Category: Greetings

Thanks

Scoop, ... 8 comments.

I finally got around to looking at the donations from the group. You guys are awesome. I would thank you all by name, but I doubt that you would want your real names to be exposed, given the crazy world we live in. Just imagine me tipping my hat, although I have never worn one.

Am I the only guy in the world who has never worn a hat or a watch? I’ve never even worn a cap to play baseball or golf, except one time when a softball ump told me I had to put one on or we would forfeit. (Who knew there was a rule for that?)

Recap:

* From the PayPal donations, there is enough to cover the cost of the Other Crap hosting for two years, so now I wouldn’t quit even if I wanted to! (Which I don’t, because I love the Other Crap portion of my day.)

* From the additional subscriptions on the pay site, well, there were some, but I’m still taking a bath on hosting that server. My bad, really. I went years without actively promoting the subscription area, and rarely even mentioned it, so I shouldn’t be surprised that the number of members slowly eroded. But many thanks to those of you that signed up or re-signed recently, even when you didn’t need the content! That was kind, and … well, just “thanks.”

As I mentioned earlier, I don’t want to push this obnoxiously. I don’t expect to make a profit on the sites. I just don’t want the cost of my little hobby to get out of control. I would love to break even! No donation is too small and, needless to say, no donation is too large.

Wait! Those last five words are wrong.

If you donate a billion dollars or more, that actually would be too large. That would be counter productive, because I’d probably buy my own island, build a private golf course, hire a staff, erect a giant golden statue of myself, and become so big for my britches that I would forget about the site and abandon you guys. So do NOT give me a billion dollars. Restricting your maximum donation to a few million would keep me grounded.

I’m kidding out of embarrassment because I hate internet begging, and now I’m doing it.

That actually raises an interesting side-track. The truth is that if I suddenly came into a billion dollars, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. Would you? I would be totally incompetent as a rich person because I don’t really want anything more, except for my kids and grandkids. I don’t have any interest in yachts or private planes or mansions or penthouses or golf courses. I don’t want to own a sports team or name anything after myself. I’m not interested in booze, drugs, gambling or escorts. I don’t even want to travel any more because I’ve already been everywhere I want to go. I’d just give some to family members, donate to some causes that I would feel comfortable supporting, and keep doing my same daily routine, thus proving, as my wives and girlfriends have always said, that I am the world’s most boring person.

Anyway …

Uncle Scoopy’s Fun House is still active and updated daily. It includes more than a million images and tens of thousands of videos, dating back about 30 years. At this point, between all of my costs for hosting all of my sites, I still lose money, so subscriptions are still very welcome. There’s a lot of material there!

If you aren’t interested in the Fun House, but enjoy reading Other Crap daily, and would like to help get me to a break-even position overall, please consider a donation. Anything helps. I don’t want Other Crap to be weighed down with ads and pop-ups. It is best when it is simple: just celebrity nudity, jokes, and sports. (And this message once in a while.)




In the immortal words of a great man, “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Fun House news

Scoop, ... no comments.

In case any of you are interested, Aesthete has just begun the ambitious task of chronicling for the Fun House all of the nudity in every season of Naked Attraction, in HD, from 2016 to the present.

As you’ve probably noticed, I don’t push Uncle Scoopy’s Fun House any more, although I keep it active and updated daily. It includes more than a million images and tens of thousands of videos, dating back about 30 years. At this point, between all of my costs for hosting all of my sites, I lose money, so subscriptions are very welcome. There’s a lot of material there!

If you aren’t interested in the Fun House, but enjoy reading Other Crap daily, please consider a donation. Anything helps. I don’t want Other Crap to be weighed down with ads and pop-ups. It is best when it is simple: just celebrity nudity and jokes. (And now this message.) Even when I write about news and sports, I try to find what humor there might be.




Many thanks to those who chipped in! I’ll look at the numbers in a week or two and report back.

Site news:

Scoop, ... 1 comment.

I will have to make some changes to conform to the new requirements of my host on the pay site, as well as to conform to the demands of the credit card companies. This does not affect Other Crap (for now), except that I’ll have to change some of the links. You might not even notice. Basically I have to put an age 18 warning on any site in the pay site domains if they contain adult material that is accessible by people under 18. For example, I have the following choices with the free preview of the latest Fun House, which is not behind a paywall, but is on one of the paywall domains: (1) place the dreaded “are you 18” choice to get to the page; or (2) make it into a page with dead links only; or (3) drop it. I suppose I’l drop it and just mention on this site when something is in the Fun House that is not on Other Crap.

