Category: Beauty

The Giants legend has passed away at 80

He hit more than 500 homers and led the NL three times. In 1965 he and Willie Mays teamed up to hit 91 homers.

UPDATE:

One commenter made an interesting point – Willie frequently had more walks than strikeouts, including four consecutive years. In fact, in his MVP year he drew so many walks that he led the NL in on-base percentage (not to mention in slugging average as well). In his prime, from 1965 to 1971, ages 27 to 33, his on-base percentage was a sparkling .404 for that seven-year period. He led the league in OPS three consecutive times during that period.

Here’s a measure of how much respect pitchers had for Willie: before Barry Bonds came along, Willie held the major league record for intentional walks in a season.

A bit of nostalgia …

When I was in college in NYC, the candy machines in the subway stations were always empty – except for Powerhouse Bars. If you got desperate enough to buy one because it was 3 A.M. or something, you most likely got one with a faded wrapper. Only the Lord himself knows how long they had been in there. That was in the 60s, but the wrappers probably had pictures of people rolling up their sleeves to defeat Hitler.

All kidding aside, some older bars included a rhyming slogan on the wrapper: “Generous. Nutritious. Truly Delicious.” The wrappers on the oldest ones just said “good eating.” Their corporate mascot was named Roger Wilco, and their oldest ads looked like the color comic strips from the Sunday paper.

Here are the results of the most recent poll, complete with thumbnails and links to a film clip from each 1996 performance in the top twenty.

Once again, if you are a member, you do not need to download any of those film clips. I retrieved each and every one of them from the members’ section, where they rest side-by-side with some 54,000 other clips and about a million pictures. After 23 years, things begin to accumulate.

If you are not a member, you can use those file locker sites linked from Mirror Creator. My tip: I find that Zippyshare contains the least bullshit, but even with that one you sometimes have to click on the orange download box a few times before you get the result you want. (It’s not consistent. Sometimes it works on the first try; other times it gives you a bunch of irrelevant links before yielding its treasure on the third try.)

Hey, the best solution is just to sign up and get access to that vast amount of film clips, pictures and collages – not to mention twenty years’ worth of back issues, and the fully working edition of each day’s Fun House, which has now been published each and every day for more than 7000 consecutive days.

Here are the results of the recent poll(s), complete with thumbnails and links to a film clip from each 1997 performance in the top twenty. Also included on the page are links to the numerical results of each of the two polls.

If you are a member, you do not need to download any of those film clips. I got each and every one of them from the members’ section, where they rest side-by-side with some 54,000 other clips and about a million pictures. After 23 years, things to begin to accumulate. I know that at least a few of you have been reading my blogs since The Fun House was a totally free site in 1995-1996. There was no Other Crap, nor Uncle Scoopy’s Ballpark, nor Uncle Scoopy’s Movie House in those days, so all that material was just mixed in with the nudes and jokes. In the very earliest days, I used to write the entire site in a character voice – as the ignorant Texan, No Bob “Scoop” Parking.  (His mom named him No Parking so he would always have an executive parking place marked with his name.) That made for a lot of good politically incorrect jokes, but I abandoned that character when I realized that people thought Scoop’s foolish and lightly racist opinions were mine, and I got tired of explaining the “unreliable narrator” concept to a gazillion offended e-mailers per day.

Back in its heyday, the F.H. used to get some 200,000 hits per day, which made it one of the busiest sites on the internet, because not many people were “wired” then. (Today that kind of traffic would be nowhere near the top.)

Anybody remember when I hit #1 among all the adult sites on the internet? That was not my highest volume day. One day I got 491,000 hits, but that was a year later and the internet was starting to catch up to me, so I only finished third in the adult rankings.

One more bit of nostalgia: the site was very popular with the guys at NASA, especially with one guy that they called Freddie Fartknocker or Turdknocker or something like that, who was totally obsessed with it. I’m not sure that the moniker was Freddie Fartknocker, but go with it. A couple of his colleagues called me at home (!) and asked if I could help them play a practical joke on their co-worker. The very next day, the site became “Freddie Fartknocker’s Fun House (formerly Uncle Scoopy’s)” for a couple of hours, complete with a very unflattering picture of Mr. Fartknocker at his desk, in lieu of my trademark Greek masks of comedy and comedy. As soon as the joke worked, the pranksters called me and told me how it went down, and I then reverted everything back to the normal look. Oddly enough, nobody else ever wrote in to ask what the hell was going on.

It’s been quite a journey.

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Enough nostalgia.

Moving forward …

If you are not a member, you can use those file locker sites linked from Mirror Creator. I find that Zippyshare contains the least bullshit, but even with that one you sometimes have to click on the orange download box a few times before you get the result you want. (It’s not consistent. Sometimes it works on the first try; other times it gives you a bunch of irrelevant links before yielding its treasure on the third try.)

Hey, the best solution is just to sign up and get access to that vast amount of film clips, pictures and collages – not to mention back issues dating back to 1998!

Not to mention further that you will help me pay the bills!

This was the winner of our poll for the Best Nude Performance of 2004. It was the second most convincing victory in the history of our poll. (I doubt if anything will ever top the margin achieved by Katie Holmes in The Gift. That was truly the occasion when the times and the woman met.)

