Author Archives: Iowa Life

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About Iowa Life

Experiencing life in Iowa.

I bow at the altar of Chaka Khan!

Oh my gosh what a find! Etta James, Gladys Knight and Chaka Khan singing ‘Ain’t Nobody’s Business’ with BB King on guitar (1987). In typical fashion I discover this singing goddess 40 years late. James and Knight are incredible, but Chaka…. luckily we have YouTube. She’s a saucy little tart. My gosh I miss the 70s.


aka Yvette Marie Stevens

Yvette Marie Stevens, better known by her stage name Chaka Khan, is an American singer and songwriter. Her career has spanned nearly five decades, beginning in the 1970s as the lead vocalist of the funk band Rufus.” – Wikus Pedius

Sad sack

“I’m not stupid, I’m smart! I can do things!” I’ve always been kind of interested in John Cazale, in a perverse sort of way. Few people can photograph as homely as that man. Or have ever had such an expressive face. A quick read of his bio shows he appeared in 5 films that all were nominated for Academy Awards. What are the chances? He died at the ripe old age of 42 with Meryl Streep at his bedside. Al Pacino said he was first attracted to Cazale because people always surrounded him because of his congenial manner. The opening quote is from The Godfather of course. Fredo Corleone trying to explain why he sold out the family to the Miami Jew, Hyman Roth. Spell check may not recognize his name, but anyone interested in filmdom will.


Dog Day Afternoon

Get off of my lawn!

Something is occurring in Ames now that reminded me of being out in Omaha a year or two ago. I noticed when we were  at an intersection to watch out as people kept turning left through a red light. Just blatantly running a red-light. My go-to Omaha source tells me 4 or 5 cars going left through the red is now the norm. She has been honked at from behind for not running the red! This phenomenon  has really taken off here in Ames. Never thought I’d see it. Somebody’s going to get nailed. I suppose its been happening in big cities for decades. Society always breaks down in the cities first, then comes to the rural areas.

Its caused of course by cops not doing their job. Rudy Giuliani demonstrated this in New York with the ‘broken window theory’. He showed that if you didn’t tolerate the little infractions, the big ones took care of themselves. You end up being micromanaged by the city when traffic cameras start springing up everywhere. Then you start seeing people receive tickets for ridiculous infractions. The city will claim, “Oh we have to have these cameras (revenue enhancement) in the interest of public safety!” When of course the real answer is if your city employees the cops had done their job and let scoff laws know this wouldn’t be tolerated, we wouldn’t have this problem.

I see these little societal quirks as indicative of a bigger problem. An overall coarsening of society. It reminds me of the old days when half the population smoked. They would do it in rude and obnoxious ways, and did a lot to get themselves banned to the point where now there is not a bigger social pariah then someone who smokes cigarettes. Every generation likely thinks the world is going to hell in a handbasket as they get older, we’ll have to see if it is truly the big collapse. Or not.

One of the most irritating occurrences for an OCD person like myself, is watching Walmart shopping carts end up 3 or 4 blocks from the store. Abandoned. People just cavalierly steal them. In the same Walmart parking lot you’ll see people dump out their ashtrays onto the ground. Slyly set their drink cup outside their car door before driving away. Take up 2 parking stalls. All manner of rude behavior. Walmart is such a microcosm of society. When people no longer feel the need to do the right thing, when no one is watching, it makes you fear for the survival of self-governance.

As one of our founders said to the effect, “Our limited government is wholly inadequate for an immoral people.” 

Self government only works for people who don’t need a nanny state. I think psychologists call it the “assholization” of society. I don’t want to get too technical though. The first trigger was at the credit union when I pulled up to the ATM. I would invariably notice on rainy days that people would leave up the lid on the envelope box so that all the envelopes would get ruined. They got theirs, so to hell with the next guy. Something tells me it doesn’t bode well for a culture when basic human decency is no longer the norm.

