I still use Google. If you want me to change to your search engine, here is what you have to do:

1. NEVER take me to a page that I would have to pay to read. If a site shows up in your results and I click on it, I want to be able to read the article I clicked for. I realize this would mean removing some big-name sites from your results. Fuck ’em. They are wasting my time.

2. I want the ability to set some personal rules with cookies. Here are the ones I would set (the URL’s I list are from my imagination, although I didn’t look them up, so I suppose they may exist):

a. If I search for a name, and the name I searched for has an entry at any of the sports-reference.com sites, list that first.
b. If the name has an IMDb page, list that second.
c. If the name has a Wikipedia page, list it third.
d. If the name has a personal url, like amberheard.com, list that next.
e. If the name has an Instagram page, list that next. If there are multiple matches, list them in descending order of their number of followers.
e. Of course if any of the stages above are missing, move each of the others up one.
f. Of course I understand that you have to pay the bills. I’m OK with ads, and I’m OK if you sell my search history to others. Just make sure all paid search results are clearly labeled, and let me choose to whom you sell the info. Give me your full list of customers for that info, and let me check the ones that are OK with me. If you sell my history to Amazon or Coca-Cola or REI, fine. But don’t sell it to companies with web sites like cheerleadersinchains.com or tooyoungjapaneseschoolgirls.com. And don’t sell it to any political groups, right or left, or any governments, including my own.

Today’s Fun House (free version)

The full Fun House, including today’s film clips, about 9,000 back issues, more than 70,000 HD film clips, and more than a million images and collages, is anchored here. Today’s highlights:

  • Jennifer Lawrence fully naked in No Hard Feelings – in a 4k clip!
  • Some awesome nostalgia: Stella Stevens in Slaughter

If you are interested in my writing:

  • My movie essays are here.
  • My baseball essays are here
  • My novel is here

I am voluntarily taking an internet-free vacation for a month (although I will have my phone, just in case). Call it rehab for an internet addiction.

I’ll be back in May.

Some online sources you should look for:

Johnny Moronic. It’s unbelievable how much material can be created and hosted by one man, much of it unique to his site. GREAT site.

Hot Celebs Home. He is always on top of the everyday matters of pop culture, and is very thorough in his approach.

The Nip-Slip. Self-explanatory.

Popoholic – great friend of Other Crap, and the world’s biggest fan of female celebrities. Not much nudity on his site, but it’s always sexy and upbeat. He’s not currently updating, for reasons unknown to me.

Drunken Stepfather. The internet’s bad boy. This is a guilty pleasure site for me, but others find his negative energy to be a turn-off. (He writes in a character voice.) He’s incredibly prolific, especially with his themed, non-celeb material. He obviously lives on a planet with longer days than hours.

My tentative timetable is to resume the Fun House on Saturday, when I no longer have to take my antibiotics.

The drugs are doing their job. I am symptom-free at the moment, but the cure is almost as bad as the disease. This is one harsh drug. The list of side-effects is “all of the above,” and the rules I have to follow are unreal. Some examples: no exposure to daylight (perfect drug for ailing vampires); no antacids of any kind; no dairy products; no caffeine.

Anyway … Saturday. Maybe.

Well, I can’t tell you that I’m ready to run a marathon, but I’m more optimistic. Unfortunately, the infection is still in my system so I’ll be having good days and bad until that is solved. I may or may not be posting because although I feel great now, I felt like I might die just three hours ago, and I may feel that way again in three more.

Many thanks for all the kind words and well-wishes you guys wrote.

—–

I learned that there are certain benefits to a forced vacation:

1. I’m an old fart who literally had not taken a day off for something like 9,000 consecutive days. Maybe a rest was due. Preferably not an eternal one.

2. My other obsession besides my websites is my lively career in senior athletics. I don’t know if any of you follow my Facebook page under my real name (you really should not because it is as boring as a Terrence Malick film festival), but if you do, you know that I finally won my personal grand slam last year – a medal in the singles events of all four “racket sports” in the Senior Olympics. Pickleball is considered a racket sport even though no rackets are involved. I guess that’s because it’s basically badminton + tennis + a whiffle ball. Anyway, I play several hours every day, so I chew Ibuprofen like M&Ms, and my legs still ache all the time. My left knee is so painful I can’t walk up the stairs some days. Well, guess what? Turns out that two weeks of doing nothing has completely restored my legs. So I guess that’s a silver lining.

