And a story of class, or lack thereof

Social media + holidays . . . the combination has given birth to its own cottage industry it seems. Every celeb or wanna-be tries to come out with the perfect encapsulation, via image or 120 characters, of any given holiday or celebration.

New Year's Eve = party. We all know that. So let's look at two women who gave a peek at both ends of the spectrum in commenting on the biggest party night of the year.

First, my girl Maitland Ward brings me to the brink of shortness of breath by going nearly full monty in this poorly lit Instagram image:

That's a party I would have liked to have been at.

At the other end of the spectrum is the tiresome Lena Dunham, letting us know what a night out in NY is like with her:

That's a party I'm glad I missed.

Not going to read too much into these images. But I find it interesting that Dunham's view of New Year's is passed out drunk on the floor with her pants around her ankles. This coming from a gal who falsely accused a guy of rape after she got falling down drunk and druggy at a party.

Update:
To be fair, in looking at Dunham's Facebook or Twitter or whatever post, it seems the picture she posted is supposed to represent a woman who was scared to death, literally, by a confetti cannon. Not sure why she had to have her ass hanging out of her clothes other than Dunham's desperate attempts to shove her lardy, out-of-shape body down the throats of everyone at every opportunity.

A story of change to start the new year

So let's start this year off with a story about a change of heart, shall we?

I found this story over at Prof. Jacobsen's site. In 2012, a Brazilian woman named Sara Fernanda Giromin created Femen Brazil under the name Sara Winter. Openly bi-sexual, she went on to do a number of protests against the church over gay rights and was openly pro-abortion, having aborted her own child.

But in 2015 all that changed. Did she find God? Well, not exactly. What happened was that she got pregnant again. And this time, she gave birth to the child and everything in her life changed. I mentioned in a previous post, and I repeat it often in these discussions -- I defy anyone to hold a newborn baby, especially their own child, and deny the existence of God.

While Giromin doesn't actually speak of a newfound life in God, she does regret not only her actions against the church, but also killing her first unborn child:

"I have repented of having had an abortion and today I ask for forgiveness," writes Giromin. "Yesterday marked one month after the birth of my baby and my life has taken on a new meaning. I’m writing this while he sleeps serenely on my lap. It is the greatest sensation in the world.

Please, women who are desperate to abort, think carefully about it. I was very sorry I did it. I don’t want the same for you."

Giromin goes on to apologize to the church for various protests against them, including an iconic photoshoot of her kissing another half-naked girl in front of the Church of Our Lady of Candelária in Rio to emphasize the gay community's contempt for Christianity:

"Asking for forgiveness is certainly not an easy thing to do . . . we went way too far and ended up offending many religious and non-religious people."

She has now also repudiated the feminist movement at large, calling it a "sect" that actually persecutes women, promotes lesbianism, covers up pedophilia within its ranks, and inflames hatred of men, Christianity, natural female beauty and the equilibrium of families. She writes in her book "Bitch, no! Seven times I was betrayed by Feminism" that she was pressured to become bi-sexual to gain more acceptance within the feminist community. She also found herself sexually molested by other feminists, forced to do drugs, and encouraged to have sex with total strangers.

Stacy McCain has spent the last year or so detailing the craziness within the radical feminist movement and you can read plenty of pushback from outsiders who try to discount what he brings to light. But here is a major player within the movement saying all these things are actually occurring within the borders of the feminist movement.

Whatever happens now, Sara Giromin is a happy parent whose eyes have been opened. Here's hoping she and her child have a wonderful life together.

And for the rest of us . . . realize that anyone can come back from the brink.

Mysterious ways, indeed.

Happy New Years!

Happy New Year!

Still got all your fingers and toes? Awesome! Not in the drunk tank? Very good! Hung over? Yeah, that's to be expected.

It's a new year, time for a fresh start. Try that diet/exercise thing again. Get those Christmas lights down (don't be that house with the lights stil up in May or the needle-less tree at the curb in February). Watch some college football. Guess they don't do the Championship on New Years anymore :-(

Enjoy your three-day weekend if you've got it. If you're like me and have to work tomorrow . . . off a day - on a day - off a day, it could be worse.

Where am I going with this mess -- Have a nice day folks!