Our government of course wants to grow, so they foster the destruction of institutions that made America strong. Authoritarians thrive amongst a weak people. 


By parking on and over the line the typical pickup uses 4 parking stalls


The concept  of putting trash in the dumpster is too tough for many


My favorite, the “Leave the dirty diaper for someone else” maneuver


This is a favorite on my street on Friday night, the “fast food bag drop”


Normally the lid is left more open

 

 

The 10 Most Beautiful Women of the 2000’s

I lied, there are only 4. And only 1 is an actress. A Danish professional tennis player. A 2008 vice-presidential candidate from Alaska. A pop singer. And the only actress from the decade I noticed. Such is the state of modern television and movies.  About the only movies they make anymore are ones that are remakes of duds from 30 years ago. That were themselves remakes of movies from the 20’s or 30’s… Look at the current television lineup, Hawaii 5-0 and Magnum PI for god sakes! (Update: CBS has now remade ‘MacGyver’ also) Its been done! Crack a book and come up with a new idea! What do you get paid for? To copy other people’s work??

But I’ll put these 4 women up against the women of any decade. In the other decades a clear favorite of the bunch always stood out, not with these 4. All 4 are the stuff dreams are made of. I was going to say an athlete, a politician, a singer and an actor, but Sarah Palin was actually a college level basketball player herself. And Pink was a gymnast, so 3 jocks. And, Sarah Palin can also clean a fish. Television is so noxious and vacuous it eliminates any entrants to this group save Bowen. It gets worse next decade, I can only think of 1!

This is an interesting group in a couple of ways. If you look at Caroline, Sarah and Pink these are 3 very healthy and athletic women. And Julie at times looks very fit, other times going from slender to skinny. This fantastic four I realize have another distinction, they embody the concept of Warrior Women. They have embraced and beat hardship and adversity to varying degrees. I think it says something, I’m not sure what, but it says something.


Caroline Wozniacki

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin fixes her hair as she addresses the American Conservative Union’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, February 11, 2012. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst (UNITED STATES – Tags: POLITICS)


Pink


Julie Bowen


Caroline Wozniacki


Sarah Palin

LOS ANGELES, CA – NOVEMBER 18: Singer Pink attends the 40th American Music Awards held at Nokia Theatre L.A. Live on November 18, 2012 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Jason Merritt/Getty Images)


Julie Bowen


Caroline Wozniacki


Sarah Palin

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Julie Bowen (that to me, is a really beautiful woman)


Caroline Wozniacki

Women of the 2000’s                                Women of the 90’s

Women of the 70’s                   Women of the 80’s

Women of the 60’s

Women of the 40’s & 50’s

Women of the 2010’s

The 10 Most Beautiful Women of the 90’s

10 4 very beautiful women. So many thoughts. Photoshop had come into vogue in the 90’s, replacing the airbrushing and touchup paints of earlier generations. 10 4 perfect women. The lighting, pedestrian. The backdrops, lackluster. The costumes, not bad. Lip injections and breast implants have enhanced this generation of beauties. The photography from an earlier post on the 1940’s and 1950’s blows this bunch out of the water (the photographers, not the women). Hollywood during the Golden Age knew how to shoot a glamour shot hands down. Being a bit of a photo editor I chose images that were unique but served the purpose. I purposely skipped the more overblown / bra-busting cleavage shots that typify the crassness of modern photography. Most of modern photography appears to be a digital wasteland. It reads like a high school yearbook.

What’s really crazy, is the feeling you get that the top 4 women are just really nice. I’ll have to look into that. I know just who to ask. And the top 2 you get the feeling they roll out of bed looking fantabulous, without any war paint. And the top one makes you realize Jesse James is clearly the dumbest man on the planet (more Sandra). I didn’t think I was going to be able to come up with 10 women from the decade, and I didn’t. Just 7 4. I can’t imagine coming up with 10 from the 2000’s, I think I’ll start branching out to sports and singers. For the 2010’s I think I’ll just put up a picture of Lacey Chabert and call it good.

