Category: Beauty

This is brought up from another thread.

The Siena Scholars Poll put together their 2018 results, and they rank Trump ahead of Andrew Johnson and Buchanan, but behind Harding and Pierce.

One other commenter noted that they rank Trump the dumbest, the crookedest and with the worst appointees.

I guess that could be, but I just don’t know enough about all those 19th century presidents to offer an opinion. Who the hell knows about all the nominees of Franklin Pierce except scholars who specialize in the Presidency? Perhaps not even them. Maybe it would have to be scholars who specialize specifically in Franklin Pierce.

Frankly, I have some problems with these scholars not knowing as much as they should. The first thing that catches my eye in this table is their rating of the Presidents by intellect. This is something I have studied in some depth, although I am just an amateur historian. The most obvious glaring error is their ranking of John F Kennedy at #11 and James A Garfield as #20.

Kennedy was a very witty man who could think well on his feet, and was above average in intelligence compared to the general population, but was probably below average in Presidential intelligence, very likely near the bottom. We have a very good grasp on his IQ and George W. Bush’s, for example. Although Kennedy could be eloquent as well as witty in public, while Bush had a poor presentation style that made him appear to be perpetually befuddled, Dubya actually had a significantly higher IQ than JFK.

Garfield, on the other hand, may have had the most powerful intellect of any man ever to hold the office. He was certainly in the same league as Jefferson, the Adamses, Madison, Wilson or anyone else. The most famous story about him is that he knew both Latin and ancient Greek, and could write them simultaneously, holding one pen in each hand. That story is probably apocryphal. Although Garfield was ambidextrous and did know both ancient languages, there’s no evidence that he ever really performed that feat. But it wasn’t a parlor trick that revealed his intelligence. He was just freakishly brilliant at everything he tried, and succeeded in an astounding number of unrelated fields, even though he was born into dire poverty and had no father that he could remember.

As far as Trump’s intelligence goes, I don’t know how they determined that he was the dumbest. I don’t know how to compare him to James Buchanan or Tippecanoe, for example, so he may not deserve last place, but he’s no genius. He was a C+ to B student at Fordham, and earned no honors at Wharton, where one of his teachers called him “the dumbest goddam student I ever had.” He never attended grad school, so there’s nothing to offset his mediocre undergrad record. As for high school, I think you can assume there is a good reason why he had Michael Cohen write letters threatening legal action against any institution revealing his grades and SAT scores. Coincidentally enough, The Donald and I were both at Fordham in 1966, he in the spring, I in the fall of that year. Same university; same calendar year. I will be happy to share and compare our 1966 report cards, but you can bet with 100% certainly that he would never take up that challenge for any amount under any circumstances!

There’s no controversy over the movie scenes or her famous skinny dip, but several stills on the internet purport to come from a nude shoot Milano did for the first issue of Bikini magazine (from the publishers of Ray Gun) in 1993.

In reality, the pics do not all come from there. (That would have been a helluva magazine spread!) Thanks to several of our commenters and some old magazines in my own collection, we are now able to identify a source for most of the nudes.

Four of the images did come from that edition of Bikini. These were the first Milano nudes to appear. She would have been 19 at the time, and this edition hit the newsstand two years before the release of Milano’s first film nudity in Embrace of the Vampire or her first TV nudity in an episode of Outer Limits .

The images are authentic, by Milano’s own admission. Alyssa said in an interview:

“I didn’t pose nude for Bikini. I posed nude for a coffee-table book about celebrities and their tattoos, and the money was going to go to pediatric AIDS. But the book never came out and the photographer sold the pictures to Bikini without telling me. I could do nothing because the photographer owned the rights to the pictures.”

That explanation does not seem truthful for two reasons: (1) No tattoos appear in the photos; (2) One blogger says he worked on the photoshoot in the desert, during which Milano was accompanied by her mother, and he was there as an employee of Bikini magazine.

Not that it really matters. They key fact is that the images are authentic.

The next group comes from a 1995 spread in Celebrity Sleuth magazine, volume 8, number 3. The Sleuth chose the 25 sexiest women of 1995, placing Milano in the #2 spot. That was certainly an appropriate rank for her, perhaps even too low, since Milano burned up the screen that year. In our poll for the top nude scenes of 1995, Milano appeared in both the top film scene and the top cable TV scene!