So everyone's doing their "best of the year" posts . . .

. . . and I might as well do mine too.

heh

Though I may have finally topped a million hits on this silly little blog, I'm not under any illusions that folks are coming here for my commentary on sports or politics or my ravings about the great lie of man-made global warming. And why aren't they?! Damn!

I adhered to Stacy McCain's light-hearted comments about using pretty girls to drive traffic to one's blog. And of course, it has worked. 99+% of my traffic is image generated searches. So I present to you the images that may have caused their attending posts to be the top 12 most viewed of 2015:

Number 12:
Sadly it wasn't my story about the PO's return to profitability that drove eyes to this story but rather Nikki Sims' sauciness that folks were looking for:

Number 11:
The whole point of Rule 5 Sunday is from Stacy McCain's blueprint for blogging success and 60's beauty Margaret Nolan is still bringin' in the hits:

Number 10:
It seems fans are still interested in Denise Richards after all these years out of the public eye. Her bikini pictures were in demand this year, botoxy face and all:

Number 9:
My favorite redhead, Maitland Ward, was a top hit getter in several posts, but this one drew the most attention. I wonder why:

Number 8:
More Rule 5 goodness -- that sexy Texan, Elizabeth Marxs got plenty of well deserved attention in 2015 here:

Number 7:
Who would have thought Mena Suvari was still being searched on the web? I threw the pics in as a lark and boom . . . hit city. Go figure:

Number 6:
What I just said about Mena goes double for Tiffany Amber Theissen. Rule 5 magic of course, but folks are still Googling her plenty just the same:

Number 5:
Sexy, beautiful, conservative Stacey Dash is always a big attraction, hit wise, and my post celebrating her birthday was no exception:

Number 4:
I did a post about whether Paris Hilton had a boob job. I'm still not sure as her cleavage seems to expand and contract constantly. Not sure which pics in that post are drawing the eyes, so I'll go with the topless as a default (you're welcome):

Number 3:
Salma Hayek did an amusing tweet about how she was "still here" after the celeb magazines were touting Sofia Vergara as the new Salma. Well, rare bikini pics of the luscious latina drew some big traffic for this blog:

Number 2:
Equally surprising this year was the interest in Katie Holmes. Specifically those nudes from The Gift. Not sure if she wishes those would go away, but part of her fame is associated with those rare topless scenes. No such thing as bad publicity, right:

Number 1:
And finally -- the number one traffic getter is my post about Melissa Reeves getting back at her friend Kayleigh Morris. Kayleigh led the pack, far outstripping (no pun intended) other posts about Melissa herself (who didn't even make the top 12). Wonder if Melissa knows that all her drunken stumbling around half-naked isn't making her more popular than her friend:

The new Deadpool trailer dropped on Christmas as promised

The studios had promised another red-band trailer for Deadpool would be put out on Christmas day, and they did deliver:

This one's not as great as the first trailer out, but it has more characters and more implications that this movie is going to go along the lines of the most excellent Watchmen movie. Which is to say that it won't be a cookie-cutter comic book movie -- instead using more adult language and themes than studios usually want to try in flicks based on comic books, even though the audiences are primarily adults.

As an old-time X-Men fan, it's fun for me to see Colossus properly presented in a movie, and I see Gina Carrano is making another attempt at a movie career (saw she was in a movie on pay-per-view as well yesterday). I think Ryan Reynolds box office clout, such as it is, is helping the writers and director of this movie get out the version they want. Bully for them. That backfired on Thomas Jane when he tried that with The Punisher some years back.

This movie is out Feb 12, and like I said previously, I think this will be the first movie I've seen in theaters in more years than I can remember.

Merry Christmas!

The following is a reprint of last year's Christmas post because I really liked how it came out:

Just want to wish a Merry Christmas to my one or two regular readers and anyone else who happens along today.

I'm going to leave you with the quotation from Luke that Linus performs on the stage during the most excellent Charlie Brown Christmas cartoon:

And in that region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with fear.
And the angel said to them, "Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.
"And this will be a sign for you; you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger." And suddenly there was with the angle a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,
"Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace, good will among men."

What did I think of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season three?

Glad you asked.