And then it occurred to me, it isn’t just the modern photographer that sucks, but its also the modern movie that sucks. I’ve never had it so crystalized as between these 2 posts half a century apart. I can name movies from the 40’s and 50’s when I wasn’t even alive.  I can’t name more than 2 from the nineties. The modern movie is set to entertain the typical 12 year old boy. With various computer generated graphics of an assortment of comic book characters jumping about the screen. (Theaters have become an “adults not wanted” area.) Movies back then were ones you could sink your teeth into. A House un-American Affairs Committee could have a field day with this bunch.  Unfortunately the more debased Hollywood becomes, it simply reflects a more dysfunctional America.

One thing that hasn’t changed, is the Hollywood culture. The majority in the industry still appear to be insecure people going through life at various degrees of altered states. Another thing that hasn’t changed is the beauty of the women. This generation gives nothing away to the Golden Age. I’m guessing most guys figured out what I did by putting the sweet girls at the top and the bitches not so sweet at the bottom. In no way could I deny their amazing beauty based solely on their personality or politics. In previous generations they were perhaps smarter to keep their politics to themselves and let their screen work do the talking. I took out all the clunkers, I got tired of hearing about their politics.


Sandra Bullock


Denise Richards

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Sheree J Wilson – here’s to skinny blondes with freckles!

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Jennifer Love Hewitt

Perhaps one of the more bizarre stories is that of Michelle Pfeiffer. Reading her bio on IMDB reads like a list of what ‘could have been’. She was considered for this, she turned down that. I like watching a good looking blonde in a movie, but the only thing I could tell you she ever made was a comic book thriller episode of Batman. She seems mostly famous for being beautiful.

On a lighthearted note on all these posts they breakdown evenly between blondes and brunettes (except the 70’s/80’s which had 8 brunettes). I also chose 11 women for this Top 10 post. I can’t imagine a more boring bunch of photos than these. True an outsider doesn’t have access to the ‘good’ ones, but I did look through a lot of photos. One aspect of digital photography I’ve noticed since being in it from the start in ’93, is they take a ton of images. There’s no cost. In the old days you got it right the first time because you were burning film and developer costs. Sure the pros burned a lot of film, but not even close to today. They might as well be taking video.

———————————————————————————————–

“Sandra Bullock is a genuine sweet person. My sister and I had dinner at her restaurant a few months back. She sat down and chatted with us for a few minutes as if we were old friends.”
—Anonymous

Named the Most Beautiful Woman in the World of 2015 by People magazine. Bullock’s response: “That’s just silly.”

Why Sandra Bullock may just be the most likable person in Hollywood

sandra bullock

Women of the 2000’s                                Women of the 90’s

Women of the 70’s                        Women of the 60’s

Women of the 40’s & 50’s

Women of the 80’s

Women of the 2010’s

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The 10 Most Beautiful Women of the 40’s & 50’s

What a generation of women that was! The 40’s & 50’s surprised the heck out of me. That was my parent’s generation, WWII, the fifties. I thought I would be hard pressed to find 10 women I knew of. I really thought my favorite would be the Grace Kelly or Rita Hayworth type. Who knew it would be the grownup version of the most famous child star of all, Shirley Temple (circa 1948 age 20)! Aside from the beauty she grew up to be, she also struck me as an unbelievably nice person. I ended up having so many great photos of the women of this era, I put the extras in this post. The photography back then was so much better. Lighting, background, composition, color, the use of B&W.

Another surprise was Janet Leigh, who as far as I could tell never took a bad photo! It was amazing, winner after winner after winner… I have this vision of Grace Kelly from Rear Window and I don’t think anyone ever photographed her as well before or since. Loretta Young had 1 exceptional photo and left me mystified as to what was going on the rest of the time. I couldn’t find 1 decent color Myrna Loy shot. I ended up taking Betty Grable out of the post. She strikes me as a really nice/down to earth person. Who had zero sex appeal. I don’t know what it was. I replaced her with someone I hadn’t known until recently, Dorothy Malone. Like Gene Tierney, I hadn’t known they existed until this past year.

