Category: Beauty

Halle Berry seems pretty fit at 53

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Margot Robbie – young and (modestly) naked

Scoop, ... 1 comment.

Ms. Robbie takes a shower in the beloved cinema treasure, I.C.U. She was 18 when it was filmed.

The writer/director, Aash Aaron, finishes pretty close to the bottom of IMDb’s ratings. He earned a 2.4 for this movie, and a 2.6 for an earlier film called Vigilante, also starring Margot Robbie. That was quite an auspicious start to his career! Of course it was also the start of her career, and she seems to have done OK.

On the other hand, he must be very close to the top in alphabetical order, whether it is ordered by first or last name.

Speaking of alphabetical order:

When I was a kid there were two guys who competed to get the last entry in the Rochester phone book every year. One would be named Zzy Zzyrski, so the next year the other guy would have a new number, and he’d be listed under Stanley Zzzyk, or something like that, so old Zzy would get a different number, add some more z’s to his name, and reclaim the bottom spot the following year. (I’ve made up those exact names, but the story is otherwise essentially true.)

Looking for weird stuff in the phone book was just one of those little things that made it fun for me and my friend, Mike Dwyer, to grow up. At one point he called me “Zizzy Zizzuriski,” which is how we imagined old Zzy pronounced his name. We’d look for people with odd names and call them with annoying questions in which we pretended to misunderstand who they were. We’d call up a guy named Karp, e.g., and tell him we wanted to buy some carp for our parents. We’d look to see if any local TV personalities had listed numbers, then make nuisance calls to them. Man, we were assholes. My favorite was when we called the guy who was the announcer of the local pro wrestling broadcasts and asked him if we could watch the rehearsals. (This was back in the days when they were still pretending the results were not scripted.) We actually managed to get the guy quite flustered when we started to ask him tough questions, like “OK, we know how the referee could have missed the guy pulling a blackjack from his shorts. After all, that manager was distracting him. But how could you miss it when we could see it on your broadcast? And why don’t you guys just play the tape for the referee?”

The ranking of American Presidents

Scoop, ... 14 comments.

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!

“Alyssa Milano Nudes Are a Blast from the Past”

Scoop, ... 16 comments.

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.