Going Into Year Eighteen

Before I begin a new round of new subjects to start off another year of this blog, I have an announcement to make - I am not going to try to reach one hundred subjects before the end of September 2024.

I've been cutting back on my regular blog, Miscellaneous Musings, largely because commenting on current events every day depressed me, and even though I never imagined cutting back on this blog as well, I've had to concede that I cannot continue as before for numerous reasons.

The first reason is simple; after featuring 1,700 different women, it's clear that it's becoming increasingly difficult to come up with new names.  A second reason is the longevity, or lack thereof, among many women I've featured here.  I couldn't help but notice that many of the women I featured over a decade ago when this blog started have become answers to trivia questions - mainly, sitcom stars of the 1990s and the 2000s whose careers have since cooled and who have fallen out of the public's attention. Being a television actor, male or female, has always been a precarious profession.  While a few TV stars have become timeless icons, it's not possible for all TV stars to achieve such a status.  Fame is, indeed, a fickle mistress, and if you think fame is fickle with TV actresses, imagine how fickle she is with on-camera meteorologists from The Weather Channel!

Thirdly, I want to cut back on presenting female news personalities, and I just might end doing so altogether.  (I do have some entries, created before I started having doubts about continuing such posts, ready to go this month and next.)  The reason for this is because of what recently happened to two newswomen I have featured here -  Kristen Welker, my post of whom from 2011 is the most popular post on this blog, and Kaitlan Collins.  After their disastrous television encounters with Donald Trump - who is the biggest threat to this country since the America First movement of the late 1930s and early 1940s - maybe it was inappropriate to have featured on a beautiful-women picture blog two newswomen who don't know how to handle Trump.  I am not  suggesting that either Kristen Welker or Kaitlan Collins got their current jobs as news program hosts ("Meet the Press" and "The Source," respectively) because of their looks.  I am saying that it was probably not a good idea to feature them primarily because of their looks. 

One night, I recognized the folly of including news personalities on a blog like this when I was looking at one CNN female commentator and thought she might make a good candidate for this blog.  I won't say her name, but I will say this; she's a legal commentator, an attorney, and a former trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice.  Suddenly, including her on this blog seemed inappropriate.  While I've always avoided featuring women on Fox News, I suddenly thought that maybe I was trivializing female news personalities from channels other than Fox News by including them on a blog that, like Fox News, displays women for their physical attractiveness.

Fourth, I can't even always get satisfaction from depicting women for whom physical attractiveness is a legitimate job requirement - models.  Since 2009, I had happily featured pictures of Sheila Johnson, a leading black model from the 1980s.  Well, I became friends with Sheila on Facebook and for the longest time, I had a happy association with her.  Then when I found old catalog pictures from her portfolio online - a couple dozen of them - I posted them to her Facebook timeline as well as to a Facebook group I'd started in her honor.  To make a long story short,  she unfriended me because she thought I was a pest and invading her privacy - when all I wanted to do was share pictures from her own modeling work with her - pictures she hadn't likely seen in 35 years (which she deleted).  In a fit of rage, I shut down my Facebook group for Sheila, blocked her account, and erased all of the pictures of her I'd been saving to post on this blog at a later date.  Although my earlier posts of Sheila - including mt first one from September 2009, my second most popular post - will remain on this blog, I will not post any more pictures of Sheila here.  I don't like her anymore. 

So there you have it.   I'm less enthused with this blog than I was when I started it.  This blog will carry on, although you can expect far fewer posts.  You won't notice right away, because I was able to find a good deal of subjects for October, but you'll see my posts become less frequent after that and I really don't want to waste time looking for new subjects that I could productively apply elsewhere.  As for retrospective posts of women I've featured, I pretty much posted almost all of the pictures I had for such post this past summer.

I hope you understand.  I am not completely going away, but you can expect less activity here going forward.

Back soon with a new subject.