Man in speedo, originally uploaded by dromidror.

I don’t know if this is off-topic or not. But he’s hot, and I love the tiny Speedo.

Ben Kimura is a wonderful Japanese illustrator and artist who paints the most exquisite men, mostly athletes, and that includes a lot of swimmers and well-carved men in tiny speedos. He is represented by Studio Kaiz, a Japanese online gallery (the website is in Japanese, except for a few headers).

A few years ago, I happened on a number of large images of his paintings, and turned them into wallpapers for my own desktop. Then I saw nothing more about him until recently, when I stumbled on some of his newer speedo images with his gallery’s name on a few different art blogs. So, here for your pleasure, and perhaps for your consideration, are some of my favorite Ben Kimura paintings as mirror-style wallpapers. Most are 1365 x 1024. Three are 1680 x 1050.

Water Polo Legends sports a few links of its own to international water polo websites. (I’ve added several of these links in the Athlete Websites at left.)

One of these is a very cool Spanish site, called El Cuervo Water Polo. This website features dozens of water polo photography slide shows, including images such as the ones below.

You can find more images of this and other slideshows on Slide.com here.

Speaking of Michael Phelps….I’ve been looking everywhere for this one.

After seeing some tantalizing lo-rez images in various places from the Michael Phelps-Julianne Moore-Disney-sponsored ‘Little Mermaid’ shoot, I’d been hoping to find a large-scale version of the key image by Annie Leibovitz.

Well, SCAQ found it and posted it back in April. And I’ve posted the PRNewswire-released 1800 x 1191 version SCAQ links to below. (Note: the original release has been deleted from PRNewswire.)

Disney recently hired photographer Annie Leibovitz to realize live-action fantasy moments from their movies, called the ‘Disney Dream Portrait Series.’ Michael Phelps, Rowdy Gaines, Cullen Jones, Janet Evans and Brendan Hansen all became mermen and a mermaid surrounding Julianne Moore as Ariel from ‘The Little Mermaid’ in this now famous photo below.

Other top talent who appeared in this series were Tina Fey, Jenifer Lopez, Jessica Biel, Gisele Bundchen, Mikhail Baryshinikov, Scarlett Johansson, Beyoncé and David Beckham, among others.