My beautiful-women picture blog is ending at the end of this month.
Recently, I had begun to be weighed down somewhat by my efforts to keep this blog going, as new subjects were becoming difficult to come up with. Also, women I had already featured long before turned out not to be worthy of my attention. You might recall that I scrubbed Lara Logan from this blog because she turned out to be a far-right South African jerk. Well, I recently remember that in 2015 I once featured Maye Musk, who gave birth to - and defends the actions of - another South African jerk. I deleted my post of her, too. Ditto that of Mika Brzezinski, whom I featured in 2008; even though I had featured her over a decade before she turned out to be someone who would compromise her feminist principles to accommodate a misogynistic white Christian nationalist once that same misogynistic white Christian nationalist regained the Presidency of the United States. I had talked about this at the start of the year; after self-deliberation, I decided that keeping my 2008 post of Mika Brzezinski was a compromise of my own principles.
Having already decided to cut back on news personalities, I thought I could keep this blog going by focusing on actresses and models and not so much on media personalities. Then I got the e-mail I feared I would inevitably receive . . . an e-mail objecting to my use of pictures that are not my own.
Last year I featured four actresses who had one thing in common - they all appeared on RETROcirq, a YouTube channel in which young women in exaggerated face paint played clown-like characters hosting video anthologies of TV commercials from the 1980s and 1990s. Having stumbled on this channel, I thought it was the zaniest thing I'd ever seen on YouTube, and I noticed something else - the actresses, who appeared out of costume and character at the end of these videos, were attractive young ladies who were perfect for my blog. I have featured seven of them. Well, the proprietor of this channel e-mailed me to ask me to remove four of these actresses for reasons that boiled down to intellectual-property issues and the privacy of the women he cited. I promptly removed them. And it was this incident that broke me. Featuring news-media personalities like Mika Brzezinski was already problematic, but now even featuring young actresses whose careers are just starting (a few of the RETROcirq ladies have their own Instagram feeds) is troublesome.
As a result of the RETROcirq retraction, this blog stopped being fun for me, although it was becoming less and less fun for awhile, and as ice-cream moguls Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield once said, if its not fun . . . why do it? So, after April 30, I won't. I'm using April 2025 to post the few remaining completed posts and pictures I had been saving in draft form for future posts.
Another breaking point came this past Sunday when Kristen Welker, the moderator of NBC's "Meet the Press," asked Donald Trump a question she shouldn't have asked, else the topic wouldn't have come up - would he try to seek a third presidential term? Trump cited nonexistent polls and fanciful circumventions of the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution limiting Presidents to two terms, and Kristen Welker did not call out his lies and did not push back against his novel interpretations of a constitutional amendment that leaves no option to serve no more than two full terms. Kristen Welker caved on national television. And this is nothing new; she's folded like a cheap suit every time she's interviewed Trump. Kristen Welker, of course, is the most popular subject on my blog ever - my 2011 post of her had had 56,436 page views. Note the repeated use of the word "had," suggesting past perfect tense. That's exactly what I'm conveying - I deleted my post of Kristen Welker, along with a follow-up post of her, because while this blog is ending in thirty days, I couldn't, after what happened this past Sunday, keep Kristen Welker on my blog for even thirty minutes. Kristen Welker is no longer on my blog because, sadly, I no longer respect her.
My second most popular subject was 1980s model Sheila Johnson, my initial post of pictures from her modeling portfolio from 2009 having been viewed 29,201 times. Alas, Sheila Johnson - who was one of the models I connected with on Facebook - turned out to be a not-so-nice person, having been annoyed by my adulation for her and deleted numerous pictures of her that I had found online that she likely hadn't seen for over thirty years. As a result, all but two of my posts of Sheila Johnson have been removed - a post of a Bob Krieger photo she posed in with fellow model Carol Perkins and a token solo post - for the same reason I took down my posts of Kristen Welker. Although, to be honest, I'm more ticked off at Kristen Welker for nuzzling Trump and normalizing him.
It's Trump, by the way, who is a big reason for this blog's end. With his denigration of women and his penchant for reducing them to eye candy just there for the grabbing, he's made it virtually impossible for men to publicly display appreciation for feminine beauty, for even complimenting a woman on her looks in the most tasteful way is viewed as passive misogyny. And maybe it is - as formidable as CNN's Abby Phillip and CBS's Cecilia Vega are as journalists, it was their movie-star looks that got them featured in this space as much as their journalistic prowess. But now it's even politically incorrect to value actual movie stars for their looks. As I wrote yesterday on my regular blog, "The days when you could appreciate American actresses like Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor and European actresses like Catherine Deneuve or Sophia Loren for their looks as well as for their acting ability are gone forever . . . over a long time ago."
April 2025 will be a month in which I wind down this blog and publish the last pictures still in my reserves - the post of new subjects ahead were written up and set to publish on future dates befrore I decided to end this blog. It will remain up for the month of May but have no added content. On May 31, it will go offline for good. I had planned to archive my blog by switching it to a private site, but instead I plan to repurpose a good deal of the pictures on it before deleting it altogether.
I will save my goodbyes for the end of this month.