Two others that were nearly devoid of good color photos were Julie Newmar and Ava Gardner (In fact the choices for them were so bad I ended up removing them). Photographers captured about 1/10th of the sultriness that was Gene Tierney. One thing I did notice that was different from the more modern decades was the classic style, beauty and grace that the photographers captured in this era. While the few candid photos stand in stark contrast to the formality of the day, there was definitely something to be said for the ‘old school’. It was never so clear as in the post mentioned above where I used the surplus 40s/50s photo, modern day photographers are such hacks. And it wasn’t because of the advent of digital photography, that didn’t start in earnest until the late 90s or 2000s. By the 1960’s photography was quickly becoming a wasteland. [Here is a great link, “Bullet Bra Ladies of the 40s & 50s”. Awe inspiring.]


Shirley Temple

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Grace Kelly

Rita Hayworth
Rita Hayworth – This picture is a good example. The first one I’d used was a simple indoor photo of Rita in a blue sweater next to yellow drapes. It worked really well with the  redhaired beauty. It was small and Rita was sporting a rather ‘canned’ smile. This photo is easily 4 times as big and Rita has a very natural contemplative expression, and mostly natural lighting. It also shows how simple a good photo can be. She’s standing in the yard leaning up against a telephone pole wearing a simple blue dress with a corsage on the belt as the secondary subject. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have the finest subject in the world either. There’s that.


Janet Leigh


Gene Tierney  (*great story below)


Loretta Young

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Dorothy Malone

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Fort Apache was on TCM this morning starring Shirley Temple. That 1 year later at the age of 21 she should make her last movie (A Kiss for Corliss) just seems criminal! Quite.

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ST %IP&T

Shirley has a wonderful interview on YouTube with Larry King from 1988 when she was 60 years old. Great stuff about the pervs at MGM and how when she asked for her money at age 22, the $3,000,000 plus she’d earned as a child was gone. Poof! (I took out some photos of Miss Temple so my crazed obsession would not be quite so obvious.)

*Gene Tierney had the most heartbreaking story that really is apropos in this time of pandemic. She was volunteering in 1943 at the Hollywood Canteen for soldiers on their way overseas. A high school girl who was a fan thought she’d show what a hero she was, and broke the rubella (German measles) quarantine she was under to visit Tierney at the canteen. The disease she gave the pregnant Tierney caused her daughter to be born deaf, blind and retarded and have to be institutionalized the rest of her life. Luckily her medical expenses were paid for by Howard Hughes and her ex-husband  Oleg Cassini. In a final bit of irony, years later she met the very same fan again that had destroyed her daughters life. She bragged to Tierney about breaking the quarantine to show how devoted a fan she was.

Women of the 2000’s                                Women of the 90’s

Women of the 70’s                        Women of the 60’s

Women of the 2010’s

Women of the 80’s

The 10 Most Beautiful Women of the 60’s

That was fun! The “10” most beautiful women of the sixties. Its funny but you learn a lot doing this. Looking through thousands of photos clues you into a couple of things. The ‘models’, the Cheryl Tiegs, Candace Bergen, Cybill Shepherd, the Ali MacGraw,  they were models for a reason. If they could be photographed bad I didn’t see it. Whereas I wasn’t happy at all with the choices for Julie Christie, Stella Stevens, Connie Stevens, Dawn Wells or Angela Cartwright. Another irritant was how Getty Images invariably grabbed the really good ones. [Looking back on my lists, I believe the 60’s had the strongest decade 1-10. The 40’s, 50’s, 90’s, 00’s and 10’s I couldn’t even come up with 10 women.]

