Maker of love, babies and fine cabinetry Robert J. Baumann passes along what follows, which is, as the title of this breathless dispatch suggests, Bartolo Colón surrounded by a colon …

Sure, we could have spared you the distressing visuals and instead surrounded Mr. Colón by the punctuational colon (pictured here: :, with this text added in advance of the closing parenthesis so as not to inflict an emoticon upon the unsuspecting reader), but we at NotGraphs have never been one to shy away from the visceral and corporeal. So what you see is Bartolo Colón surrounded by a human colon, the disemboweled colon of David Appelman, it turns out.

Did Bartolo Colón somehow vanquish David Appelman? Of course not. David Appelman, in the service of human amusements, ripped out his own colon, placed it around Bartolo Colón’s neck in a perfect and ceremonial double-windsor knot, polished off a vast belt of scotch and a plate of gorilla legs, and then punched his way out of the county jail.

Look at Stan Hack. Just look at him. The hacks are necessarily drawn to him, but ol’ Stan smiles anyway. Bless that Stan Hack and his Job- and Frodo-like burdens.

This has been “Stan Hack Surrounded by Hacks.” This has been your Daguerreotype of the Evening.

It was with a sense of both agency and sexual uplift that I recently introduced the loins-first category known as “Men Surrounded by Things.” And then it was with a sense of almost imperceptible disrupt — like a godhead, phallus tensed, vaguely and amusedly aware of a fly in another universe’s outermost unmapped regions — that Mr. Cistulli’s unfortunate, flaccid, oozing, splotchy, papule-ridden prose — prose lampreyed on to an otherwise fetching image — caught my attention. There are things in this world that I am resigned to abide, but this is not one of them. And so I shall not. I dipped into my trillions and commissioned a rejoinder, since I can scarcely be bothered to do it myself.

And so Chris Cwik, known around the NotGraphs office as “Murray St. Gorgeous,” has saved the day, perhaps a genre once adored and most assuredly the streets. All at my bidding, of course. With the pride of the proud, I present his masterwork, “Chipper Jones surrounded by Chips”:

And the saints, people and dearly departed say: amen.

It goes without saying, but should be written down as often as is reasonably possible, that the present author has no intention ever of attributing greatness either to the actions or actual person of Dayn Perry. This is a point in the defense of which I’d be willing to engage in an elaborate, choreographed knife fight.

However, I’ve also made it clear that no milk moves me so thoroughly as the milk of human kindness — and it was this sort of milk with which, thanks to reader and noted loin-girder Santos, the Team NotGraphs Inbox (email) was runnething over this morning.

With the image included here, Santos has contributed not only another installment in, but perhaps the very apotheosis of, Perry’s own series, Men Surrounded by Things.

In conclusion, the reader should not gaze up into the darkness and see himself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and his eyes should not burn with anguish and anger.

Dick Allen surrounded by … Allen wrenches!

Allen wrenches! Although, I suppose, if one were so inclined, one could view the above adornments as peckers of a certain crudity — “dicks,” in the parlance of the Teenage Thunderclaps who roam the streets of America in defiance of local curfews — but, no. No, these are Allen wrenches. Dick Allen is surrounded by Allen wrenches.

And may I say he seems content to watch them go by. “This is not so bad,” he seems to be saying. “I’m going to hang with these wrenches for a while and then go do something amazing.”

If you’re one of the five people you meet in Heaven or one of the measurably smaller number of people reading this, then you may have encountered this breathless petition from NotGraphs reader/thief of hearts RamboDiaz:

Request: Cookie Rojas surrounded by cookies.

Because in this space we are for the people (if not automatically so) and because Rabbit Maranville Surrounded by Rabbits is lonesome, I present to you in general and RamboDiaz in particular Cookie Rojas Surrounded by Cookies:

Like you, I once entertained dreams of something more.

You, the pure of heart, look at this:

This has been Rabbit Maranville surrounded by rabbits. This has been your Daguerreotype of the Evening.