Ten Year Anniversary:

Uncle Scoopy's Fun House was first seen on the internet in November of 1995. I've lost track of the exact date, but I think it was just before Thanksgiving. It was a free site in those days, updated daily when I could. I updated it once a day when I was at my desk, but I couldn't do it every day because I took 24 hour plane trips for one thing - like Austin to Manila, for example - and in the mid-nineties I often ended up in places that had no internet connection at all. I did manage to update the site from a four star hotel in Manila with an "internet cafe", but I also spent weeks at a time in places like El Salvador and Papua New Guinea, so back in 1996 the site sometimes went many days without an update. Amazingly, the lack of updates wasn't a major impediment to building the site's traffic. The site got more than 300,000 unique visitors per day in the Spring of 1996, and that was a mammoth amount of traffic by the standards of those days, when the internet was not in many households.

We've now had a daily page every single day of every year since the Spring of 1997 - more than 3000 consecutive days - and every one of the updates since May of 1998 is still in the archives. (Some of 'em are just awful!) Since the Fun House was updated with dated daily entries and was basically the personal daily ramblings of one guy looking for celebrity pictures, it was the very definition of a blog, or at least it would have been if such a definition or even such a word had existed in those days. I actually wondered if I might have invented blogging, but the Wikipedia article says that the credit for that belongs to someone who started in 1994. On the other hand, I may have been the first person to use a blog for good rather than evil, and Uncle Scoopy's Fun House may well be the longest-running continuously updated blog in the history of the internet.  Not that anyone will ever know that except the people reading this sentence.

I'll bet there aren't many of you who remember when I actually used to write Uncle Scoopy's comments in a character voice! In fact, here's some trivia - Scoop has a last name. His full name is Scoop Parking. He was a good ol' Texas boy, by the real name of No Bob Parking. His mom named him No Parking because she was impressed by those executives with a named parking space, and she resolved that her boy would always have one, no matter where he went. By doing that she also went one-up on her sister, and ol' Scoop always got a better spot than his ne'er-do-well cousin, Two Hour. "Scoop" was a nickname he earned because of the journalistic savvy he displayed as he traveled around the world with Greg and managed to misunderstand every element of local culture. The site's actual name, Uncle Scoopy's Fun House, was ripped off from an obscure TV special done by one of my heroes, Andy Kaufman. (Uncle Andy's Fun House, of course).

I didn't stick very long with the character voice because Scoop's comments could be pretty damned insulting, and people had no way of knowing that he was a fictional character. I just got tired of answering all the e-mail from people who took it seriously. Sometimes I responded tongue-in-cheek as Scoop, and sometimes I responded as me, explaining that Scoop was a put-on. Finally I just realized that I was spending too much time on that crap.

That was a long time ago.

Jesus, ten years is a long time.

 

My Breast (1994):

I remember Meredith Baxter very well from the sitcom Bridget Loves Bernie. It was ever so cute, because she and her co-star David Birney (Birney played Bernie) became a real-life couple, married, and stayed together for many years. Meredith was attractive and bland, with the kind of perfect diction that girls develop from years spent at Mrs. Sconeworthy's elocution classes. I had always noticed that Baxter was conventionally pretty, but I never realized she had monstrous breasts until twenty years later, when I saw the first captures from My Breast.

What a shame that she never did nude scenes when she was in her twenties. She was 47 when she did this film, and while she was not unattractive, and still had some impressive boobs, 47 is 47, after all.

My Breast is made-for-basic-cable movie (Lifetime Network) about a single, fortyish journalist who discovers a lump in her breast. It basically serves the function of presenting the necessary medical facts to its female audience, while simultaneously presenting an examination of how the diagnosis and treatment affect the patient's concept of herself, as well as her relationships with those around her.

The cut-and-dried information about medical procedures is interwoven with a story about the impact of the diagnosis upon her relationship with her significant other. Her potentially fatal encounter with cancer casts an intense light on their affair, and this magnification process ultimately changes her perception of the balance between his flaws and his strengths. His tendency toward insensitivity seemed more insignificant in less stressful circumstances, when her own neediness caused her to overlook his flaws, but the same insensitivity in the face of a life-threatening crisis finally pushes her to move on romantically.

The usual Lifetime Movie.