Another interesting finding was that I wasn’t able to get into the icons, Raquel Welch, Ann-Margaret, Joey Heatherton and the like. And although I personally loved the big hair and the bold colors of the 60’s, I toned it down for the faint of heart. I also could have gone with a 100% black and white gallery, nobody likes B&W more than I do. But then, no one lends herself to color like Cybill Shepherd. It would be a crime not to photograph her in color. I had assumed one of my youthful sex symbols would have been my favorite. Nope. Cybill Shepherd. In her modeling days where I nabbed her photos, she usually had such a delightfully smartass expression. Now that I’ve done the 60’s, 70’s & 80’s, I can’t wait to do the other decades!


Natalie Wood


Charmian Carr

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Hayley Mills (I almost forgot Hayley, I tend to think American. She’s also not what one thinks of with the phrase ‘stunning beauty’. Yet she is. I’m going to go into this further with a separate post on her. I’ll just say she has a following.)

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Ali MacGraw – whatever “it” is, she had it in spades


Jacqueline Bisset

Candice Bergen


Angela Cartwright (Interesting that 2 of the picks should be from Sound of Music) She was really coming into her own when she left Lost In Space. Absolutely stunning from my perspective. Why the TV career petered out is beyond me. She was on the show with a very beautiful woman named Marta Kristi, yet for me Angela had no equal. Sort of like Eve Plumb being the standout on Brady Bunch compared to Maureen McCormick.

Dawn Wells (there’s no debate by the way) Passed away December 30, 2020 at the age of 82. I can’t imagine a more smoldering picture of her.

Cheryl Tiegs  – I took out Cheryl’s photo. The more I listened to her in YouTube videos the less I liked her. I could overlook the enormous ego, she was a Big Deal back then. What I couldn’t over look was when the pilot of her 4-seater bush plane suffered a seizure while taxiing. She didn’t turn off the engine and aid the pilot, she bailed out of the plane.


Julie Christie – “All women are aware of that moment when suddenly the boys don’t look at you. It’s a fairly common thing, when suddenly you no longer attract that instant male attention because of the way you look. I never really knew how to enjoy beauty, but it took the form of a subconscious arrogance, expecting things, all muddled up with celebrity. Then you begin to deal with it. In the 1970s, I was amazed to be talked about as a 60s sex symbol. I wasn’t that person, as if I were a doll from the past. I had to learn to come to terms with that.” (just watched Shampoo, she was 35. I didn’t really know of her until about 10 years ago when I first saw Dr Zhivago. I thought sure I would think of her as sexy, but no, just beautiful.)

julie christie | Sixties hair, Julie christie, Hair icon

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Michelle Phillips (the Girl Scout earning her ‘Cigarette Badge’)

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Marlo Thomas (totally missed it back then, what a woman) She was the quintessential “sexy” woman, because she never tried to be sexy.

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Tuesday Weld – I had Tuesday in the wrong decade, the 50s. She was more of a 60s gal. Great line in her IMDB quotes page. When asked what drove her into seclusion she responded, “I think it was a Buick.”


Cybill Shepherd


Cybill Shepherd


Cybill Shepherd

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Cybill Shepherd

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That’s got to be tough though, going from about the most beautiful woman in the world 50 years ago… to being 68. TCM recently played The Last Picture Show starring Cybill. In it the fan got a see at least a topless scene with Cybill. Unless they were ‘stunt’ boobies. They did that back then.

Women of the 2000’s                                Women of the 90’s

Women of the 70’s                        Women of the 60’s

Women of the 40’s & 50’s

Women of the 80’s

Women of the 2010’s

(for the first comment: Lori Saunders)

Lori Saunders

The 10 Most Beautiful Women of the 70’s

As a young man in the 70’s you become finely attuned to the wiles of women. And this is the wiliest bunch I know. How do you possibly narrow it down to 10? You can’t, but you can give it the old college try. What I discovered was that a man’s taste in women tends to run the gamut from young and innocent to dark and sultry. One of the most interesting (and sad) discoveries was the cynicism already evident in the eyes of likely the most beautiful woman in the 70’s, Farrah Fawcett. She was just in her mid 20’s when she shot the poster that rocketed her to stardom. And her eyes already showed a sort of ‘tiredness’ at having to be beautiful all the time. I’ll have to ask a beautiful woman sometime if that’s what it is.

