No Swelled Head Yet

The people at Wordpress, who host this blog: they try to give us bloggers a boost. They wrote me a report on Exit Only for 2012 saying that - get this:

"9,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform and this blog was viewed about 110,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it!"

Well, they try to buck you up . But I know very well that

most of the visitors to my posts were probably only here looking for all my pictures of near-naked people.

Like this photo I once posted of Susan Sarandon, showing what 60 can look like if the ligaments hold up:

Or this nice one, of Marilyn, that I found for one of the times I wrote about her.Or this great shot where Sophia Loren is seen looking over at Jayne Mansfield.

Or even this one of.... well, I don't know just WHO these two are but you could have a lot of fun thinking up a caption for this pic:

But really what brings them here, according to their analysis ? Searches for the word "Speedo," the term "wardrobe malfunction" and fascinating phrase "the head of Jeremy Bentham," that particular item being on display in a museum in London

(The head on the dummy is fake; the one under 'his' chair is real.)

.

So there it is.Like I say, no swelled head yet!

Creepy But Cool

Below a video of my man Ralph Waldo Emerson, here reanimated in as hideously compelling  way as the famous stuffed corpse of old Jeremy Bentham. He was gentle and good, was Emerson, even though he did make that poor second wife change her first name. Even though he did shut himself so thoroughly up in his rooms after their little boy died she must have felt doubly bereaved.His first wife had died in her early 20s. This was before he walked away from the ministry to start mixing up the tasty pie-filling known as Transcendentalism. He had her dug back up, you know, just so he could gaze once more upon her face. Abe Lincoln did this too, after his little boy’s death in the White House years. It must make sense on some level to us the left-behind. We just can’t believe they are gone.Anyway, I love to visit old Waldo's house. I love to study his mild kind face with its deep-set eyes. It’s true I was a tad unsettled when I first saw this clip but strangely comforted too,  maybe at the thought of them all still alive just on the other side of that mirror, talking away; trying so hard to give tips to us the living ,so heedless and so deaf …..[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5J2M2CEQsE&feature=related]