Dane's Polar Plunge: a 365 day Lake Tahoe Challenge, with Scott Gaffney, Danish d*cks, and the n*de dudes of Notre Dame

  

Link to the n*ude dudes

I've been following Dane G. on Instagram.  He doesn't post much, but in August 2026 he complains that he just arrived at the University of Nevada Reno for his freshman year, when he had to evacuate due to the wildfires.   

Back when he was a student at North Tahoe High School, Dane posted a lot: he was doing a challenge where he jumps into Lake Tahoe every day for a year. Even on Day 190: Water temperature 39.3, air temperature 32.  That's Fahrenheit. 

 

Day 173: Gray, cloudy. Water temperature 37.3, air 33.0.  Dane walked through the snow-- barefoot! -- toward his icy plunge.

On Day 184, he brought his Dad, professional skiier Scott Gaffney Water temperature 48.5, air 55.

He invited Tony Cavalero of The Righteous Gemstones, but Tony ended up ignoring him to flirt with Scott.

On Day 120, he brought the North Tahoe High School Varsity Basketball Team -- at least the ones brave enough to try. Water temperature 39 degrees, air with wind chill 19.  

The Wildflour Baking Company in Tahoe donated some donuts.  How about space heaters?

I can't imagine being interested in the aesthetics of the p*enis after all that icy plunging, but there are some guys running n*aked through the snow on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

Plus n*de Danish dudes in the snow outside an ice cream stand. 

An ice cream stand?

More after the break.  Caution: Icy.

Matthew Beem hitchhikes n*de takes a polar plunge, builds secret rooms to spy on his internet star friends. With four of their d*cks

 

Link to the d*cks

I grew up before the internet, so I instinctively think of entertainment as books, movies, and tv programs written and performed by professionals and distributed by corporations. But there's a whole world out there of short form, amateur videos that I had no idea existed. 

Topper Guild posts stories about saving his friend from an evil cult, surviving the strictest school in the world, and so on to his 88 million subscribers.

Matthew Beem, who has "only" eight million subscribers, does wacky DIY projects, like turning his room into a fishbowl, or a building a minecraft maze for his hamster. 

The first two episodes of his Hulu series, Matthew Beem Creator Essentials, introduced me to more multi-million subscriber Internet stars.

 

Episode 1: Matthew renovates iShowSpeed's tour bus, and adds a secret room so he can spy on the dude as he...um...does things.  He's discovered almost immediately, but still, I have to wonder, what was he hoping to see?

IShowSpeed, real name Darren Jason Watkins, Jr. started with gaming, and moved into livestreaming and rap music, gaining 53 million subscribers. He has livestreamed in 67 countries. The Speed Goes Pro tour ended with a concert at the Hollywood Bowl. 

Plus he's won about a dozen Streamer Awards.  And posted pictures of his d*ck. Maybe that's what Matthew wanted to see in his secret room.

In Episode 2. Matthew and his crew do some home improvement projects for his internet star friends:

A custom dog house for Salish Matter, who started with posts about her daily skincare routine, gaining 3.5 million subscribers.  She started her own skincare brand at age 16, and also posts about gymnastics and family "matters" with her father, Jordan (n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

Next Matthew and his crew create a gaming room for the Costco Guys, including mock-ups of their Juiceful packages, a giant chocolate chip cookie, and the world's biggest Pokemon card. 

More after the break

Rick Gomez: What has Endless Mike of "Pete & Pete" been doing lately? Is Steve Zahn his boyfriend? Is he really endless? With Rick d*ck

Link to the n*de photos

Remember this?

Hey smiin' strange
You're lookin' happily deranged
Can you settle to shoot me?
Or have you picked your target yet

It's the theme to The Adventures of Pete and Pete (1991-95), the first of the Nickelodeon "adults are insane" teencoms.  Two brothers, both named Pete, negotiate the weirdness of the city of Wellsville, where no one is really well. 

A bowling ball has mystical powers.

A garage band vanishes overnight.

Little Pete accidentally erases baseball from existence.

I liked Rick Gomez as Endless Mike, who knows more about the town's weirdness than he lets on.  He sometimes bullies and humiliates Big Pete, and sometimes acts as his ally and protector. You might even find a gay subtext in their interaction.

No one ever explains why his name is Endless.  Maybe the teenage boy is a manifestation of a transdimensional being who exists beyond time and space as we perceive it.

Or maybe he's endless in the beneath the belt region (example on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

When Pete & Pete ended, I moved on to other things, and thought about Endless Mike rarely, if at all.  And the years passed.

Recently we started watching Silo (2023-), a dystopian science fiction series where 10,000 people, all of surviving humanity (that they know of) live in a huge underground helix.  They can't go outside, or ever open the single door, because the air is poisonous (or so they are told). 

And there in the cast list was Rick Gomez!

He plays Patrick Kennedy, a maintenance worker with a dead wife (of course) who sells strictly-forbidden relics from the Before Time.  He starts to suspect that they are being lied to (they are, sort of), and joins the Resistance. 

Right: Steve Zahn plays Solo, who survived a rebellion in his own silo, where everyone went outside and died.  They buddy bond in Season 3.

A few years have passed, but you can still see that insoucient, all-knowing smile.  

I wanted to check what Rick has been doing since 1995, whether he is actually gay in real life, and if he is really endless.

Searching for "Rick Gomez," "actor," and "n*de" yields a lot of photos of Rick kissing guys (top photo) and showing his backside (on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends), but it turns out to be a Google Images misdirection.  The gay/backside actor is Ricardo Gomez.

Our Rick starred in five tv series between Pete & Pete and Silo.

1. Hitz (1997), about workers at a record company (remember records?)

2. Band of Brothers (2001), about World War II soldiers. Rick plays George Luz, who does some buddy-bonding during the War, but then returns to Rhode Island for the married-with-children bit.

Not much of gay interest so far.

More after the break

Grit: Beefcake and Bonding in an Attic in Rural Indiana

Every summer, and sometimes at Christmas, we visited my Grandma Davis in Indiana.  She had an attic full of old magazines, and my brother and I used to spend rainy afternoons there, leafing through half a century worth of browning ephemera.

Today I get the impression of someone who longed for an urbane, sophisticated life as an artist in Jazz Age New York, but somehow found herself in a farmhouse in rural Indiana, with a husband who was gone weeks at a time, and spent her life lapsing between attempts to rebel and attempts to adapt:

Rebellion:  Nash's, Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post

Adaption: Better Homes and Gardens, The Farmer's Wife, Grit

Grit?

Who would name a newspaper after that gross stuff that gets in your eye after you sleep?

Maybe it was grits, the gross Southern food made out of boiled corn.

It was like a tabloid newspaper, with lots of human interest stories: a blind guy who works as a postal carrier, a woman who found her lost wedding ring in an egg laid by her chicken, a traffic accident that reunited a father and his long-lost son.

Nothing that took place anything near a city: in the world of Grit, no settlement with a population over 2,000 exist in the U.S.

No foreign countries exist, either.  Or black people.  Or Jews.  Or women who weren't housewives.  Or gay men and lesbians.

But -- there were a lot of cute 4-H Boys holding up prize sheep, providing a hint of beefcake on rainy rural afternoons.

Here's a shirtless boy in a bunkhouse at the Millstone 4-H Camp in Ellerbee, North Carolina, 1961.

There were also pages of comic strips, some the old-fashioned dinosaur strips familiar from the Rock Island Argus -- Blondie Prince Valiant, Out Our Way -- and some even older.

Beefcake titles like  Jungle Jim, Mandrake the Magician, and Flash Gordon.

Very nice physique, for a guy from the 1930s with his head wrapped in a plastic bag.

Here's an ad from Grit about selling Grit.  

$6 in 1956 is the equivalent of $50 today.  Not a bad source of income.

Grit was founded in 1885 by German immigrant Dietrich Lamade.  It was especially popular in the 1930s and 1940s, with over 400,000 weekly subscribers, competing favorably with newspapers that wouldn't deliver to rural areas.

The decline of the rural population after World War II, and competition from radio and television, led to a nosedive in subscriptions.  By 2000, there were less than 10,000 subscribers, mostly elderly.

Under new management, Grit has rebranded itself  as a bimonthly blog and print magazine for food and gardening enthusiasts, with articles on free range chickens, hybrid tomatoes, and lawn mower maintenance.






The new Grit is more inclusive, with racial and religious minorities, urban dwellers, and gay men and lesbians:

"Who do you call when you have an animal in trouble?  The ladies next door are at work, and I can no longer phone the gay guys down the street because they have me blocked since we had a shouting match about being invited to a Pampered Chef party, so I call the SPCA."

 It has over 150,000 subscribers.