The Washington Redskins—not their name now of course— defeated the Broncos by the score of 42– 10, winning their second Super Bowl. The game was played on January 31, 1988
After the game that year there was a special show premiering:
THE WONDER YEARS would go on to be one of the greatest shows in the history of television and would run until 1993…
But consider this.. the program premiered in 1988. The show featured nostalgia from 20 years previous in 1968. A crazy time of course
And that would mean if the WONDER YEARS premiered today and the same time constraints applied, our ‘wonder years’ would be 2001…
And to some of us who have been online since that year, this website included, it sure doesn’t seem like 20 years. Maybe it didn’t seem like that to those who turned 40 in 1988 either..
The wonder years indeed. Boy do we wonder .. where has the time gone?
Every year I strive to bring a different, and new perspective on the anniversary of September 11, 2001..
As each year progresses, the distant memories become even more distant. For those who still recall each second of the day, scarred into their psyche, it still becomes a faraway feeling as time marches on.
2015’s focus was on secrets. Like live nukes on a tarmac and the Speaker of the House being taken out of contact with everyone during the aftermath and evacuation…
So this 19th anniversary feels strange. Not quite the 20th.. and as time becomes hazy, we seem to be losing something as we go.
The aftermath of 9/11 elevated police to hero and icon status. 2020 does not look as favorably .. A lot has changed. Perhaps the events of that day caused wars, which caused beheadings, which cases alarming friction around the world, which caused dismay and turmoil and could quite possibly have led to the election of Donald Trump. It’s like the butterfly effect. One slight alternation could have changed everything.
There is another theme to 2020 that seems somewhat relative. Statues are coming down all across the fruited plane. Civil War soldiers of the South who stood in parks or state capitols are actively being canceled. Even Chris Columbus himself is on the verge of being a role model of evil. This year, his statue was taken down in Baltimore on the Fourth of July and thrown into the Harbor.
We choose not to step into the murky waters of debates about statues. But as one ages, one can realize that history itself becomes just as murky as the ‘heroes’ who embodied them.
x x x
THE PEACH LADY
I belong to a David Letterman fan forum. The other day, an interesting memory was posted on the page about the ‘Peach Lady.’ Those who watched the CBS Late Show around 1995 may recall her.. Letterman played a video of this woman, sitting in the seats of the US Open, eating a succulent and juicy peach, with the liquids dripping down her chin and neck. Letterman played it over and over again. Each night with more laughter than the previous. As a matter of fact, the footage of her in the stands at the tennis tournament was shown at least a half-dozen times September 1995 on the show.
In a punch line for his “Top 10 List,″ Letterman referred to the Peach Woman as a “seductive temptress.″ Letterman also started a nationwide search for the mystery woman, putting her picture on the Times Square Sony Jumbotron with the caption: “IF THIS IS YOU … CALL NOW!″
The woman’s name was Jane Bronstein, a then-fifty-five year old woman with a thyroid condition. And because Letterman made her famous, she sued Worldwide Pants in February 1996.
Jane Bronstein, a 54-year-old New York City woman, has sued the comedian, saying he violated her right to privacy and left her with mental and physical pain from the public ridicule.
But here is the kicker.. The suit was settled in 1997 for undisclosed damages – and that footage and the image of the “peach lady” is no longer available for casual consumption.
The peach lady has vanished!
She is gone from Google. Gone from Youtube clips. Gone even from Wikipedia, where a page for her existed until around 2013.
I have a visceral memory of it. As did many others on the David Letterman forum I frequent. But we don’t have the image anymore.
But what is true is this: I have the video tape to prove she existed. An old VHS, taped from television in 1995.. fuzzy and hazy, but there she is. On my TV, which peach drippings sopping down her face.
It is in my possession.. and it did exist. But no one, possibly, will ever see it again.
THE HISTORY OF PRE 9/11
The peach lady has vanished from sight and memory. No here to be found, and no where to be seen. The gag was gone after the lawsuit. And strangely enough, those few images that still were online throughout the 2000s are gone as well. She is not even a meme.
History is forgotten.
There are people who believe the 21st century adage that whatever you put online stays for good. Forever. That it will be seen by future generations as freely as the current.
That does not appear to be true. The peach lady is a symbol of how things can go into the trash heap.
It is why so many screen shot breaking news events for posterity. The facts change quickly. The original information posted or reported vanishes …
In 1996, a brand new news network emerged on cable: MSNBC. It was a conglomeration between Microsoft and NBC News. And it just so happened that their inaugural week coincided with the tragic crash of TWA Flight 800. What those may now forget *unless you have old VHS like me* is that a great portion of their coverage during that life event focused on witnesses who claim they saw a mid-air explosion, and others who stated a missile was visible shooting down the plane. In the final analysis, no missile or accidential shoot down by the Navy (which was conducting a drill that very night) made the report… The conclusion was .. a crash.
And MSNBC’s frantic reporting and witness statements vanished… never to be seen again.
Only memories exist.
Few and static memories.
So this year.. this 19th anniversary since the 9/11 attacks, let’s stroll back into our collective amnesia and regret to find history forgotten..Events that occurred prior to the attacks, prior to the chaos that changed the world. Little events that seemed potentially coincidental at the time. But monumental in the aftermath.
And remember this.. most of these events, though important and impactful, are forgotten. As thought they never happened..
Thankfully we were busy keeping screen shots of websites and news long before it was cool.
And now presented for your viewing pleasure, or displeasure, a picture of America prior to the nightmare of 9/11.
Forgotten history, remembered now potentially for the first time in 19 years
During the summer of 2001, there were a few things on Americans’ minds. Gary Condit, a congressman who was under suspicion after his intern was killed. Also SHARKS! It was the summer of sharks. Shark bites were taking place all over the East Coast.
But a little reported event concerning then Attorney General John Ashcroft also occurred.. After a “threat assessment” was made, the AG was told to fly ONLY by private jet for the remainder of his term. The FBI had no further comment to CBS news when they reported this on July 26, 2001:
The Pentagon was a location of a terror attack on 9/11.. but just five months prior to the event, the Joint Chiefs of Staff rejected the idea of a hijacked airliner crashing into the Pentagon as impractical!! In April 2001, NORAD requested that war games run by the Joint Chiefs include a hijacked commercial plane. When the Boston GLOBE wrote about this event years later, they could not reach the original NORAD official for comment.
William Rodriguez was a hero janitor who helped people escape the towers after planes hit the building. He was celebrated and even photographed with George W. Bush. Things went sour after his testimony before the 9/11 Commission was completely emitted. Perhaps saying explosions were taking place in the building led to that choice by the group?
On June 15, 2004, the New York DAILY NEWS had a profile about the custodian that included this information: He swore that United Airlines hijacker Mohand Alshehri was there in June 2001 and that he told the FBI, and that he never heard back from then. According to his account, he just finished cleaning a bathroom when Alshehri asked “How many public bathrooms are in this area?” He said he found it strange and did not forget the event. He said he believed Alshehri was casing the towers prior to the attack.
Also during the summer prior to the attacks, there was a reported memo by an FBI agent urging the Bureau headquarters to investigate Middle Eastern men enrolled in American flight schools, and said that followers of Osama Bin Laden could use the flight schools for terror operations. Robert Mueller, the newly appointment FBI director in 2001, admitted that the Bureau gave the memo little attention.
The mastermind of the attacks also had luck evading investigation. In the summer prior to 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed received a US visa weeks before the attacks despite a 1996 indictment linking him to terror plots. It was reported that he took advantage of a 3rd party Visa processing system and used a false identity
While terrorists may have been casing their attack location and the mastermind was busy exploiting computer systems, it was reported that Osama Bin Laden also was able to get a miracle stroke of luck at the same time.
A CIA agent allegedly met with bin Laden in July 2001 while he underwent treatment for kidney problems at an American hospital in Dubai, France’s Le Figaro newspaper reported then. Bin Laden reportedly checked into the American Hospital Dubai, a 100-bed, acute-care general hospital, July 4 and stayed until July 14 that year. He arrived from Quetta, Pakistan, accompanied by his personal doctor and a close aide — possibly Ayman el Zawahiri, a leader of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad, now bin Laden’s right hand man, the newspaper said. The clinic denied the report after the 9/11 attacks occurred.
And finally, one last huge stroke of luck that occurred as one of the hijackers, Ziad Samir Jarrah, was pulled over by police six weeks before 9/11.
Prior to 9/11, in the spring of 2001, the ‘Lone Gunman’ pilot appears on FOX. It was a spinoff the X-FILES. And it was viewed as a dud.. a “dull” according to this review i the PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE:
So what was this boring episode about? In The Lone Gunmen’s premiere episode, “Pilot”, which aired March 4, 2001, members of the U.S. government conspire to hijack an airliner, almost hitting the World Trade Center, and blame the act on terrorists to gain support for a new profit-making war.
