I especially enjoy the casual smile from the ref: Welcome to the football field, little feller!

1:16AM in Tinseltown: Cloud cover, no meteorites.

Shuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuux

Interesting. Watch out for the shaky cam about midway thru.

https://youtu.be/24jMVZszPTY

Something to keep an eye on:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9JKbxqoJcY

Methinks this will eventually be integrated to smartphones.

Unexpectedly!

http://notrickszone.com/2016/08/12/surface-frost-strikes-germany-mid-august-temperatures-shatter-old-records/#sthash.uLLA8EEI.dpbs

During the German occupation of the Netherlands, [she] smuggled messages for the Dutch resistance in between ballet performances. As the occupied Netherlands plunged into famine during the winter of 1944, [she] suffered severe malnutrition and developed anemia.

Wartime deprivation left her too weak to be a prima ballerina, so she turned to acting, becoming the most beautiful actress who ever lived.

Anyone who disagrees with me suffers from a diseased mind.

I knew right away which actress you meant, even though I read the second paragraph first.

But...I have to wonder how many young men today would really watch an Audrey Hepburn movie when they could watch their favorite big-breasted actress instead. Yes, as Billy Wilder(?) said, Hepburn almost made breasts "obsolete" - but only in her time - and only for skinny girls, really.

It's been said that before the bra was invented, breasts weren't really fashionable - but a tiny waist certainly was. Thankfully, the corset eventually was discarded. Unfortunately, with the invention of TV and multiple labor-saving devices, since the late 1950s, men and women alike have had too many excuses to sit still and get fat.

From this thread:

http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2013/01/07/solving_the_tit.html

Interestingly, though, in the 1999 book "An Underground Education : The Unauthorized and Outrageous Supplement to Everything You Thought You Knew About Art, Sex, Business, Crime, Science, Medicine, and Other Fields of Human Knowledge" by Richard Zacks, it suggests that before the 20th century or so, big breasts were considered more peasant-like than sexy.

Here's the section (not sure which pages these are, but it was from the fourth(?) chapter, "Everyday Life"):

History's Quest: Avoiding Big Breasts

Large breasts--in the genre of Elle MacPherson, Sophia Loren, beloved Marilyn Monroe--have very, very rarely been venerated throughout the history of Western civilization. Americans refuse to believe it, but it's true: This 20th century (mostly American) obsession for over-sized mammaries on a thin frame is a complete aberration. The women who grace the covers of Playboy--with their birdlike shoulders and 3-D cleavage--would have been considered almost freaks in most of Europe and the United States through the mid-1800s. They'd have been viewed as too skinny, with a man's derriere, and their large breasts would have been deemed maternal, not sexual, and more suited for peasant wet nurses.

Martial, the Roman poet, wrote of the perfect breast as not overflowing one hand. And the Romans--so efficient in public works--left nothing to chance. The women of ancient Rome wore a "fascia," a light but firm undergarment to support and supress the bosom. "This device opposed the growth of the breasts," wrote Augustin Cabanes, a l9th-century medical historian, "just as tight shoes of the Chinese women reduced the size of their feet."

The ancient Greeks--during the so-called Golden Age of Aristotle and Aeschylus--had a temple dedicated to Aphrodite Kallipygeia, Aphrodite of the Beautiful Derriere. One Greek dramatist penning cosmetic advice to a prostitute recommends suppressing her large breasts while supplementing her hips via padding. "Like ourselves, the Greeks detested bulky breasts," stated another French medical historian in 1895, "the signs of beauty were elevation, smallness and regularity of contour."

Renaissance corsets so brutally squashed breasts that quite a few medical texts for women from that period discussed how to cure nipples inverted by a lifetime of corset-wearing.

Unlike today's Wonderbra, the prevailing challenge was always to minimize, not maximize, to understate, not poke somebody's eye out. "The formulas for reducing and firming up the breasts are countless," notes Dr. Cabanes elsewhere and cites by example a French handbook from the Renaissance. The Bastiment des receptes advises: "To make small breasts remain in that state and to reduce the size of large ones, take the main viscera (heart, liver, spleen, lungs) of a hare, mince them and mix with an equal part of ordinary honey. Apply this as a poultice to the breasts and surrounding areas and renew the application when dry."

Even the most cursory glance at sculpture through the ages reveals very few figures resembling Claudia Schiffer and many more resembling Venus de Milo, who'd be considered a bit zaftig today. Women who would have been a goddess for Sophocles are Helen Gurley Brown's mouseburgers.

(end)

Zacks also mentions Scarlett O'Hara's fierce determination to keep her waist under 20 inches(!) her entire life, despite having had three babies, and he explains why this was hardly an unusual attitude for the time.

From that part of the book:

"It is not pleasant to see a woman cut in two, like a wasp," observed Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who helped set the Revolution's twin themes of liberty and nature. (Of course, that was long before the American Civil War - and not in the U.S.!)