It's a true story. The subject of the story is Joyce Wadler, who is probably the closest thing the New York Times ever had to a gossip columnist. Here's a recent Salon article about her column. This movie is based upon her own autobiographical account of that crisis in her life, which began as a 1992 article in New York Magazine and was later expanded to a full-length book. Wadler herself adapted the book into a screenplay for this movie.

The reviews of the book say that it is filled with a sardonic sense of humor, but I guess Wadler set that aside to deliver a product targeted at her Lifetime audience. She made the screenplay treatment clinical and chose to portray herself as a bland person. It's a shame because,   from what little I know of her, she is quite different from the straight-arrow portrayed here. She is apparently a colorful eccentric in dress and style. She once worked at Screw Magazine, for heaven's sake! According to a recent New York Observer article, she sashays around town with a leopard print umbrella and used the royalties from the printed version of My Breast to buy herself an expensive fur and flaunt it in politically-correct circles.

Unfortunately, My Breast seems more like a story about bland Meredith Baxter than the real-life Edith Prickly character that is Joyce Wadley. If My Breast had been made about the colorful character profiled in the Observer and if it were really filled with the sardonic humor mentioned in the book's reviews, it might actually be worth watching as a complex drama. As it is, it's a soap opera which could also be used to enrich high school health classes.

 

Meredith Baxter

Other Crap:

Movie Reviews:

Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.

"8MM 2"

8MM 2 (2005 Video) is supposedly a sequel to 8MM, this time set in Budapest, and pits a US embassy lawyer, and his fiancee, the ambassador's daughter against the local underground porno syndicate, who are blackmailing them. The two visit a spa, meet a woman they think is a model, have a three way with her, and then receive a package of prints of the evening with a $2,000.00 ransom demand. If found out, it would ruin his career, and possibly the ambassador's as well, so they dive into the local porn industry to find the identities of the blackmailers, and get the prints back.

Eventually,they pay the blackmail, which has grown at that point to several million, from her trust fund. Lori Heuring, as the ambassador's daughter shows breasts and buns. Zita Görög, as the temptress, shows all three Bs, as do a lot of unidentified women in various strip clubs and studios.

Nine IMDb readers have this at 4.8. This is probably a fair assessment. It is clearly an excuse to show a lot of naked women, which is a good thing, has a coherent plot, and a surprise ending. Performances could have been much better. This is a C, as a reasonable soft core, and nothing more.

Lori Heuring
Unknown
Zita Görög

"The Second Arrival"

The Second Arrival (1998) is a sequel to the original Arrival, and it is necessary to see the original to understand the sequel. Zane has been killed, but has sent packages to his brother, a famous professor, a reporter, and a couple of others, who are to meet in an abandoned meat locker (the aliens can't tolerate cold), retrieve an alien device that is an optical Laser powered computer, and save the world.

Upset of his brother's death, programmer Jack Addison (Patrick Muldoon) hits his favorite bar, and is picked up by Catherine Blythe, who lives in his building. They have sex, and he reads the packet of information his brother sent. At the end of the meat locker meeting, he and the reporter have the alien device but not the power supply, one of the people there turns out to be an alien, the others are rather quickly killed. and it is up to Muldoon and the reporter (Jane Sibbett) to evade the aliens, the police, discover how to power the alien device, and save the world. They of course do, but leave room for a sequel.

Blythe does a full frontal in a rather dark scene. IMDb readers say 3.6, which would indicate some pretty negative emotional response. I frankly didn't think it merited all that emotional energy. It is nothing more or less than a lackluster attempt to grab a few more bucks with the original story. It has no glaring plusses or minuses. This is a C- as a very mediocre Sci Fi sequel.

Catherine Blythe

We're going to uncover 3 actresses today. First we have one from France. 

Anne Brochet delivers a full frontal performance in 1991's Tous les matins du monde. (1, 2) Also in these two clips, luckily with their clothes on, are Gérard Depardieu and his son Guillaume. To take care of the educational side of the Fun House I can tell you that you shouldn't be surprised to find brochet on a French menu. Brochet is a fish, a pike to be precise.  

With this knowledge on board we cross the Rhine, not to go fishing, but to uncover two actresses who can't wait to deliver the goodies. 

Sissi Perlinger would like you to take a look at her shapely breasts (and maybe a hint more) in Der letzte Kurier (1996). Please look for yourself, I am not exaggerating about those breasts.

Lastly Angela Roy gets all hot and steamy at age 44 with her lover in an episode of Die Cleveren: Der Vampir from 2001.