Day: July 8, 2020

“KPOP” is “on notice”

UncleScoopy

No! Not the dreaded “notice”!

After being informed that they were already on notice, Dean Wormer placed the “KPOP” crowd on double secret notice.

Kanye starts to outline his qualifications for the Oval Office.

UncleScoopy

“Over the course of four rambling hours of interviews on Tuesday, the billionaire rapper turned sneaker mogul revealed:”

  • His party will be called the Birthday Party
  • He has never voted
  • “Planned Parenthoods have been placed inside cities by white supremacists to do the Devil’s work.”
  • He’s suspicious of a coronavirus vaccine, terming vaccines “the mark of the beast.”
  • He was sick with Covid-19 in February.
  • He envisions a White House organizational model based on the secret country of Wakanda in Black Panther.

Fine ideas. I’m subscribing to his newsletter.

UPDATE: “Have yet to see the book, but it is a book of falsehoods.”

UncleScoopy

That was Kayleigh McEnany, drawing on her supernatural powers to give her take on Mary Trump’s new book.

I have to say that while Mary Trump “wrote” this book, she was apparently writing sections of it as the amanuensis for somebody else in the family. Mary Trump was born in 1965, so she can’t be the primary source for all these anecdotes about the president’s childhood and college years. Trump graduated from Penn in 1968, when Mary had just turned 3. The stories in the book about Trump’s youth must be the work of somebody older, presumably Maryanne Trump Barry, Trump’s sister.

One key revelation in the book: Trump cheated on his SATs. He allegedly paid a guy named Joe Shapiro to take the tests for him.

I don’t believe this story. While I consider Trump to be capable of that, and I know for a fact that some guys paid others to take SATs for them in those days, the details don’t make sense.

1. Supposedly he was already a sophomore at Fordham when he paid somebody to take SATs so he could transfer to Penn. That doesn’t ring true. Has anyone ever heard of a college sophomore re-taking the SATs in order to transfer? I’m not saying that was never done back then, but I never heard of such a thing.

2. Penn was accepting pretty much everyone then, and the Trump family had a connection with an admissions officer, so there would have been no need for Trump to have high SAT scores. He only needed a pulse and a checkbook.

3. Perhaps most important, we have to realize that the lawyer Michael Cohen was engaged by Trump in recent years to send a letter to the College Board people, threatening legal action if Trump’s SAT scores were revealed. If we assume Mary Trump’s story is true and Trump (through a surrogate) has really high SAT scores, we then have to believe that Trump, through Cohen, wanted to prevent people from finding out how smart he was. Does that sound like Donald Trump to you? We know Trump is hiding his SAT scores. It’s a good guess that he’s not hiding brilliant scores made by a whiz kid.

UPDATE:

4. Pam Shriver, widow of Joe Shapiro, says (1) it never happened, (2) and it couldn’t have, because Trump and Shapiro met AFTER Trump transferred to Penn.

Mary Trump is making a lurid claim about an event that happened about at the time of her birth, without having given any thought to all those issues I just raised. She apparently just made a credulous transcription of some family gossip, probably heard from her aunt, Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry.

——

DISCLOSURE: Trump and I were both students at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus in the calendar year 1966. I did not know him.

By the way, Kayleigh’s phrase, “A Book of Falsehoods,” is an excellent title for Trump’s autobiography.

Marilyn Monroe in the very first edition of the Hefmag

UncleScoopy

“First Playmate” is a trivia question that will win you many bar bets. Most people think it was Marilyn Monroe. You can also win bets on the first centerfold, also not Marilyn. You all know that Marilyn appeared in Playboy #1 in December of 1953, but the magazine never applied the term “Playmate” to her (MM was the “Sweetheart of the Month”), and she was not a centerfold, having appeared on pages 17-19. The main color picture was presented vertically, as shown in the link above.

  • An obscure model/actress named Margie Harrison became the first “Playmate” when she was so called in the second-ever issue of the Bunny-oriented publication. Margie also became the first woman chosen as a Playmate twice, when the magazine pictured her again a few months later in the June, 1954 edition. Unfortunately for her, the picture was not identified as Margie at the time. It was not until two years after her appearance in Playboy #2 that Playboy’s readers learned her identity.

Brainscan covered her in Lil From Brazil in part 4 of his brilliant overview of Grindhouse Films.

  • The first actual centerfold (two-page) was Janet Pilgrim (Miss July for 1955)
  • The model for the first three-panel fold-out centerfold was Marian Stafford, Miss March for 1956.

Find more Playmate trivia here.

One site pictures every one of them!

By the way, you can find a replica of that first Playboy online. It was primitive!

The second issue was somewhat more professional in appearance, but was still rudimentary, and was still predominantly black-and-white.