinent information about the identities of both shooters and victims these days. She suggested I was dragging race into a sad crime story. Then she left the room. As I expect many of you would too. We’ve been well trained not to see this particular elephant in the room. Or at least not to discuss it. Here’s the NBC account: One person is dead and at least six others were wounded in a shooting amid homecoming festivities Saturday night at Lincoln Unive...
Read more

A Skirmish in the Gender/Family Wars

Image
  Her name is Rachel Gilman. I’m sure she’s a pleasant lady in person. Before we get into the nitty gritty, please take a closer look at the graphic in the lower right hand corner of the image above. This could be the most gruesome desecration of the American flag I’ve seen. It  demonstrates the scare tactic of the coat-hanger abortion to a fare-thee-well.  300 deaths a year may be a sad statistic, but it is not a civilizational catastrophe.  We stopped counting abortions many years ago. The numbers you see quoted are all guesstimates, riddled with acknowledged gaps smoothed over by minimizing assumptions to conceal the enormity of legalized deaths that occurred under Roe v. Wade. Numbers in our biggest cities are terrifying when considered by racial breakdown. In NYC, nearly half of all black pregnancies end in abortion. That’s eugenics-level population control. Why Planned Parenthood is so embarrassed about admitting the eugenic philosophy of their patron Saint, Ma...
Read more

The Sprained Mind of Rachel Maddow

Image
This is the follow-on to Monday’s post about the dire straits the Democrat Party now finds itself in. We were at pains to point out that the only hands capable of seizing the horns of the bull charging at the Progressive movement belong to Rachel Maddow. That bull is wearing the mantle of what used to be called “that old-time religion,” now revitalized with a heroic cape of youthful energy. Some facts that should be very concerning about the impact of the Kirk Memorial Service. Why somebody needed to take the reins and assert some visionary leadership over a Democrat Party that has been scoring nothing but fouls and foul-mouthed tantrums at the referees. Unlike most of her lefty colleagues, she was a star athlete in high school (and could have been in college if she hadn’t been outed as a Lesbian by the Stanford newspaper when she was a freshman). She knows about playing with pain. One of many reasons why Rachel Maddow was the best choice for assuming a strong, defining position o...
Read more

With my fortuneteller hat on…

Image
  The big historical questions of “What will happen?” are usually best settled in hindsight. The biggest questions generally concern whether or not some historical catastrophe was inevitable or not. The American Civil War. World War I. World War II. Meticulous historians, back when we had them, have given us answers to those three in particular. Yes, yes, and yes. The one that bears the strongest resemblance to our current turning point is our own American Civil War.  The young constitutional republic had been born with a deadly contradiction at the heart of its founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The reason for the contradiction was political compromise needed to secure sufficient nationwide support for the adoption of the Constitution. Slavery was a ticking time bomb from 1789 on. Eventually there would have to be a reckoning.  Was actual warfare inevitable though? Yes. North and South were unified by their shar...
Read more