Diora Baird in Hot Tamale (2006)

This was shot at about the same time, or perhaps shortly after, she appeared on the cover of Playboy. Back in that 2003-2010 era, she often appeared on those Maxim and FHM lists of the hottest women.

After that period, she was married from 2013-2016, and the couple had a son together, but not long after dissolving her marriage she announced the she was engaged again – to a woman this time.

The entire balloting process is complete. It happened in three parts.

Part 1 was to ask for nominations. Because we are not looking for a list of the better scenes, but the one very best one, I only want to include those scenes which people would vote for as their one and only choice. Therefore, I listed seven sure-fire nominees

Alexandria Daddario in True Detective
Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin
Eva Green in The Dreamers
Rosario Dawson in Trance
Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball
Heather Graham in Killing Me Softly
Gretchen Mol in The Notorious Bettie Page

I asked the blog readers to give me additional nominations for the very best scene of the millennium, understanding that we are looking only for one scene, so in order to be the best, it would have to beat those seven. About 20 people, either by blog comments or by e-mail, said “I would be willing to ignore those seven and choose _________ as my #1”

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Part 2 was to take those original seven performances plus the additional nominees and rank them from top to bottom on a “Baseball MVP” or “College Football Ranking” ballot. The results of that ballot are here.

Of the 25 women on that ballot, four received NO first place votes (Wiig, Parker, Mortimer, Linney). Five others received only a single vote (Jolie, Gyllenhaal, Clarke, Hayek and Wilde). They were dropped from the final competition – leaving only the sweet 16, the women that got multiple first-place votes in the preliminary round.

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Part 3 consisted of a “one-man-one-choice” ballot. The votes in the final run-off were closely clustered into four groups. There were vast gaps between the groups but not within them. The differences inside each group were so insignificant that, if the voting were repeated, any woman in the group might be the highest vote-getter in the group or the lowest, but would be unlikely to cross into a different group.

Group 1, Hall of Famers (130+ votes): Daddario and Green

Group 2, All-Stars (48-53 votes): Johansson, Holmes, Dawson

Group 3, Solid Contenders (19-28 votes): Berry, Robbie, Chastain, Graham, Silverman, Borth

 

Statistical anomalies:

1. Voters changed their minds about the Daddario/Green battle from the preliminary balloting to the finals. In the semi-finals, Daddario got 120 first-place votes, while Green got a mere 48. Because Daddario won the semis in a landslide, I did not expect the final balloting to be close, but it was, because Green’s gain from the semis to the finals was highly significant.

2. Margot Robbie and Michelle Borth also received improved second looks from voters in the finals. They barely qualified for the final round with a mere three and two first-place votes in the semis, but jumped all the way into the “solid contender” tier in the final voting. (Robbie soared all the way to seventh place!) Perhaps the visual aid, present in the finals but not in the semis, reminded people of what great scenes those were.

3. Of my original seven choices, five of them finished 1-2-3-4-6, prevented from a sweep of the top five spaces only because we all still love Katie Holmes after twenty years, which I did not foresee. On the other hand, Heather Graham’s scene was weaker than I anticipated (it finished in ninth place), and the voters did not at all share my enthusiasm for Gretchen Mol.

The actual numerical tallies follow:

What was the best nude performance of the millennium?
Alexandria Daddario in True Detective 158 ( 25.32 % )
Eva Green in The Dreamers 132 ( 21.15 % )
Rosario Dawson in Trance 53 ( 8.49 % )
Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin 52 ( 8.33 % )
Katie Holmes in The Gift 48 ( 7.69 % )
Halle Berry in Monster's Ball 28 ( 4.49 % )
Margot Robbie in The Wolf of Wall Street 26 ( 4.17 % )
Jessica Chastain in Salome 22 ( 3.53 % )
Heather Graham in Killing Me Softly 21 ( 3.37 % )
Sarah Silverman in Take This Waltz 20 ( 3.21 % )
Michelle Borth in Tell Me You Love Me 19 ( 3.04 % )
Kate Micucci in Easy 12 ( 1.92 % )
Gretchen Mol in The Notorious Bettie Page 11 ( 1.76 % )
Chloe Sevigny in The Brown Bunny 10 ( 1.6 % )
Kate Mara in My Days of Mercy 8 ( 1.28 % )
Jennifer Lawrence in Red Sparrow 4 ( 0.64 % )