This post originally started out as a “10 Most Beautiful Women of the 70s & 80s” (I’m up to 17 22 at last count). That of course was a ridiculous proposition. The seventies and eighties for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, had the most beautiful women ever! At least to my mind (big hair and Spandex really helped that perception). It was also a different time in a couple of ways that are hard to understand now. R-Rated “skin flicks” were big back then. “Exploitation” films. Sybil Danning was the Queen, Phyllis Davis made her share too. Looking through photos for Sybil, she had posed with about every weapon known to man and in about every swimsuit known to man! (And then some!) I’m so glad she embraced it and hope she profited greatly. Because I know the producers profited off of her.

Some of the actresses who were winning Oscars in the 70s were Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Glenda Jackson and Liza Minnelli. Nothing wrong with that. But while they were taking home hardware, these women were being asked to do some of the most embarrassing things. It was called “jiggle TV” for a reason. Lynda Carter for one as Wonder Woman experienced this a few times when she wore the tights! Camera angles that captured the cleavage, slow motion that immortalized the bounce. And we appreciated it too, don’t think we didn’t. Oh and the men guests on Charlie’s Angels! The slimey come-on’s! “Hey baby, maybe you’d like to come up to my place??” Makes you embarrassed to be a man!

Something just occurred to me. With the internet today, a boy sees his first naked woman before he would even care to! (What’s a 6 year old care about boobies?) Nudity and pornography are everywhere. I bet they become numb to it. Back then it was ooh la la! Boobies! If a well known star posed in Playboy you bought it! If somebody famous took their shirt off in a movie you went! Teen boys would discuss what they had seen off of whom! (Trust me, I know) I seriously can’t tell you one ‘star of the day’, let alone whether they had ever gotten naked. Though I have noticed young female actresses don’t have the pressure to get naked that they did in the old days.

But the other thing I’ve always noticed will sound the most strange. Really built women in the movies and television, have never reached the pinnacles of success. There is/was some sort of bias amongst the studios against really voluptuous women. Marilyn Monroe (the megastar) was a B-Cup, Jayne Mansfield the B-Queen, was a D-Cup. On and on it goes. Jane Fonda was the “serious actress”. Sybil Danning the built actress. John Travolta would attribute it to “homosexual Jews” who run the studios. Who really knows? One of the best examples is Linda Blair (in my 80s group). She was taken more seriously as a 12 year old child actress, then 10 years later when she had grown into a very curvaceous woman! [Here’s a great site 12th Blog for a vast array of beautiful women from all times and all places.]


Farrah Fawcett

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Cheryl Ladd

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Shelley Hack

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Teresa Graves (Get Christie Love!)

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Marie Osmond – the Mormonic Goddess

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Pam Grier (Foxy Brown)


Lynda Carter – when you watch reruns of Wonder Woman, Lynda seems like such a nice person, outside of her character.

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Marilyn McCoo

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Catherine Bach (when you hear the term ‘Daisy Dukes’, this is the original)

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Joanna Pettet – I  gave her 2 photos for a reason. Guys who like slender blondes with freckles will understand why. Very busy actress, who was incredibly underutilized if that makes any sense. Just stunning. Its this phenomena I’ve seen before. A contemporary of hers equal in every physical aspect is Meredith McRae. Yet Joanna brings the heat, there isn’t even a contest.

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Freda Payne (Band of Gold, 1970) The 70s were truly the decade of the beautiful singer: Freda Payne, Linda Ronstadt, Marie Osmond, Marilyn McCoo, Debbie Harry & Chaka Khan, Sheila Ferguson, Gloria Gaynor. That’s quite a Top 8.