I personally chose Eva Green’s performance in The Dreamers as the best of the decade 2000-2009.

And if I ever make a list of the greatest nude performances in history, I may choose it as the top one there as well (although I’d have to give that one a lot of thought). And I’m not even a great fan of Eva. It was just that good.

“The president has long claimed he could have gone pro. We looked into it.”

Was Trump good enough to play pro baseball? I don’t know, and the article suggests he was nowhere near that level, but I have to give the devil his due. He was a jock, good at almost every sport. He only played one varsity sport at Fordham (squash), but he was a playground legend, and every intramural team tried to recruit him in just about every sport. He didn’t play much because he was a commuter. The day-hops spent way too much of their lives going back and forth, so most of the intramural athletes were students who lived in the dorms or in off-campus apartments, but when Trump hung out and played, he was said to be tremendous, and he was reputed to be a superlative golfer. His high school records support that. At various times, he played football, baseball, basketball, soccer, bowling and wrestling. He made the varsity in baseball, football and soccer. He was a real jock.

Here are the ordered results of the balloting, complete with links to film clips.

(If you are a member, you don’t need to get the film clips from those storage locker sites. They are in the members’ page along with more than 50,000 others. Aesthete alone has done more than 5,000 film clips, and Defoe about 3,400!)

Although it takes me a long time to assemble the choices, create the thumbnails, create the poll page, create the film clips and assemble the results page, I have to say that it was fun to look back on 1998. I really enjoyed recalling some of those great scenes and seeing how you evaluated them. I usually have a lot of reservations about the results of our “real time” polls, but I felt that this one came out almost exactly the way I would have done it personally. (Although one commenter reminded me that Dangerous Beauty probably placed far too low. Fair point. I would not have placed it second, as he suggested, but probably would have pegged it for the #6 slot.)

Given that it seemed to be a pleasant experience for all of us, I’ll trudge along on 1997 as soon as I muster sufficient ambition.

The image comes from a book titled “Room 23.”

The article

While it is true that James Garfield was actually killed by his own doctors, the part about Alexander Graham Bell is not stated accurately. He did not mislocate the bullet. Indeed, if Bell had been permitted to use his metal detector the way he wanted to, he might have saved Garfield’s life, even after all the bungling the doctors had done previously. While the metal bedsprings did present a problem, Bell’s methods could have overcome that. The greater problem was simply that Doctor Bliss had staked his reputation on the fact that the bullet was on the right side of Garfield’s body, and would therefore not let Bell examine Garfield’s left, where the bullet actually was.

I’m about to go off on a tangent …

Because his presidency was brief and not especially memorable, we learn little about Garfield in school, which is a shame, because he was in many ways the greatest man we ever elected to the office. He was as smart as Jefferson or either Adams and distinguished himself in many different fields.

His early career in academia was just about unbelievable. He entered college without the funds to pay tuition, so he spent his freshman year working as a full-time janitor and handyman in the school. Just one year later, he was teaching literature and classical languages. He did not apply for the teaching positions. The administrators simply recognized his extraordinary ability and appointed him. By the time he was 26, he was college president.

He then became a lawyer, passing the bar without the benefit of a legal education and eventually arguing before the Supreme Court. He also served as a preacher who was considered the premier orator of his era. He continued in those professions for a short time until the Civil War broke out, at which point he enlisted in the Union Army. His career as a soldier was again incredible. By the time he left he was a major general.

His career in the House was also incredible. He was nominated by admirers while he was still a soldier, and did not campaign. He was elected anyway. He was perhaps the only man in America who consistently held the moral high ground above Abraham Lincoln. Garfield admired the Great Emancipator in many ways, but found Lincoln to be a pussy, both in his indecisive conduct of the war and in his wishy-washy attitude toward slavery. Indeed, although they belonged to the same party, Garfield did not even support Honest Abe’s re-election to the Presidency, although neither did he oppose it. In retrospect, Garfield was right about the war in every way. On the slavery question, Garfield held the moral high ground above Lincoln, no small accomplishment in its own right, but Lincoln was a political pragmatist who had to hold together a fragile coalition, and could not always afford to pursue moral right without compromise. Garfield did not actually wield much power, so he could afford the luxury of moral certitude. After Lincoln’s death, however, Garfield became a skillful compromiser, but not on civil rights. No man of the era more strongly and unambiguously championed education and voting rights for African-Americans than James A Garfield.

His rise to the Presidency was similar to his reluctant entry into the House. He didn’t want to be President, and made absolutely no effort to get the office. He made no effort to get nominated, but was nominated anyway – after he drew the convention’s attention by making a speech nominating another candidate. After the nomination, he barely campaigned, but was elected anyway. He was the last member of the House to rise directly to the Presidency.

You may have noted a common thread in the stories above. He did not choose to be a professor, a congressman or the President. In each case, his competence and intellect were so universally admired that he was essentially handed the job. He was also known to be brilliant in both the bar and the pulpit. The only other career he actively sought was in the military, and he was obviously pretty damned good at that as well.

He accomplished all of that despite being raised in dire poverty. He was born in a log cabin, and his father died when he was 18 months old.

If you are interested to learn more about Garfield, I can tell you that Candice Millard’s “Destiny of the Republic” is a very readable bio.