Overall champion: Alexandra Daddario

Category champions:

Best scene 2000-2009:
1. Eva Green
2. Katie Holmes
3. Halle Berry
4. Heather Graham

Best scene 2010-2019:
1. Alexandra Daddario
2. Rosario Dawson
3. Scarlett Johansson
4. Margot Robbie

Best movie scene:
1. Eva Green
2. Rosario Dawson
3. Scarlett Johansson
4. Katie Holmes

Best scene from a series:
1. Alexandra Daddario
2. Michelle Borth
3. Kate Micucci

A compilation .gif of Heather Graham in of the ten or so sexiest performances of this century in a film I called Shakespeare in Lust, given that Heather’s co-star was a certain Joseph Alberic Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, aka Will Shakespeare in love.

By the way, that is a real name, and not a name made up by the Pythons for their Upper Class Twit of the Year competition.

Somebody e-mailed me this link:

Scarlett Johansson plastic surgery – Breast Reduction Before & After 2019″

The nose job pictures are reasonably persuasive, but …

This site claims that she has had breast implants, then had them removed. That doesn’t seem right to me. In A Love Song for Bobby Long, her breasts were monstrous, to be sure (below), but they seemed to be natural, not implants. If her breasts are smaller now, I’d guess she lost weight and got in shape, causing the breasts to reduce naturally, ala Jennifer Connelly. Of course I could be all wet since I’m no expert on cosmetic surgery.

Thoughts?


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Many people argue that Canada is already vanilla enough, but in a more literal sense, they can now control most of the world’s vanilla supply, given that vanilla flavoring can be extracted from beavers’ assholes.

Beavers’ assholes have some worth, but there is still no known value for assholes’ beavers, which is tough news for Ann Coulter.

Interesting article. I always love this kind of mind-boggling cosmic mystery.

NOTE: The article itself is sound, but the headline is not strictly accurate. We can see objects that are that are currently 46.1 billion light years away. Those two statements are not identical. We are seeing them as they were long ago, when they were no more than 13-point-something billion light years away. Two crucial things have happened since they emitted that light: (1) they and we have have moved away from one another at approximately the speed of light; (2) the universe, space itself, has expanded for various reasons touched upon in the article. (And we have fairly recently calculated – in the past quarter century or so – that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, which surprised many astrophysicists.)

That’s not so confusing, but a truly mystifying phenomenon is this: “The Universe Is Disappearing, And There’s Nothing We Can Do To Stop It.” How can that be? Because objects are moving away from us at an apparent speed faster than the speed of light. How can that be? It’s that pesky expansion again. The Hubble Constant (as recalculated since Hubble’s time) suggests that once distant objects are approximately 4,200 megaparsecs away (about 13.7 billion light years), two galaxies will separate faster than the speed of light.

In theory, if you could wait an infinitely long time, the night skies would be empty of any objects not gravitationally attached to us. (Well, I’m assuming that the life of the universe itself is infinite, which is probably not accurate, and I’m ignoring the fact that there will be no “us” then anyway, as our Sun will have burned out in some five billion years, which is just a brief blip of time in cosmological terms. Heavy stuff, dude.)

Lev and/or Igor taped Trump going ballistic over the ambassador to Ukraine and ordering his minions to “take her out.”

“Get rid of her! Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. OK? Do it.”

By the way, this excerpt is a one-one-one exchange between Trump and Parnas, the guy Trump says he doesn’t know and never had a conversation with.

Tapes are Trump’s greatest enemy. Every time independent evidence has emerged, we have seen that whenever there is a dispute between Trump and somebody else about a private conversation, Trump’s version is always a lie, but so far only Omarosa knew Trump well enough to be able to document it. (She had been working with him for years and knew exactly what to expect, so she taped everything.) I’m hoping that Lev and Igor have more!