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Eve Plumb – for some reason she’s sexy, Maureen McCormick not.


Judy Landers


Sybil Danning

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Phyllis Davis

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Jennifer O’Neill – in a league of her own. In the summer of 1972 there was not a more beautiful woman on this planet.

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Sheila Ferguson (center) Three Degrees. Never have I seen such a shortage of photos of such a knockout. Its bizarre. Luckily YouTube has a ton of video of her.

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Gloria Gaynor (this was truly the decade of the songstress goddess)


Susan Anton

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Linda Ronstadt – she was universally lusted after. A lot of sex symbols have men who love them and men who hate them. I would have to say men back in the 70s pretty much all had a thing for Linda.

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Judy Pace

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Chaka Khan (there is such a shortage of photos of her from the 70s)

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Debbie Harry

Women of the 2000’s                                Women of the 90’s

Women of the 70’s                        Women of the 60’s

Women of the 40’s & 50’s

Women of the 80’s

Women of the 2010’s

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The last 4 photos are of Shelley Hack, who kind of deserves a separate category unto herself. Truly scrumptious. Before she became an actress she appeared in a series of perfume commercials named ‘Charlie‘. When you notice a girl from perfume commercials, she’s memorable.

“Why did you tell them, baby?”


The Killing (1956)

By gawd that’s what film is for! I just happened to catch the tail end of this Sunday morning treat, and what a treat it was! Sterling Hayden and his mugs pull off the ultimate heist, they take a racetrack for a cool $2 million dollars. They were gonna get away with it too, but somebody told a dame! A secret is no longer a secret if you told a woman. Elisha Cook tells Marie Windsor who then tells her thugs and they all die in a horrible shootout à la Reservoir Dogs.

Sterling Hayden who hadn’t arrived yet with the dough, is the lone survivor. He’s at the airport with a large suitcase (the $2 mil), and the airline will not let this huge suitcase be carry on! After much arguing Hayden agrees to let it be checked luggage. As he’s standing at the gate on the tarmac, he’s watching his suitcase precariously balanced on the luggage tram as it heads out to the idling plane.

‘Tinkles’ the dog picks that moment to leap out of Aunt Martha’s arms and bolts in front of the tram driver who swerves to avoid the dog. The suitcase with the loot falls to the taxiway breaking open in the fall. The prop wash of the idling planes immediately blows the $2 million all over creation! A decidedly dejected Hayden watches in disbelief, slowly walking to the exit before authorities figure out it was his suitcase.

The ‘film noir’ examples shown on Turner Classic Movies never received the accolades or the budgets of the studio darlings. Filmed in less expensive black and white and cast with underdogs, they often over achieved compared to the glossy, vacuous big budget films when looked at with the hindsight that 60 or 70 years brings. Director Stanley Kubrick himself on Taxi Driver had to film the aftermath of the bodies following the big shootout (the films union cameraman refusing to do the handheld camerawork Kubrick wanted).

The climatic scene where the fortune blows down the runway, reminiscent of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre when the gold dust blows helplessly across the desert. The ill-gotten gain never to be had by anyone and keeping the curse alive. No, film noir went beyond the clichés, the remakes, the boring storylines. Film noir was honest about their film’s motivations; greed and sex. I respect that. The rest of the Hollywood crap factory is about deceptions.

Will the crisis ever come?

After watching a ton of apocalyptic videos (like: “The Imminent Market Collapse!”) I saw one with a different take on the situation. This guy believed the same way, that we have a crooked monetary system and that the Federal Reserve are manipulating the markets, but he believed that the Fed is so far out of control that they can do anything they want. That they are Masters of the Universe so to speak and that normal market forces no longer apply. Evidently we’re supposed to believe they can run a $2 trillion dollar deficit on a $3 trillion dollar economy. (If they can print $5 trillion dollars out of thin air, why not $20? A $100 trillion?)