Yes, I know that age question is ridiculous because no kid ever checks “I am under 18,” but them’s the rules, and I have to play by ’em.

If you’re a member of the pay site, it will no longer link to pages that are not behind the pay wall, like Other Crap and Charlie’s site, although those sites will continue to function normally. (And Other Crap will still link to Charlie’s site.) Sites behind the pay wall will only link to other sites behind the pay wall, and will have to open in a new window if the registered domain changes.

So it goes.

Eric Roberts turns 70 today

Scoop, ... 5 comments.

James Brown used to call himself the hardest-working man in show business. Maybe he was. I don’t know.

But I do know the hardest-working man in showbiz today.

image host

It’s our man Eric.

He now has 916 acting credits on IMDb, including 14 this year so far, and 90 in the pipeline. That’s not a typo. He is in NINETY upcoming projects. I suppose he celebrated his birthday with a quick nod to those who thanked him, then set upon learning his lines for some crappy film in Croatia or Ecuador or Uzbekistan or Pitcairn’s Island. Gotta study, you know. He has to nail it all today, because tomorrow he’s on a plane to some place we’ve probably never heard of, someplace deep in the jungle or high atop a mountain, where they eat insects and worship mud. But if they have a camera, and their checks don’t bounce, he’ll get there. He may need a safari guide or a sherpa or protection from the Armenian mafia, but he’ll get there, he’ll know his lines, and he’ll hit his marks.

Cheers to ya, E.R., and just keep doin’ you. We’re pullin’ for you to hit the thousand mark.

Happy Giant Pink Japanese Penis Day (oh, and Easter)

Scoop, ... 13 comments.

This is the rare occasion when one of the most sacred holidays of Christianity occurs on the same day as one of the most sacred holidays of Scoopianity. It is Giant Pink Japanese Penis Day in the Year of Our Shatner 95. Once again the world celebrates the event that has been described as “Mardi Gras with dongs.”


image host

I hope that your family enjoys the traditional bird with all the trimmings. We always put a rooster into the oven at our house, but there’s never enough meat to go around because my brother-in-law always eats too much cock.

I also hope that you did your shopping early this year. I waited until the last minute, and the clerk at Walmart told me that they had no Giant Pink Japanese Penis Day gifts. I guess they must have sold like wildfire this year.

When you get right down to it, that’s not really important. Sure, kids of all ages enjoy the food and the presents, but amid all the merriment, we should never forget the true meaning of Giant Pink Japanese Day. As one commenter noted a few years back:

“Maybe Giant Pink Japanese Penis Day doesn’t come from a store.
Maybe Giant Pink Japanese Penis Day means a little bit more.”

Hemingway once wrote, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” The same is true of Giant Pink Japanese Penis Day, for no matter where we roam, there is always a giant pink Japanese penis inside all of us.

————

Warnings:

(1) Do not be fooled by imitations. Some other countries have gotten penis envy and have instituted Giant Penis Days of their own. Beware. These are rip-offs, although some have memorable celebrations, like Giant Brown Swiss Penis Day, where a different giant chocolate penis comes out of a cuckoo clock every hour. As for Giant Green Irish Penis Day, the celebrations may seem riotous, but it’s still not the real thing.

(2) Do NOT try to smuggle giant pink penises into Japan from other countries. In addition to the fact that you would face the dire legal penalties for giant penis smuggling (imagine Midnight Express, except with giant penises), there are simply good reasons why you should not do so.

  • First of all, they would not be sacred. The official giant pink Japanese penises are the only ones that have been blessed. Bringing in a counterfeit would be like trying to pass off a bottle of Ozarka from 7-Eleven as Holy Water in the Vatican.
  • Second, the Most Honorable Japanese Department of Agriculture and Giant Genitalia is concerned that introducing a new strain of giant pink penises into their eco-system could cause the native strain to mutate or die out. It’s the same reason why you can’t take frogs to Australia.