Note that I am not vouching for the fact that all of these pictures really portray Alyssa Milano. The “muddy” ones are obviously consistent with the sepia-toned pics that appeared in Bikini mag, which Milano admitted posing for in the interview cited above, but some of the others seem doubtful, especially the one on the lower left.

Three years later, a third group was published in a French-language gentleman’s magazine called Newlook in their June, 1998 issue.

This layout represented the first appearance of the color photographs of a woman in Native American gear alleged to be Milano. Newlook did not seem to be completely convinced of their authenticity, since those photos were relegated to the status of tiny inserts, but the editors did also publish a larger (non-nude) image which seemed to be from the same shoot. That particular one portrays a woman wearing a Native American headdress.

She turns 65 today.

Her only significant nude scene was in the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, and it earned her second place on our poll to determine the best nude scene of 1999.

As I try to look back on the 1999 list objectively, I am of the opinion that this performance is nowhere near the second-best of the year. She was already 44 during the shoot, and there were better scenes on the list done by younger, more attractive women. I guess she was riding the zeitgeist at the time.

Film nudity legend Nastassja Kinski is 58 today. Cat People (1982) was lensed when she was 20.

Her nude career began in a most scandalous fashion when she did a topless sex scene in Wim Wenders’ Falsche Bewegung at the age of 13. (If that. She told one interviewer she was 12 when her scenes were lensed.

Just to prove it was no fluke, she performed full frontal and rear nudity in To The Devil a Daughter (“The film that ended Hammer studios!”) at the age of 14!

She didn’t slow down for decades. All in all, she performed nude scenes in more than 20 films and TV shows.

Here is what she looks like now. She’s essentially retired. According to IMDb, she has only one film or TV credit in the past 12 years.

Tove Lo – usual deal

The final order of finish.

It was a great year, reminiscent of the mid-90s. As I wrote about 1996, the second twenty from 2018 are as good or better than the first twenty from some other years. In fact, there are probably 25 or more 2018 scenes that could have finished #1 in 2008!

There were some surprises for me.

I did not expect Sally Hawkins to win. Oh, it’s a great nude performance in a Best Picture winner, but I didn’t even expect her to do well because it was first seen in January, and I figured “out of sight, out of mind.” And after all, she’s not a busty young chickadee. By the way, there has been a bit of backlash against this film. It is rated only 7.4 at IMDb, which is low for the Oscar champion.

I thought it would be between Lachman, Lawrence, Gilpin and Pike. I was surprised that people liked Higareda’s scene slightly more than Lachman’s, but that was also a great one. Altered Carbon was absolutely the rookie of the year.

I thought Sevigny’s and Stewart’s nudity in Lizzie would attract more enthusiasm.

Emma Stone? WTF? It was one breast for one second. It was probably the weakest scene on the list. If that had been a lesser-known actress I wouldn’t even have put it among the choices. You guys must have been longing for some Emma flesh.

Lady Gaga – I expected her to do much better. She showed the works, if only for a second, and she’s a huge star.

Dakota Johnson – I found her scenes a waste of time, and not at all erotic, but Mr. Skin picked her among the top ten, so I thought she would have supporters. I was wrong. You guys, like me, were indifferent to her charms.

If you’re curious, I voted for Pike. It’s great nudity, and she is my dream woman, more or less.

R.I.P. George H.W. Bush

When we bury him, we will bury the last of the old Republican party, the last remnant of the time when one could use “Republican” and “moral” in the same sentence without irony.

His accomplishments were enviable: naval aviator in WW2, self-made oil millionaire, congressman, head of the CIA, ambassador to the UN, VP, President. He was a dignified man who did just about anything an American can dream of doing; a man who always placed his country first.

Above all, he was a decent man. I wish we could say that of every leader.

Here is the summary page for The Top Nude Scenes of 1995

As always, members should not use the Mirror Creator links to obtain film clips. They are all in the member’s section.

If you are not a member and do use the Mirror Creator links, I’ve found that Zippyshare is the one which presents the least bullshit, but even on that one it can be necessary to click on the orange download box as many as three times before the download begins. It’s not consistent. Sometimes the first click yields the download. At other times the first click, or first and second clicks, lead to nonsense.

Here is the summary table of all the top tens from every year.