I’m beginning to believe him, especially after reading the book ‘The Aftershock Investor‘ (pictured above). It was written in 2014 and tried to convince readers a monetary system based solely on a central bank inflating bubbles forever was not sustainable. 4 years later and we seemingly are no closer to the collapse the authors and many others have been predicting for decades that was supposedly just around the corner.

The basic premise of all these guys is that basically all developed nations in the world have a debt based fiat currency system that is insolvent (Europe, China, everybody). That we can no longer service the deficits, let alone ever pay off the debt. We are floating bond sales just to pay the interest (the equivalent of an individual borrowing from the credit union to pay the interest on his credit card, not a home equity loan to pay it off). We’ve squandered the SSA and Medicare money as it came in on current spending, rather than leaving it in the “trust funds”  they told us they were doing. Congress of course never thinking beyond the next election.

The national debt has really begun to take off. When Trump took office in January 2017 it was a couple of months before the debt officially hit $20 trillion. Today (11/18/18) the National Debt Clock shows $21,747,000,000,000 and change. It may grow by $2 trillion just in Trump’s first 2 years. That is almost the entire amount it grew in Reagan’s entire 8 years. Its a snowball on a downhill slide. You don’t want to be at the bottom of the hill.

Once again the authors took way too long to give us their recommendations on how to prepare for the crash (367 pages). Oh, and if you really want to prepare, you need to buy their newsletter for $420 bucks a year or hire them as private consultants to guide your portfolio decisions. (“More money can be made selling advice, then following it.”)Whether or not “the big crash” does come, we did indeed have a nasty turn in ’08. There’s no getting around that, and we’ve just piled more personal and government debt on top of that debt crisis. So if a “Global Financial Crisis” can happen once, it can surely happen again.

They were pretty vague on the trigger points to watch for, but 2 did stick out. One was when the interest on 10 year treasuries hit 4% or 5%. The other was when gold starts to spike from its current position of $1,200 an ounce. A lot of people got burnt on gold when they bought the 2011 high of $1,900 an ounce. The authors (Dave and Robert Wiedemer and Cindy Spitzer) think the bond market will shut itself down when interest rates spiral out of control. They think the government will shut the stock market down for longer and longer periods of time to forestall a complete collapse.

I know in Greece a couple of years ago during their banking crisis the ATM’s didn’t work. They were literally taking money out of customer accounts and safe deposit boxes to fund their operations. In the event of a 1930’s style depression, all bets are off as to what the government is capable of. The only thing we do know is that the banks will be taken care of, the customers be damned. Hey, they didn’t buy Congress for nothing.

The book spends an inordinate amount of time warning you of the obvious. Stay liquid, pay off your debt, don’t be a spendthrift, don’t have a job that depends on a customer’s discretionary spending (there will be little left but money for necessities in a true crash). Below are some of the (once again obvious) vehicles they recommend, mostly revolving around hard assets.

  • Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities
  • Dividend paying stocks
  • Gold
  • Gold ETFs
  • Land
  • Commodities
  • Cash
  • Inverse stock ETFs
  • Inverse bond ETFs
  • Foreign currencies

And, perhaps most importantly, being prepared and thinking for yourself. Just because the lemmings are going off the fiscal cliff, doesn’t mean you have to. Don’t have 100% exposure to the market when it collapses. Not having the cash when its time to cherry pick the bargains at the bottom. Not listening to the “experts” on TV who saw none of this coming (and certainly didn’t warn you if they did). But as I pointed out, we may be in such a surreal time of Fed unaccountability, that the hard crash may not come at all. They may just gobble up our wealth the silent way, through inflation.

[And once again it boggles the mind that with a government on the verge of bankruptcy, it never occurs to anyone that its about time that ‘non-profits’ (hospitals & churches) ante up. Its ridiculous to say hospitals are non-profit, and defining what a ‘church’ is, is impossible and irrelevant. Our government refuses to take its head out of the sand and acknowledge the severity of the situation.]