The main thing to remember is that there is simply no need for you to take such a risk. There are plenty of giant pink Japanese penises to go around, and that means a fun day for one and all.

On the Scoopy Calendar, this is the second most important holiday of the year, after William Shatner’s Birthday

These are our holidays:

January 6: Mr. Bean Day (Rowan Atkinson’s birthday)

February 24: Unsuccessful Voyage Day (Billy Zane’s birthday)

March 22: Shatmas (William Shatner’s birthday) *

First Sunday in April: Giant Pink Japanese Penis Day
April 18: Eric Roberts’ birthday.

May 1: Cousin Greg Day (Nicholas Braun’s birthday)

June 21: Count Floyd Day (Joe Flaherty’s birthday)

July 8: Hey Now Day (Jeffrey Tambor’s birthday)

August 18: Dalton Day (Patrick Swayze’s birthday)

Note: Dalton Eve (August 17th) occurs on Spicoli Day (Sean Penn’s birthday)

September 19: Talk Like a Pirate Day

October 24: Salieri Day (F. Murray Abraham’s birthday)

November 27: Booger Day (Curtis Armstrong’s birthday)

December 23: Festivus

* Shatmas is also my New Year’s Day. I am now living in the year 95.

Merry Christmas

Scoop, ... 9 comments.


image host

The following is Scoop’s Christmas Carol, the same one I have told every Christmas for decades. The message is Christian, but the lesson is universal:

Peace on earth; good will to men.

======

Human societies seem to have some common rules, one of which is that the young men must kill or be killed for whatever causes the old men have brainwashed them to believe, but there were a few times in our history when the warriors told their overlords to stuff it, if only for a moment. On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in 1914, during the first sacred holiday of the first world war, the trench warriors set aside their rifles, ignored their orders, and walked into the no-man’s land to celebrate Christmas with their enemies.

Peace broke out in many places along the lines, involving many men communicating to one another without a common language. As the story goes, the Germans first put Christmas trees up just above their sight lines, with signs that said “you no shoot, we no shoot” or “Merry Christmas.” Then the Scots brought out their ubiquitous bagpipes and played Christmas carols. The French broke out their champagne. The men shared pictures of their loved ones. They roasted some pigs together for Christmas dinner, and their chaplains held Christmas religious ceremonies. They cleared no-man’s land of the rotten corpses, buried their fallen comrades, and helped their enemies to do the same. When they had cleared away their dead, they played soccer where the bodies had been strewn.

The real-life aftermath of the unpremeditated Christmas truce was shock among the high commands of the opposing nations. Nothing could be more disastrous for the world’s sense of proper order than to have young men of opposing countries declaring their comradeship and refusing to kill one another. Why, it’s downright socialist! Generals on both sides declared this peacemaking to be treasonous, and all the lingering goodwill generated by the spontaneous outbreak of peace had been completely quashed by Easter of 1915, when the men would again resume the unquestioned killing of one another on behalf of their common God, who had apparently issued the two sides contradictory orders. Before Armistice Day in 1918, an entire European generation was lost. Some thirty million young men would return to their homes wounded. Their mothers would be envied by the ten million others whose sons did not return at all.

As I write this on this Christmas Day in 2025, when many young men are still dying for old men’s causes, it gives me some faint hope to look back on that Christmas of 1914 and recall the foot soldiers who proved that, despite all indications to the contrary, we do have brotherhood within us, if only we reach for it.

The Funhouse Turns 30

Scoop, ... 40 comments.

It has now been 30 years since the first primitive edition of that venerable celebrity nudity site, Uncle Scoopy’s Funhouse, appeared on (of all places) AOL. There was exactly one picture – Madonna hitchhiking stark naked. There has been a daily edition every single day since then, except for approximately a month in 2023 when I took some time off to rest and recover from kidney issues.

Thirty years is a long time. I still enjoy finding the new material, and I still enjoy writing a few jokes now and then, but I have to admit that I don’t have as much fire in the belly as I used to, and I sometimes wonder how much longer the whole thing will last. After all, my two oldest sons are old enough to play with me in the Senior Games! When the elderly people in your family are your children, you can’t help but hear that ol’ clock ticking. (No, I have no plan to stop. Why would I if I enjoy it? But there’s always something unexpected like that kidney thing.)

