Disks in Rotation:
DVD • Ninja Scroll
CD-ROM • The Osbournes burned.
CD Carousel
• Soundgarden - Bad Motor Finger
• Fat Boy Slim - From the Gutter to the Stars
• System of a Down
• Skinny Puppy - Bites
• God Lives Underwater - Empty

Books Lying Open
• Tales of H.P. Lovecraft (selected by) Joyce Carol Oates
• Annotated Lovecraft, S. T. Joshi
• Grimm's Fairy Tales, The Brothers Grim
• Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
• Dreams of Terror and Death, H. P. Lovecraft
• Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre H. P. Lovecraft

Soul-Devouring Worry
• Some of those other celebrity nude photos might actually not be legit either!

When I Grow Up:
• Life will no longer revolve around a futile effort to avoid eating the same thing more than twice a day.

Daily Blog
So the Lakers won game 5, winning the series 4-1.  And again the Spurs collapsed in the last half of the 4th quarter, giving away a game they might have won.  It's really uncanny, how that happened in 4 out of 5 five games in the series.  Even the one game the Spurs won they collapsed, after being up by 10 or so they just hung on to win by 2 when LA screwed up in the final seconds. Makes you wonder about clutch performance, or choking under pressure, or luck, or what.  That sort of thing never seems to happen in the regular season, or at least very seldom, but amazing last minute come backs are quite common in the playoffs.  Perhaps players are trying harder, or more nervous, and that amplifies any little mistake or screw up.  And of course for the fans we remember it more when our favorite team wins or loses in the last second, rather than a game that's decided by 20 points and has no drama.

Work sucks.  I'm pretty well decided on that.  The busy games where I make $150 or something it's not so bad, since I'm too busy to be bored or ponder the pointless nature of my toil that much.  It's the slower nights where I'm doing the same thing and making $50, and spending most of the time bored and walking aimlessly around, that really drive home the point. Fortunately the work is giving me life skills and I meet so many interesting people and it pays so well that it'll have me set for life.  Oh wait, it does none of those things.

And yes, every year about mid-May I come to this revelation, with 4.5 months of baseball season to go. This year I'll do something about it though, I'll start working on something else I enjoy more, that pays better!  Yeah!  Right after I look at these celebrity nude photos, and play some D2X, I mean.

News follows:

• Siamese cat goes berserk, drives family from their home.  Now there's an embarrassing revelation.  It's a cat, for god's sake.  Just turn on the vacuum cleaner, and then close the closet door when it runs in there to hide.  More on the story can be seen here, and yes, nasty kitty has gone to kitty heaven by now.

Another article about the evil that is feline can be seen here.

• This news item from South Africa is great.  A woman was attacked by a burglar, trying to break into her home.  Unfortunately for the burglar, she knows how to fight.

Marietjie Fourie, who will compete in the Shotokan Karate World Championships in 2003, let fly a flurry of blows when her attacker grabbed her at her home in the port city of Durban.

The man struck back, but Fourie grabbed wooden fighting sticks joined by a chain and lit into him, putting him in hospital with a smashed skull and facial bones.

I'd pay good money to see her beating the shit out of the guy with nunchucks.  Wonder if she made the "Whoo-pah! Hwoah... ohhhhhh!" mouth noises like Bruce Lee used to?  One can only hope so...

• A truly awesome senior prank is detailed here.  Funny, difficult, clever, well-executed, and resulted in school being cancelled. Not that I endorse this sort of thing, you understand.  *cough*

• Not much of an article, but it's about a new type of dinosaur, and the following quote is great:

I would liken it to a one-ton turkey with claws," said paleontologist David Gillette, leader of the excavation team from the Museum of Northern Arizona.

Scientists are expected to immediately begin work on cloning it, primarily for the drumsticks.

• NASA searching for spare shuttle parts on eBay and elsewhere, since the computers in the space shuttle are so old they are totally obsolete now, and no longer manufactured.

The agency is particularly short of a type of Intel computer chip known as the 8086.

It's funny, I have an old 8086 computer in my bedroom closet.  I shall trade it for a trip into space, like that billionaire who went up with the Russians last year.

• The cursed Euro continues to blunder in design errors.  Here's the new color scheme concept.  Looks like a TV test pattern designed by a committee, as the old joke goes. Fortunately this isn't an official design, just a suggested one by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas.  I'd hate to live in a house he had anything to do with the decoration of.

• It's hard to think of any punishment too cruel for people poaching endangered species in wild life parks, but this one might be a bit much.

• Article about the various medical marijuana studies going on around the country, and allegations that the pot the government is supplying for it is very sub-standard, possibly to sabotage the studies.  Pity there's no way they could obtain marijuana elsewhere, of higher quality, but of course it's an illegal narcotic that we spend billions a year to keep out of the country, so therefore it must be tremendously rare and impossible to obtain.  Right?  I mean if it weren't, the money we spend on it keeping it illegal would be wasted.

A St. Louis jewelry salesman who sold Penthouse Magazine a video of a topless sunbather misidentified as Anna Kournikova testified on Tuesday he mistook the woman for the tennis star because of the diameter of her nipples.