3. Also, it turns out that dyin’ is a great way to lose weight. I’m back to my youthful shape.

===

Anyway, be sure to keep supporting the guys who bring me traffic:

Popoholic, the complete optimist, my main man. How can you not love him? He never met a woman unworthy of at least four exclamation points! The internet can by a dark road to travel, and that makes his enthusiastic site a refreshing way-station.

Drunken Stepfather, the complete opposite of Popoholic – cynical and sometimes outright mean. I don’t know if I ever agree with his rants, but since he’s obviously writing in a character voice, I’m not sure whether he agrees with his own rants. (He writes several other sites, and they are quite straight. DS is his “bad as I wanna be” project.) Many of you dislike him, but he’s a guilty pleasure for me. Sorry to admit it guys, but he often makes me laugh, and sometimes I even have to admit he has a good point. I’m not sure if you know it, but celebs are only a portion of that site’s raison d’etre. DS truly manages to assemble an uncanny collection of videos for his special themes. Given the time he spends updating his other blogs, he must live on a planet with longer days

When a woman wears a see-thru, Hot Celebs Home does’t run one pic of the event. He’ll have every possible pic. Really a thorough guy.

The Nip-Slip is also into swanky bullshit events, but he digs really deep to find events I’ve never heard of.

I don’t need to tell you what The Booby Blog and The Booty Source are all about. The names kind of give them away.

Celeb Stalker doesn’t make many posts, but the ones he makes are huge – like 900 pics + some vids

This week’s edition posts tomorrow (Wednesday) at 5:00 Eastern.

One of this week’s, the best one really, was created by a reader. If you would like to add some of your own, you can’t post them directly, since people would miss them in the comments section, but I think you know how to find me. If you have an idea but no photo editing skills, you can submit that as well. I can probably finish the job.

Or not.

I am at sea. Not figuratively – that’s always true. I’m literally in the middle of the ocean. As a result, my internet connection is slower than a land tortoise. My blogging will be limited for the next week. I had loaded lots of vintage material in advance, and I had loaded all the work of the key contributors to the Fun House, but the new stuff will be limited to only those things that are really essential and popular, because it takes forever to load a file – if it loads at all!

Back to normal in a week, give or take.

Some of you may be missing some of your comments. I removed a ton of sock puppet comments which were all the same person, and therefore your comments may have disappeared if they were responding to one of his threads. I also banned those accounts for violating for what is pretty much our only rule: no sock puppets.

Sock puppetry is especially annoying when you agree with your own posts using another name! I don’t really care if you want to stir things up, but don’t do it and then hide.

(The same guy had eight identities: Darius, Pete, Peter, Dennis DeYoung, Rick Didier, E E, Rich Currier and Rip Torn!)

In last night’s The Undoing, the character of Hugh Grant’s persnickety mother corrected Nicole Kidman for saying something like “none of them are going.”

She said “None IS going, dear. None is a contraction of no one, and therefore must be singular.”

None of that is right.

You can tell from the sentence I just wrote above that “none” is not merely an abbreviation of “no one” or “not one.” You can’t substitute either of those into my sentence without creating gibberish.  In that sentence it replaces or contracts “not any.” Even though “None of that is right” is correctly written in the singular, it is not because “none” means “no one” or “not one.” “None” is a completely separate word which can also replace “not any,” and the expression “not any” can be singular or plural depending on context (see rule three below).

Here is the rule for indefinite pronouns in American English, in three parts:

1. Always singular: each, either, neither, one, someone, somebody, anyone, anybody.

2. Always plural: several, few, both, many.

3. Either singular of plural depending on the prepositional phrase that follows or is implied: some, any, none, all and most.

Rule three examples:

With prepositional phrase stated:

“None of the milk is missing”; but “None of the elephants are missing.”

“All of the milk is missing”; but “All of the elephants are missing.”

With prepositional phrase implied:

“Were any batters truly successful against Koufax?”

“No, none were.”

“Are any elephants missing?”

“No, none are.”

Note that if you answer the baseball question with “nobody,” which would not take a qualifying prepositional phrase, the verb must be singular, per rule 1. “Nobody” is always singular, with no exceptions.

“Were any batters truly successful against Koufax?”

“Hell no! Nobody was.”

To get back to the original point, Ms. Kidman’s character was correct to say “None of them are going.” It is possible that the character of Hugh Grant’s mother was supposed to be English, and therefore unfamiliar with the conventions of American grammar, but in that case she had no business correcting an American. (I guess Kidman’s character is supposed to be an American. She dropped her Aussie accent, except for the word “your,” which she can’t master with an American accent.)