Other Crap seems like my new project – until I realize that even this site is old enough to drink. To be exact, it is now 23 years old. I recently tested some posts from the early 2000s, and very few of them still work. Many lead to domains for sale! What can ya say? The internet keeps evolving.

I know that many of you have been reading my blogs since the 1990s, which is amazing in itself, and I thank you all for that.

Happy Salieri Day

Scoop, ... 7 comments.

It is so named in honor of the greatest role of my favorite living character actor (since Wilford Brimley died), and my fellow Longhorn, the F man himself, F. Murray Abraham. He won an Oscar for playing the cunning, Machiavellian character of Antonio Salieri, “the patron saint of mediocrities,” and possible poisoner of Mozart. Today is Abraham’s birthday, so happy 86th birthday, you magnificent, Mozart-killing bastard.


image host

To celebrate this special holiday each year, in honor of Abraham’s memorable representation of the sycophantic and hypocritical Salieri, we take this time to honor our loved ones publicly and to their faces, but then to betray them behind their backs and take credit for their achievements.

—
-=-
—

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

As far as we know, the “Salieri killed Mozart” legend is total bullshit, as is just about everything else people think they know about Salieri. (The New Yorker covered the modern misperception of Salieri with an excellent and detailed article.) 1

Just a few years after Salieri’s death, Pushkin wrote a short play («Моцарт и Сальери») that gave a public, artistic airing to an idea that previously had been merely a rumor in intellectual circles – that a jealous Salieri had poisoned Mozart. The great Pushkin was a brilliant wordsmith, the Shakespeare of the Russian language, some say the very creator of modern Russian, but he was no historian, and was also a hot-headed ass whose own character flaw was … (wait for it) … jealousy. In English we often use the expression “fatal character flaw” with no regard for the literal meaning. In Pushkin’s case, his propensity for jealousy was indeed fatal. (He died in a duel involving his wife’s flirtations, or lack thereof.) Although Pushkin undoubtedly pictured himself as Mozart, the crass interloper in courtly society who was somehow blessed with an immeasurable genius unattainable by the Tsar’s favorites, his version of Salieri is a rather obvious subconscious representation of himself, a man so consumed by jealousy that he was willing to kill his rival.

Pushkin’s accusation would undoubtedly have exited the 20th century as an obscure piece of literary and historical trivia, but the idea that Salieri may have poisoned Mozart was resuscitated and cemented into our modern consciousness in the 1970s. The culprit was “Amadeus,” a celebrated play that became Oscar’s “Best Picture.” As a result of the popularity of that story, many people believe the legend today, notwithstanding a complete lack of any factual or logical basis for that belief. In reality, all of Mozart’s closest friends and associates continued to associate cordially with Salieri after Mozart’s death, and none seem to have suspected Salieri of foul play.

Mozart and Salieri were rivals, to be sure. That rivalry even included a head-to-head battle during an opera composition competition held by Emperor Joseph II in 1786. Mozart lost that competition. Contrary to the entire basis of Amadeus, it was actually Mozart who was the envious one. He was jealous of Salieri’s success, and of Salieri’s position as the emperor’s favorite. This was no literary fabrication, but was based on the hard evidence of Mozart’s own words, as expressed in letters to his father.

Wikipedia picks up the story:

In the 1780s, while Mozart lived and worked in Vienna, he and his father Leopold wrote in their letters that several “cabals” of Italians led by Salieri were actively putting obstacles in the way of Mozart’s obtaining certain posts or staging his operas. For example, Mozart wrote in December 1781 to his father that “the only one who counts in [the Emperor’s] eyes is Salieri”. Their letters suggest that both Mozart and his father, being Austrians who resented the special place that Italian composers had in the courts of the Austrian nobility, blamed the Italians in general and Salieri in particular for all of Mozart’s difficulties in establishing himself in Vienna. Mozart wrote to his father in May 1783 about Salieri and Lorenzo Da Ponte, the court poet: “You know those Italian gentlemen; they are very nice to your face! Enough, we all know about them. And if [Da Ponte] is in league with Salieri, I’ll never get a text from him, and I would love to show him what I can really do with an Italian opera.” In July 1783, he again wrote to his father of “a trick of Salieri’s”, one of several letters in which Mozart accused Salieri of trickery.

—
—
—

Vaguely related anecdotes:

1. The F in F. Murray Abraham doesn’t stand for anything. His name is Murray Abraham, but he thought that sounded undistinguished and pedestrian, so he added an initial to make him sound special. He chose F in particular in honor of his dad. In theory, it should be written without the period, since F is just F and not an abbreviation, but he spells it with the period.

2. The great genius’s name, the part between the Wolfgang and the Mozart, was not Amadeus at all. In birth it was Theophilus. His baptismal certificate reads: “Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart.”

Theophilus is Greek for “beloved of God.” Amadeus is simply a direct translation of that expression into Latin. Mozart himself used the French, German and Italian translations at various times. (Amadé, Gottlieb and Amadeo, respectively.) He generally signed his compositions “Wolfgango Amadeo.” A benefit concert for Mozart’s family was held in Prague on December 28, 1791, billed as “Concert in memory of Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart.” His earliest biographers also used Gottlieb as a middle name. As far as we know, Mozart never once referred to himself as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, although he did jokingly sign correspondence in pseudo-Latin as Wolfgangus Amadeus Mozartus. Somehow, in the 19th century, Mozart’s little jest became his posthumous reality.

The weirdest variation of all appears on his marriage registration, where his name has been mysteriously Anglicized to “Adam” – Wolfgang Adam Mozart! Scholars assume that is a misspelling of “Amadé.”

3. Tom Hulce played Mozart in the film version of Amadeus. If he were cast today, he could play Steve Bannon.

===========================

FOOTNOTE 1: Here is a hack that will usually work when you run into one of those “subscribe to continue reading” messages and you really want to read the article: (1) Right click on the main part of the page (not the “subscribe to continue” window); (2) choose save as; (3) choose HTML only; (4) go to the directory where you saved it and click on it – it should open in your browser without the paywall; (5) just delete the .html page when you’re finished.

You should get all the text, but the formatting may or may not be polished, and you may or may not get pictures and attachments. Those things depend on their coding techniques. This works for most such pages, but about 10% of them use more sophisticated paywalls. (That percentage will increase in time as soon as they realize their systems are easily defeated.)

When saving, you could also choose “html page complete,” and that will usually retain all the proper formatting. I don’t like that because it leaves directories that I forget to scrub from my hard disk.

Yikes, I forgot to talk like a pirate yesterday

Scoop, ... no comments.

I’ve decided to spin my failure by saying that I chose to write yesterday’s page as a realistic portrayal of what pirates really talked like, instead of creating a larger-than-life character. Just think of it in terms of Dennis Quaid playing Doc Holliday.

Long John Silver and Doc Holliday have something in common – roles that are more successful when overacted. Dennis Quaid portrayed Doc Holliday as a real person. Nobody wants to see that shit. That’s like portraying a medieval bridge-keeper without one decent riddle, or playing Richard III as a thoughtful man with perfect posture.

Or portraying a Yarrr-less pirate.

That reminds me of a story my sons told me. When they were kids, they watched some show about a local news announcer who had to fill in when the local kiddie-show guy got sick. He didn’t enjoy acting and he didn’t understand the characters. When he played Cap’n Jack the pirate he would just read the cue cards in his news-announcer voice. “Avast me hearties, it be time for a cartoon. Yar, kids.” (Just pronouncing “yar” to rhyme with “bar,” with no rolled “r.”) The part of the story I liked best was how he hosted the Horror Theater as Ghost Jack, reading his evil laugh off the cue cards in a flat, toneless voice as “Mewy, mewy, ma ha-ha, kids.” I never saw that show, whatever it was, but I remember how much the kids and I loved to talk about it and would make up other larger-then-life characters to be played by the substitute Something Jack: Cowboy Jack, Vampire Jack, Gabby Jack, Sonny Jack (who had a sensible appreciation of Cocoa Puffs), Jack the Tiger (“Frosted Flakes are great, I suppose. Well, let’s just say to be fair that they’re quite tasty, kids.”), Yosemite Jack, Jack Ventura (Pet Detective), etc.

Now that I think about it, I would love to see how Dennis Quaid would play Sonny the Cuckoo.

No disrespect meant to Dennis Quaid. He was very entertaining as Gordo and Remy McSwain, and in many other productions.