He said that while he had never seen Kournikova at a tournament, he had seen a photo of her on the Internet in which her tennis dress was soaked with sweat, revealing the shape of her nipples. "They were pretty evident ... the diameter matched what we had on film," he said.

The salesman, wiping tears from his eyes, called himself an "idiot" and apologized to the women and Guccione in court.

The photographer appears to be a bit of a screwball.  He's sobbing about it in court, apologizing madly, self-abasing, etc.  Why?  I mean he wasn't feeling guilty about filming topless women and selling the video of them, and he wasn't sorry it was a celebrity, but now he's sorry that it was the wrong celebrity?  I suspect he's just trying to keep Penthouse from suing him in turn.

Anyway, it's an absurd concept, as if nipple-diameter is some sort of exact statistic.  I don't see the FBI scrapping the whole fingerprint and mug shot concept to turn to tit-measurement, though I'm sure a lot of male agents wouldn't object greatly.  I wonder if the guy was talking about the areola, or he really means the actual nipple?  Given that those are pretty much the same diameter on every woman, and they can also increase in size at times...

I saw a few more scans of the photos, and even if it had been Kournikova, the magazine would have been a rip off.  All of the shots are the same, like the example one here.  It's the woman, seen in profile, lying in the sun.  There's not one shot from another angle, none of photographic quality (they are all from a video he shot, and are good quality for vid-caps, but far blurrier than actual photographs), there aren't any close ups, or shots of her body or butt, etc.  I mean you take what you can get with a voyeuristic thrill, but if I'd bought the magazine for this I'd be pissed.

Here's a comparison of them side by side. The woman in the photos does look something like Kournikova, I must admit.  I've never seen either of them in person, nor do I ever plan to do so, but I thought it pretty obvious the first time I saw a censored shot from Penthouse that it wasn't her. She looks to be a lot darker of complexion, and her short brown hair is an obvious problem, since Kournikova has always had long blonde hair since she's become famous. Also the pretend Kournikova has a wider, more rounded nose, and a higher, rounded forehead.  I saw an enlarged shot of the ears, compared, and they were clearly different.  Human ears are almost like fingerprints; no two people have identical shapes of the curves and curls and lobes, though it's hard to tell as grainy as the vidcap shots are.

On the other hand, the jaw is very similar, the eyes and eyebrows are similar, lips are about the same, etc.  At a glance and assuming some time has passed between the shots, it's not impossible to see how they got confused/thought they could get away with it.

In the profile shots they are more similar, but with this more or less straight ahead comparison I think the differences should be obvious. If you'd like to carry out further research on this important subject, you can find about a billion photos of Kournikova with any effort at all to search them out.  And thanks to Yahoo news there are even some more photos of Judith Soltesz-Benetton, the topless sun bather made so famous of late, through no designs of her own.  She hardly looks like herself now, mostly due to the passage of years since the video was taken.  Which brings up another point.

One thing I've not seen mentioned anywhere yet is the timeline.  I heard in initial reports that he shot the movie 7 years ago.  I just checked, and Kournikova's b-day is June 7, 1981.  So she's about to turn 21.  Which means that 7 years ago she was 14 or 15, and it wouldn't be legal to publish topless photos if they were of her, since she'd have been well underage then, and it would be considered child pornography.  Not to mention that she'd have looked quite different at 14 than she does now.  Benetton looked at 21 much like Kournikova does at 21, and at 28 doesn't look much like she did at the time of the pictures.

Funny how Penthouse, in their exhaustive verification process, never considered that.

One last photo I found interesting.  If you think being a celebrity is fun and glamorous and you want to be the center of attention and everything, take a look at this one.  How'd you like that waiting for you every time you left the house?

 

On a totally different topic, but still from the same Yahoo article about the whole court hearing, was this info.  Penthouse is fading fast, it seems.

Last week Penthouse, which is owned by financially troubled General Media Communications, acknowledged its mistake and issued a public apology. However both women are pursuing cases against the magazine, whose circulation has dropped to about 650,000 a month from almost 5 million. 

I would guess that Penthouse is being killed by the Internet, and by Playboy.  In other words, Playboy is sort of the PG-rated mag, no one really considers it porno, and it can be legitimately bought for the articles, features, etc.  I've not seen an issue in probably 8 or 10 years, but it's unchanging in format or content.  Penthouse is harder-edged in content and nudity.  They don't show real porno stuff, at least they didn't when I last saw an issue some years ago, but it's far more sexual, with the horrible reader sex fantasy letters and lots of softcore porn style photos.  I would suspect that men buy Playboy as a sort of slightly-more explicit Swimsuit issue, and buy real porno, usually videos, for other needs.  No one gets Penthouse for the articles, and no one is going to waste time on it for wanking, when there's so much more explicit stuff so readily-available these days.  So it's sort of stuck in the middle, not hardcore enough to compete in that huge and hugely-fragmented market, but not respectable enough to be considered classy or acceptable nudity, like Playboy is.

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