As the terrible day in history got closer, stranger events started to occur..
Italy told a tale that the 2001 Genoa Summit was fraught with worries that terrorists would crash a plane to kill Bush and other world leaders! The summit apparently was worried that year that terrorists would crash an airliner into their event.
Israel also warned the United States about an attack a month before the event.
This event reported by NEWSWEEK: In the spring of 2001, the US government’s most valuable terror informants gave the FBI an alarming report that terrorists were planning an attack on US soil..
But an even weirder warning came on September 10 when a student offered a chilling prediction to the New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn. The freshman bragged before the attacks that the World Trade Center was going to be destroyed. A teacher stated that she recalled the student saying, “Do you see those two buildings? They won’t be standing there next week.”
Salman Rushdie was banned by US authorities from taking flights a week before 9/11. . He said at that time he believed that the government was aware an attack was imminent.
Also Willie Brown was reportedly told not to fly !
Also before 9/11, the United States was forming its attack plan–against Afghanistan!!
The BBC reported that the United States government put plans into action in July 2001 for an October 2001 attack against the nation. Eventually, after 9/11, the United States launched its attack against Afghanistan in October 2001.
X X X
The days before.
Terrorists were busy watching porn and getting prostitutes before they slammed planes into buildings on September 11.
Yousef and Mohammad took a holiday to a coastal resort before they intended on blowing up the Pope. They also hung out at bars and strip clubs before 9/11.
Marwan Al-Shehhi frequently got lap dances at the Olympic Topless Cabaret but was apparently a lousy tipper.
Heightened security at the Twin Towers had JUST BEEN LIFTED before the attacks. Daria Coard told Newsday that despite numerous phone threats and 12-hour shifts for two weeks before September 11, bomb-sniffing dogs abruptly were removed the Thursday before.
On the day prior, two major events occurred that eventually become lost to history.
The United States decided to pull the plug on Muslim websites. Islamic groups condemned the action on September 10:
Also the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, used his 9/10 press briefing to announce that $2.3 TRILLION in transactions by the Pentagon could not be tracked. Trillion.
Meanwhile in Florida, then Governor Jeb Bush declared Martial Law 4 days prior to 9/11!
A victim of 9/11, David Kocalcin, could not sleep the night of September 10, 2001. He was a passenger on Flight 11 on 9/11, but the night previous he woke up at 3am pacing the house, unable to sleep. The morning he left home he wrote a note for him family saying he will miss everyone very much. He said he would see them Friday night, and stated he fed the dogs but not the fish.
On September 9, 2001,NORAD was maintaining “Northern Vigilance.” The exercise was taking place on 9/11, which led some to ask early in the attacks if they were real world or exercise.
The night before terrorists crashed planes into buildings, a Middle Eastern man seated with two other man at the Pink Pony Nude Theater in Daytona Beach said “tomorrow America will see bloodshed.” The club shrugged off the warning at the time.
Sheppton PA: The location was one of the first rescues of trapped miners accomplished by raising them through holes bored through solid rock, an event that gripped the world’s attention during August 1963..
At press time, that was 57 years ago this month.
The headlines initially were dire.. The idea that the entire world was paying attention to every dispatch and detail from Schuylkill County PA is amazing to consider..
THE ACCIDENT
This was the HAZLETON STANDARD SPEAKER’S front page the day after the incident:
The roof of the Sheppton anthracite coal mine collapsed on August 13 and three miners were trapped 300 feet below ground. A small borehole was drilled from the surface in an attempt to contact the miners.
After several days a borehole successfully reached a mine, and revealed that two of the miners, Henry Throne and David Fellin, had survived in a small, narrow chamber! A miracle amid the tragedy.
Rescuers dropped provisions to the miners through boreholes with the assistance of the likes of billionaire Howard Hughes..
Thone and Fellin were successfully raised to the surface on August 27.
Attempts to contact the third miner, Louis Bova, were unsuccessful..
But the story did not end there. Both relayed strange stories, apparitions, and tales of the other world.. the Pope at the time even became an audience .. to this day, their tales live on in ghost and coal mine lure…
THE HEADLINES
On August 14, the STANDARD SPEAKER went into depth into the background of the minors:
The STANDARD SPEAKER reported this about the rescue on August 23:
By the rescue on August 27m the SHAMOKIN NEWS-DISPATCH reported that the miners were dancing a ‘jig’ during the rescue:
Furek spoke for about 45 minutes on Sunday about how the miraculous, supernatural, technological and bizarre differences make the Sheppton Mine in Schuylkill County different from other mines around the world. In August 1963, three “regular guys” who happened to be miners went to work at the Oneida No. 2 slope, not knowing they would become trapped. The mine collapsed and buried the trio more than 300 feet below, Furek explained. David Fellin and Henry Throne were pulled out alive. The third miner, Louis Bova, was never found. Some argue the hit song “Timothy” by local recording artists The Boys was based on the the rumor Bova was eaten by Fellin and Throne.
The news reported that Fellin sang as he was rescued..
More from the 2017 report,
The rescue, Furek said, was the hardest part. The two men came out of a 17-inch opening in a harness because there was a concern the capsule, which was originally the rescue device, would break since the hole wasn’t straight down to the men. Throne was first and, when he saw the light of day, he passed out. Fellin, on the other hand, was talking and singing, Furek said. During a post-rescue interview, Fellin signed an affidavit that said he prayed to Pope Saint John XXIII daily and the Pope, who died months prior to the accident, was with the trapped miners. “I believe they had a flight of the soul, out-of-body experience,” Furek said.
THE PARANORMAL AND SUPERNATURAL
Back on the 21st anniversary of the Sheppton Mine Disaster, the HAZLETON STANDARD SPEAKER reported about the weirder and paranormal aspect of the incident:
Dave Fellin and Hank Throne told their story to medical survival experts: Claims of supernatural involvement—prompted by the remarkable visions the trapped men had witnessed.
They recollected the humanoids who were dressed in space suits with lights on their helmets. Revealingly, the two miners felt strangely wonderful and seemed to be in a dream state, like traveling through a hall of mirrors.
Throne yelled to one figure, “Show me some light over here! Over here!”
Fellin saw him too, he said, “but the shape of the man got smaller and smaller as we crawled toward him and then he was gone altogether”
Taken together, the different bits of evidence demonstrate that the men’s visionary experiences were, understandably, almost certainly hallucinations, delusions, and imaginings, shared through suggestion so that eventually they became more or less standardized between the two trapped miners. This probability is both plausible and corroborated by evidence, whereas the alternate explanation—that the described visions were actual supernatural occurrences—loses out to the principle of Occam’s razor, the scientific rule of thumb that suggests the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions is to be preferred. (Positing the supernatural requires assumptions not founded in science.)
This is not an unscholarly “debunking” attitude but rather an investigative one. I remain confident that an investigation leading to explanation is the best approach. If something can be effectively explained, any needed debunking will take care of itself.
But the ghost stories lives to today.. These old tales of the Pope and humanoids in a mine during utter chaos and collapse continue cause debate.
THE POPE?
HALLUCINATIONS?
History!
All in August of 1963.. Before THAT world changed when JFK went to Dallas in November…
The headlines initially were dire.. The idea that the entire world was paying attention to every dispatch and detail from Schuylkill County PA is amazing to consider..
THE ACCIDENT
This was the HAZLETON STANDARD SPEAKER’S front page the day after the incident:
The roof of the Sheppton anthracite coal mine collapsed on August 13 and three miners were trapped 300 feet below ground. A small borehole was drilled from the surface in an attempt to contact the miners.
After several days a borehole successfully reached a mine, and revealed that two of the miners, Henry Throne and David Fellin, had survived in a small, narrow chamber! A miracle amid the tragedy.
Rescuers dropped provisions to the miners through boreholes with the assistance of the likes of billionaire Howard Hughes..
Thone and Fellin were successfully raised to the surface on August 27.
Attempts to contact the third miner, Louis Bova, were unsuccessful..
But the story did not end there. Both relayed strange stories, apparitions, and tales of the other world.. the Pope at the time even became an audience .. to this day, their tales live on in ghost and coal mine lure…
THE HEADLINES
On August 14, the STANDARD SPEAKER went into depth into the background of the minors:
The STANDARD SPEAKER reported this about the rescue on August 23:
By the rescue on August 27m the SHAMOKIN NEWS-DISPATCH reported that the miners were dancing a ‘jig’ during the rescue:
Furek spoke for about 45 minutes on Sunday about how the miraculous, supernatural, technological and bizarre differences make the Sheppton Mine in Schuylkill County different from other mines around the world. In August 1963, three “regular guys” who happened to be miners went to work at the Oneida No. 2 slope, not knowing they would become trapped. The mine collapsed and buried the trio more than 300 feet below, Furek explained. David Fellin and Henry Throne were pulled out alive. The third miner, Louis Bova, was never found. Some argue the hit song “Timothy” by local recording artists The Boys was based on the the rumor Bova was eaten by Fellin and Throne.
The news reported that Fellin sang as he was rescued..
More from the 2017 report,
The rescue, Furek said, was the hardest part. The two men came out of a 17-inch opening in a harness because there was a concern the capsule, which was originally the rescue device, would break since the hole wasn’t straight down to the men. Throne was first and, when he saw the light of day, he passed out. Fellin, on the other hand, was talking and singing, Furek said. During a post-rescue interview, Fellin signed an affidavit that said he prayed to Pope Saint John XXIII daily and the Pope, who died months prior to the accident, was with the trapped miners. “I believe they had a flight of the soul, out-of-body experience,” Furek said.
THE PARANORMAL AND SUPERNATURAL
Back on the 21st anniversary of the Sheppton Mine Disaster, the HAZLETON STANDARD SPEAKER reported about the weirder and paranormal aspect of the incident:
Dave Fellin and Hank Throne told their story to medical survival experts: Claims of supernatural involvement—prompted by the remarkable visions the trapped men had witnessed.
They recollected the humanoids who were dressed in space suits with lights on their helmets. Revealingly, the two miners felt strangely wonderful and seemed to be in a dream state, like traveling through a hall of mirrors.
Throne yelled to one figure, “Show me some light over here! Over here!”
Fellin saw him too, he said, “but the shape of the man got smaller and smaller as we crawled toward him and then he was gone altogether”
Taken together, the different bits of evidence demonstrate that the men’s visionary experiences were, understandably, almost certainly hallucinations, delusions, and imaginings, shared through suggestion so that eventually they became more or less standardized between the two trapped miners. This probability is both plausible and corroborated by evidence, whereas the alternate explanation—that the described visions were actual supernatural occurrences—loses out to the principle of Occam’s razor, the scientific rule of thumb that suggests the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions is to be preferred. (Positing the supernatural requires assumptions not founded in science.)
This is not an unscholarly “debunking” attitude but rather an investigative one. I remain confident that an investigation leading to explanation is the best approach. If something can be effectively explained, any needed debunking will take care of itself.
But the ghost stories lives to today.. These old tales of the Pope and humanoids in a mine during utter chaos and collapse continue cause debate.
THE POPE?
HALLUCINATIONS?
History!
All in August of 1963.. Before THAT world changed when JFK went to Dallas in November…
Paleontologists in North Dakota has uncovered an incredible stash of fossils that was formed instantaneously after an asteroid struck Earth nearly 66 million years ago.
Excavations revealed in amazing detail fossils of fish and other animals unable to escape the glassy fragments that plummeted from the sky caused by the thunderous impact that obliterated the dinosaurs.
The deposits also contain water, indicating a mammoth sea surge that the collision created.
University of Kansas paleontologist Robert DePalma and colleagues said the excavation site, called Tanis, offered a momentous peek into events that occurred minutes after the asteroid crashed into the planet.
“This is the first mass death assemblage of large organisms anyone has found associated with (the end of the Cretaceous Period),” said DePalma. “At no other (time) on Earth can you find such a collection consisting of a large number of species representing different ages of organisms and different stages of life, all of which died at the same time, on the same day.”
The impact is understood to have generated a huge tsunami, it would have taken many hours for this wave to travel the distance from the Gulf to North Dakota, despite the likely presence back then of a seaway cutting directly across the North American land mass..
Instead, the researchers believe local water could have been displaced much more quickly by the seismic shockwave – equivalent to a Magnitude 10 or 11 earthquake – that would have rippled around the Earth. It is a type of surge described as a seiche, which would have picked up everything in its path and dumped it into the jumbled collection of specimens now being reported by the team.
“A tangled mass of freshwater fish, terrestrial vertebrates, trees, branches, logs, marine ammonites and other marine creatures was all packed into this layer by the inland-directed surge,” said Mr DePalma.
“A tsunami would have taken at least 17 or more hours to reach the site from the crater, but seismic waves – and a subsequent surge – would have reached it in tens of minutes,” he added.
The scientists analyzed the relationship between social complexity and moralizing gods in 414 societies spanning the past 10,000 years from 30 regions across the globe. Researchers examined 51 measures of social complexity, such as the size of the largest settlement and the presence of a formal legal code, and four measures of supernatural enforcement of morality, such as the concept of a supernatural force that monitors and punishes selfish actions.
The researchers found that belief in moralizing gods usually followed increases in social complexity, generally appearing after the emergence of civilizations with populations of more than about 1 million people.
This article needs to be read and imprinted in minds.. the HOLOCAUST was a period of hell for humanity.. but those who survived went on to live very long lives..
Perhaps this was the message from a higher power.. perhaps the intention of that higher power was to give more time to those who survived to tell their story and how it happened.. and could always happen again..
Sunday was Holocaust Remembrance Day, causing me to think about an assertion I heard from an elementary school teacher. She said that even those who survived the Holocaust were so debilitated that the rest of their lives would be short. As with many things I learned in elementary school, the reality is more complicated, and my 10-year-old self would be glad to know that my teacher was probably more wrong than right.
Living through a horrendous event, like confinement in a concentration camp or prisoner-of-war camp, does create health problems serious enough to shorten most people’s lives. But those who survive also seem to have other characteristics — perhaps a stronger immune system and a more optimistic outlook than the general population — that tend to make people live longer. New research suggests that such resilience can often overcome scarring.
MORE..
The results show that the camp survivors had higher rates of hypertension, cancer, dementia and obesity than native-born people of the same age and sex. For example, 83 percent of the survivors had hypertension, compared to 67 percent of the control group. Whether the Holocaust experience caused these differences is unclear, but they are consistent with my elementary school teacher’s statement. The surprising part is that despite being in worse health, the Holocaust survivors lived 7.1 years longer — their average age at death was 85 years, compared to 78 among the control group. Those differences persist even after adjusting for socioeconomic status (Holocaust survivors tend to be poorer than their contemporaries), sex and other factors. Some other research has similarly found longer lives among survivors.
FINALLY..
What’s the conclusion, beyond answering a question that has stuck with me for four decades? First and most importantly, it’s not that a traumatic time is anything but hideous. It’s instead that those surviving such an event may be sturdier than others, and by so much that it more than offsets the additional ailments they wind up with. In other words, survivors can wind up living longer than average, but they would presumably have lived even longer in the absence of their gruesome experiences. Second, the effects of extreme events may be passed on to future generations: Whatever the effect on survivors, the Civil War evidence suggests their children may wind up paying a price.
On March 17, 1892, a group of local men dug up the three deceased members of the Brown family in search of a sign that one of them was rising from the grave at night to suck the energy from the living. After nearly 10 years, Mary Olive and Mary Eliza were almost entirely decomposed. But Mercy, buried only a few months previous in the cold New England weather, was almost perfectly preserved. The vampire hunters of Exeter had found their target.
Most are off on Wednesday for the Fourth of July… BUT.
Only two Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776..The Second Continental Congress met on July 2nd to formally approve the new nation’s independence. The Congress approved the Declaration of Independence two days later, on the 4th of July. John Adams thought that July 2nd would become a memorable day of celebration. Adams even wrote to his wife, “The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epoch, in the History of America.”
The proto-Barbie was just shy of a foot tall, with bulging breasts and a platinum-blonde ponytail, made up for a night on the town with red puckered lips and blue eye shadow. Although Barbie’s curvy proportions are modeled after Lilli’s, the German doll’s heavy makeup and suggestively arched eyebrows didn’t carry over to the American version. The dolls also have tellingly different feet, according to M.G. Lord, the author of Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll.
In the comics, Lilli was witty, irreverent and sexually uninhibited. One strip, summarized by Lord, shows Lilli covering her naked body with a newspaper and explaining to a friend, “We had a fight and he took back all the presents he gave me.” Another shows Lilli in a bikini; when a policeman tells her that two-piece swimsuits are illegal, she says, “Oh, and in your opinion, which part should I take off?”
Nonetheless, Lilli dolls were soon coveted by children as well as adults. They caught the eye of 15-year-old Barbara Handler on a 1956 vacation in Switzerland with her mother, Ruth — a co-founder of the Mattel toy company.
We know there are so many loyal fans who have used AIM for decades; and we loved working and building the first chat app of its kind since 1997. Our focus will always be on providing the kind of innovative experiences consumers want. We’re more excited than ever to focus on building the next generation of iconic brands and life-changing products.
I, like YOU, spent countless nights in the late 90s and early 2000s getting to the know the Internet while spending time in AIM. My name was Loomicide. And now… It’s AIMicicde. Gone.
And the saddest of all? YOUR BUDDY LIST IS GONE.
Can I save my Buddy List? Unfortunately you are not able to save or export your Buddy List.
The net is reborn every hour.
But those old days of the wild NET west?…..they are the the days that will never come back again.
