"Dark Matter": Family Man physicist is trapped in a parallel world. With Edgerton backside, Styx d*ck, and Cass chest

  

Link to the bottoms and d*cks

After finishing Silo Season 3, we checked the other high-concept programs available on Apple Plus, and decided on Dark Matter: a "family man" changes places with his non-family man counterpart in a parallel world. Season 1 premiered in 2024, and Season 2 in 2026.  Sounds ok.

Episode 1.1: "Are You Satisfied with Your Life?"

Scene 1:  A guy with a flashlight walks through a deserted warehouse space, and approaches a triangular structure which is presented as extremely important.  

Cut to "family man" Jason (Joel Edgerton). He wakes up (shirtless shot), kisses his wife Daniela's shoulder, eats breakfast, criticizes his son Charlie's homework, tells Wife Daniela how much he loves her, and kisses her extremely passionately right in front of his son.  They discuss who will drive Charlie to school; he wants to drive himself, with Family Man Jason monitoring. 

Cut to the drive, with the boy not noticing a stoplight and getting yelled at by the driver almost smashed.  

Left: Charlie is played by Oakes Fegley.  His "girlfriend and pr manager," probably just a fan trying to deceive us, says that he "looks like a homos*xual." Make up your mind, is he into you, or is he a gay slur?

On  the show, Charlie's hetero identity is established immediately.    He's depressed because the Girl of His Dreams is dating another boy.

"Then she has bad taste," Dad assures him.  How do you know that her boyfriend is an obnoxious jock?  Wait -- if this won't be a plot point, why mention it?  You don't need to be that eager to assure fans that Charlie isn't gay. 

Next Family Man Jason gets a text from his friend Ryan (Jimmi Simpson, backside on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends), who has just won a major award for proving that consciousness lies in the prefrontal cortex. That's old news.  It comes with a million dollars and lots of grant money.  Family Man Jason is invited to the celebration tonight.

Left: Jimmi Simpson  makes a lot of gay references on his Instagram, but he has a girlfriend.

Scene 2: Family Man Jason teaching his class in bonehead physics at a horrible community college.  He draws a cat in a box to illustrate Schrodinger's paradox to his bored students.

Meanwhile, Wife Daniela is at work at her art gallery.  How gender polarized: men are into science, women into the arts.

Cut to a dude in a storage facility, keeping track of Jason's movements and holding up a vial of a purple liquid.

Scene 3: At home, Family Man Jason tells his wife how much he loves her, kisses her extremely passionately, and prepares to do stuff with her on the sink -- in front of their son.  Charlie protests, but they tell him to look away.  They're interrupted by a text from Ryan: "Where are you?"

"Oh, Ryan invited me to a celebration of his major award in the bar around the corner, but I love you so much that I'm going to skip it and do stuff in front of our son."

"Nope!  He obviously scheduled the celebration in the crappy bar around the corner instead of someplace nice because he is in love with you, and wants to ensure that you show up.  We can do stuff in front of our son later tonight.  Let's just kiss for ten minutes, and then you can go."

Scene 4: At the bar, Ryan introduces Family Man Jason to his Extremely Important Scientist friends, who look down on him for having a horrible job at a community college.  

Left: The cutest of the Extremely Important Scientists is Ivan (Sam Cass, top photo and left).

Later, Ryan takes Family Man Jason off by himself: "I'm starting a  neurotech company with my million dollar prize money, and I want you to come on board. We need a good physicist."  But none were available, so he's asking Jason? 

 It pay more than the crappy community college, but it's in San Francisco. (Oh, no!  Who would want to move to the center of art, music, literature, and gay culture?).

 A woman comes up and asks to do stuff with Ryan. "Sure, but I'm busy right now. I'll do stuff with you in a few minutes."  

Jason doesn't want to leave his life in Chicago, but he promises to talk it over with his wife.  Wait -- the having sex with a random woman isn't a plot point, either?  You guys are really paranoid about viewers thinking that characters are gay.  Sounds like showrunner Blake Crouch is homophobic, which means we won't get any actual gay characters.

Scene 5: As Family Man Jason walks to his car (wait -- I thought the bar was around the corner, walking distance), a man in a white mask grabs him and forces him to drive to a warehouse, take off his clothes, and walk a long way n*de (except for boxer shorts). 

Then he has to put on new clothes (couldn't you have made him put on new clothes before the walk?  Not that I'm complaining).  

He injects Family Man Jason with something to make him fall asleep, and asks questions like "Are you happy with your life?  Do you wish things would be different if you made different choices?" Shouldn't you have asked that before the guy got too groggy to answer?

More after the break

Michael Cade: California Dreams, Charlie Chaplin, Devils, and That Chest. With Aaron Jackson and the Greek God Pan

After Saved by the Bell (1989-1993) demonstrated that Saturday mornings didn't have to be all cartoons, every kid in the country suddenly started eating their Cheerios to impossibly buffed teenagers in impossibly affluent high schools.  California Dreams (1992-1997) may not have been the best of the Saved clones-- I don't know if "best" is operant here -- but it was the most beefcake heavy.  

The premise: two Iowa teens, Matt (Brent Gore) and Jenny, move to California, where they form a band called California Dreams.  Wait -- why are you dreaming about California, when you live there?  

We pause this profile to quote the famous "California Dreamin'", which I heard many times during dark dank winters in the Midwest as I plotted my move to the gay freedom of West Hollywood:

All the leaves are brown, and the sky is gray. 
I've been for a walk on a winter's day.
If I didn't tell her, I could leave today.
California dreamin' on such a winter's day.

Most of the Saved clones had the same basic characters: the schemer, who works every angle yet fails every class, and still gets into Harvard; the surly outsider who resents the schemer getting everything so easily; the goofball who litters his speech with nonsequiters; the popular girl, who ends up with the schemer; and the smart girl, who ends up with the surly outsider.  In California Dreams, Michael Cade, left, is the schemer, band manager Sly Winkle (sly wink, get it?)

William James Jones, left, is surly outsider Tony Wicks, the band's drummer and sometime soloist. 

In Season 2, Aaron Jackson joined the cast as Sly's cousin Mark Winkle, performing the goofball role. 

William and Aaron were cute, but they didn't get a lot of teen idol attention. Michael and That Chest were the definite stars. Shirtless photos littered the teen magazines and the gay celebrity websites.

I didn't watch California Dreams often -- on Saturday mornings, we usually watched Joel and the Bots on Mystery Science Theater 3000, then had lunch, browsed bookstores, bought groceries at the Gay Safeway, and went to the gym.  In the evening, we watched Mama's Family and The Golden Girls, then went cruising at Mugi or the Faultline...uh-oh, I feel "The Way We Were" coming on.

Can it be that it was all so simple then, 
Or has time rewritten every word?
If we had the chance to do it all again
Tell me, would we?  Could we?

Sorry, these profiles from pre-2000 shows make me nostalgic.

Michael was born Michael Ocello in Elmwood Park, New Jersey in 1972.  He was interested in acting, but avoided drama club so he wouldn't be bullied -- "when I was in high school, being in the drama club wasn't cool," he notes in a teen magazine interview. Sounds like he was worried that people would think he was gay, which was a major concern in the late 1980s.

But the day he graduated in May 1990, he started taking acting lessons.  After a year, a few commercials, and a lot of bare chests, he moved to California where he could be open about his...um...acting.  It took only a few months for his chest to get a guest shot on Baywatch as Young Bobby, brother of focus character Eddie (Billy Warlock)

Michael also appeared in Chaplin (1992), the biopic of the silent movie star, as his nephew Sydney Chaplin Jr.

More after the break. 

Jay Day: The "Always Sunny" trumpeter does adult videos and action-adventure in Hong Kong. With n*de dudes, Bud Bundy, and the guy from AP BIo

  

Link to the n*de dudes

I'm having a bad day.  First Blogger refused to upload photos.  I figured my photo archive was full, so I deleted an old folder that looked like it contained only photos from deleted posts.  It happened to contain the illustrations to a lot of posts on artists and writers, plus The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Love Boat, Trailer Park Boys, and Married..with Children. Bud Bundy's pecs, vanished.

Then I watched It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Episode 18.5, where the gang goes to a Renaissance Faire.  Mac (Rob McElhenney) gets into an angry flirtation with a cute short guy; I figured that they would end up in bed.  But it was impossible to find out who played the short guy.  He's not on the IMDB. Google AI doesn't know. The closing credits cut to the next show just as we get to his name (I tried three times).  So for a consolation prize, I'm profiling trumpet player Jai Day.  Maybe he's the son of Charlie Day, who plays dimwitted janitor Charlie.  

No such luck. Charlie Day was born in New York City in 1976, and Jai Day in in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, in 1986, so there's no apparent connection. 

But at least Jai is a muscleman.  He founded the Actors' Gym in Hong Kong, which...wait, it's not an actual gym, it's a actors' studio, offering scene training, voice study, and audition reviews. 

How did he get from Staffordshire to London?  

His biography doesn't say.  He received  a B.Sc. in Psychology and Sociology from Keele University, did some shorts and a horror movie, performed in Nickelodeon at Sea and Offshore LA, and suddenly in 2010 he is hosting Improv Asia. 

Some theatrical performances in Hong Kong follow: Macbeth, Four Assassins, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Cockroach Flying Like a Helicopter, and The Dark Side of the Moon.  

Plus a lot of commercials.  Here he's selling socks.

And straight adult videos: 

Due West: Our S*x Journey (2012), starring Gregory Wong (on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends) and Justin Cheung.

L*st and Found (2015), with Jai starring.

More after the break

The Leneave Brothers: Three Catholic swimsuit models with gay-positive ads, contradictory biographies, and model d*cks

  

Link to the n*de photos

When Chris Leneave, aka Chris Luquin, appeared on my Instagram recommendations, I figured that he was French.  But he appears to be an American model, one of these two.  I'm not sure which yet -- all of his posts show duos or trios.

An ad from 2021. Chris (or his Mom) says that this advertises "environmentally friendly luxury swimwear" with his brother and MZ.   I still don't know which brother is Chris.

I looked for MZ, but can't find a model with that name.

Google AI thinks he might mean the Model Zone, MZ agency, based in Mexico City but with branches in Florida.  I checked the six male actors on their website, and found a n*de photo (on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends), but no one who looks like the dad above.

"The perfect shorts do exist. Community and family values etched into every line."  Family values usually means homophobia, but this looks very much like two dads and their sons frolicking on the beach.

Again, he doesn't tell us who the grown-up models are, but at least he identifies himself: Chris is the older brother.

I had even less to work with in an attempt to track down the adult models.  The closest I could come was "black male model Florida" (n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

More after the break