I had meant to get on this and do a regular sort of critique as the season went on. But I missed the premiere, got behind, caught up via my DVR, and never seemed to get something together in a timely fashion. So I'll get my thoughts out this way.

After the ups and downs of seasons one and two, Phil Coulson's new version of S.H.I.E.L.D. is no longer the little engine that could. Nick Fury's infamous tool box has given Coulson a respectable amount of tech and financial resources to be a viable shadow agency ala the original S.H.I.E.L.D. (ugh, these long acronyms are gonna kill me!). New plane(s), new headquarters, a large staff, etc. -- papa's got a brand new bag, so to speak.

We see Skye, now called Daisy, more fully formed into the Quake character from the comics. She's trying to recruit new Inhumans to create a powered unit within SHIELD (that's it, I'm done with the periods!). We see her thwarted on two fronts -- May's ex-husband, the wonderful Blair Underwood as Andrew Garner, doing psyche evals on each new Inhuman and rejecting them outright. And a scary agency called the ATCU -- Alien Threat Containment Unit, supposedly created to contain the growing Inhuman threat, caused by the dissemination of the Terrigen crystals at the end of season two.

But neither of these stumbling blocks turned out to be what they were on the surface. Garner turned out to be Inhuman himself -- a monster that is driven to kill other Inhumans. And the ATCU, while doing what it's head, the unconventionally attractive Rosalind Price (played by Constance Zimmer) believed she was doing, instead it turns out the ATCU was in fact being run by HYDRA, through Gideon Malick (a former council head from the first Avengers movie), played by Powers Boothe with his usual lurid evilness.

We learn that HYDRA was not in fact created by the Red Skull in WWII, as put forth in the Captain America comics and movies, but instead a centuries old organization dedicated to retrieving a monster, most likely another Inhuman or some sort of Cree criminal, who was banished to another world via a portal that happens to be the monolith discovered by the agents last season. This would be the same portal that swallowed up Simmons at the end of last season.

Got all that? Okay, so . . .

After starting the series thinking that Daisy/Skye was going to be the focus, this season seemed centered mostly around Coulson, with a large part also devoted to Simmons and her awkward love for Fitz.

It took until the end of the season for Coulson and Rosalind to get over their Tracy/Hepburn-esque back and forth to become lovers. And then Rosalind was murdered by the increasingly annoying former agent Ward via the overused technique of a mile-long sniper shot.

After introducing Ward as nothing more than a trained soldier, the character has morphed over three seasons into one of those formulaic indestructible psycho killers from horror movies. He survives every attack, defeats a room full of armed soldiers without a scratch, can out-think and out-maneuver anyone and everything that comes at him. Blah, blah, blah. I was so happy when Coulson finally killed him off in the finale. But then we see him reborn as the alien/monster/Cree thing has inhabited his body and returned to Earth.

Simmons got to become more than just a geek due to her time on the alien planet. She's tougher now, and if the finale is any indication, may finally be able to show some affection for Fitz, who has overcome most of his aphasia from last season's near death situation. Indeed, we got to see Daisy and Lincoln kiss too, so maybe there's a love interest for next season.

Mack (Henry Simmons) is still struggling to cope with Coulson's seemingly fluid morality when it comes to missions and also the agency's alliance with powered individuals. Bobby (Adrienne Palicki) seems to have lost some confidence after her capture, torture, and near death at Ward's hand. And she and Hunter may be resolved, as lovers, or maybe not. Like I said, this season seemed mostly about Coulson and his struggles to lead the team against, and then with, Rosalind's ACTU.

There were a lot of good moments this season. If you can find it on demand with your cable or whatever, it's worth a watch, imho. The show has improved each season, which is what you want in your television shows. I'm hoping MARVEL keeps the thing alive for a while. It serves the greater purpose of furthering their mythology for the movies. And I find it kind of fun to see the tie-ins as everything progresses.

Maybe we'll even get one or two cameos next season from a few more prominent characters from the movies.

But thumbs up for this series.

Here's a couple of recent pics of Chloe Bennett, who needs to work on her red carpet manner -- she's got the deer in the headlights thing going on here:

And I GOOGLE'd Constance Zimmer for some pics and found out that she was in STUFF eleven years ago. Woof! I thought she was hot now, but: