The Blog of Record

I hope the girls giggling at the back were not executed, Sun Tzu style.

From here.

It’s about 1 minute in.

More films from the 1900s.

The scariest thing about these letters is that some guys somewhere are married to their authors.

A simple list of telltale signs that can save a man a lot of grief. Or help him have a lot of fun. Some of the signs are pretty surprising.

Source.

The ornament was quite popular before the Germans ruined it for everyone. (Click the photo to enlarge.)

Source.

Click the picture to enlarge.

Susan Travers’s service in the Foreign Legion during WWII included not only lots of fighting but also love affairs with married men, so she didn’t want to tell her story while the people who were in it were still alive. She had to wait until she was 91.

The lipstick in the photo is the woman’s menstrual blood.

Modern feminism: you are not truly emancipated unless you proudly show your menstrual blood and used tampons for all to see.

With dozens of Camorra bosses killed or in prison in Italy, their widows, wives and sisters are rising up to the challenge and becoming madrinas, or godmothers. And they are just as tough and ruthless as the men:

Carabinieri arrested 11 women for drug trafficking in a raid on Naples’ Sarno crime clan in July. A mother and her two adult daughters were arrested on organised-crime charges, including extortion.

“There is a growing number of women who hold executive roles,” said Gen Gaetano Maruccia, commander of the Carabinieri paramilitary police in the Naples area.

“They are either widows or wives of husbands who have been put in prison. They hold the reins. They’re very good at mapping out strategy, even sharper (than the men).”

Some Camorra women still perform the more traditional roles of cutting and repackaging cocaine and heroin in their kitchens or paying teenagers to act as lookouts, others are wielding power on the streets.

Women also extort businesses and shop owners for “pizzo” or protection money and control multi-million pound drug trafficking operations.

Women can do anything men can do, only better.

“Is it too late to vote for the white guy?” Well, yes, I believe it is.

And without “excessive retouching or complicated styling”. I wonder how much retouching is OK before they deem it excessive. A good retouching job plus some uncomplicated but skillful styling can more than make up for a lack of makeup.

And I have now idea what the last woman is doing in a lineup of supermodels.

(Via David Tsikaluri.)

Contestants describe why Miss Black USA is relevant in the age of Obama:

“We celebrate our heritage, drawing strength from our foremothers all the way from Africa to our modern day sheroes, Oprah to Michelle Obama, we celebrate black women.”

Celebrating whiteness: racism. Celebrating blackness: empowerment, embracing uniqueness, and many other wonderful things.

Prison beauties from around the world.

Plus: How they do it in Russia.

This photo reminds me of something…

Oh, yes:

Washington, D.C., circa 1922. Click the photo to enlarge.

Source.

Click here (NSFW).

They want this uniform in size 28:

(AP photo.)

Their union will get what it wants. It’s not like we still live in an era when businesses could demand that their employees’ appearance make for a pleasant customer experience. The existence of fat flight attendants attests to that.

The Russians in occupied Germany in 1945, balancing the account:

The first rapes in East Prussia were an eruption of pure rage, bloody revenge for Wehrmacht atrocities on Soviet soil in the march to Stalingrad; soldiers destroyed homes, raped women — some as young as 12 — and killed children. But revenge could not have been the sole motive, for even Soviet prisoners of war and Jewish survivors were not safe; some, as young as 16, were raped by the soldiers who set them free. By the time the first libidinous Soviet wandered into the diarist’s cellar a few months later — pointing menacingly to a teenage girl and asking “How many year?” — German women appeared to the Red Army simply as rightful spoils of war.

Though the precise statistics will never be known, existing estimates are breathtaking: 2 million women were raped in Germany, many of them more than once. In Berlin alone, hospital statistics indicate between 95,000 and 130,000 rape victims. Many women killed themselves rather than “concede” — as some women put it — to the Soviets; some men killed themselves and their wives rather than suffer the indignity of rape.

It’s easy to imagine what the women of Tbilisi felt last August when the drunken Russian horde was only 20 miles away.

(Via Tom McMahon.)

It appears that Jayne Mansfield was a trained musician, in addition to her other, better-known assets.