Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:07 PM

The images I blogged earlier this week belong to:

• Drew Barrymore
• Dora the Explorer
• Holly Hobbie, and
• Strawberry Shortcake

For more on these extreme makeovers, see Shakesville and Sociological Images.

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:08 AM

Also, have you seen TheDailyKitten.com for today? Awww...

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:45 AM

In previous April Fools' Day, Wikipedia offered a great one-stop listing of the day's pranks at pages like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_1,_2008.

They were extremely useful on the Day for identifying hoaxes and a fun source for finding jokes one otherwise might not have encountered.

So, naturally Wikipedia deleted those pages as unsuitable for Wikipedia, eliminating yet another of Wikipedia's advantages.

Oh, and they appear to have locked down their generic April Fools' Day page against vandalism, so don't expect to find out about breaking humor there.

In the meantime, meet Google's CADIE and check out the new products at Archie McPhee & ThinkGeek (I like the sleeping bag). The Telegraph has two articles, listing Fleet Street funnies and some corporate hoaxes.

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:40 PM

In Gypsy the musical, Stephen Sondheim has June and Louise sing this lament:

Louise:	But Momma gets married
June:	And...
Louise:	Married
June:	And...
Louise:	Married
Both:	And never gets carried away

My mother wondered how often the real Mama Rose actually was married.

Ages ago, I bought and read Gypsy's autobiography (the book upon which the musical was based).

In it, Gypsy said her mother was married three times, and describes the men/marriages this way:

My sister, June, was two and a half years old when Mother and Father were divorced. I was four. We had been going to dancing school for six months. June could dance on her toes, like a ballet dancer, even before we went to dancing school. Father, who was a reporter on the Seattle Times, didn't approve of dancing lessons, perhaps because of the expense, but Mother believed in starting things early. After the divorce we went to live with Grandpa...

In her more dramatic moods [Mother] would add, "I'm a woman alone in the world with two babies to support." She said this years after June and I were out of the baby stage, and even after there were three ex-husbands contributing to our support, but that was a detail Mother always chose to forget until the alimony checks were past due. Mother didn't call it alimony. If it was mentioned at all, it was a "financial settlement."

Besides our real father, who lived in Los Angeles, we had two other fathers. June and I never got to know them very well. They weren't around long enough. One was a chiropodist. I know that because I heard Mother and a friend of hers talking about him one day. The friend called him a corn doctor, and Mother was always sensitive about things like that. "Corn doctor," she repeated slowly and thoughtfully. Within a month she had left him and we were back in show business again.

Whenever Mother was married we didn't work; we trouped only between marriages. One of our fathers was a wholesale grocery salesman whom we called Bubs. He used to bring home samples to June and me, and I think we liked him very much, but I'm not sure. Mother divorced him because he was cruel, cruel and inhuman she charged in her complaint. He wanted to send us to school -- not dancing school but public school. He also tried to make us go to Sunday school. Mother explained to him that June was too high strung for Sunday school, but he insisted and so we went. My sister became hysterical when they told us the story about Moses in the bulrushes and had to be carried out of the room. She cried all the way home and cried for three days whenever she thought about the sad story. "He might have got dwowned," she kept saying between spasms.

Bubs said she was a spoiled brat and that we were both heathens. He accused Mother of not raising us properly. Mother cried and held both of us close and defied Bubs to lay a hand on us. "If the story of Moses does this to the child," she said, "can you imagine what would happen if she heard about the Crucifixion?" We never had to go to Sunday school again until years later when we were playing Omaha and then we went because we wanted to.

As soon as Mother divorced Bubs we went back on the stage, this time for good. Mother decided she would never marry again. "It isn't fair to the children's career," she said.

Seems relatively straightforward.

Then I picked up June Havoc's memoirs over the weekend, and came across this passage:

We had legally removed Father two years before, and Mother had already gone through three husbands, so at this moment we were all living with Daddy number four, the last of Mother's legal husbands...

Until now, all the published biographies have been written by family members. [I've also read Erik Preminger's book on life with his mother.] But two new books are coming out this month and next:

• Gypsy: the art of the tease by Rachel Shteir for Yale University Press, and
• Stripping Gypsy: the life of Gypsy Rose Lee by Noralee Frankel for Oxford University Press

Maybe one of them can set the record straight. I've been checking online geneology databases without much luck (on that score, at least - more on this shortly).

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:21 AM

So, a woman I've never heard of before named Kim Kardashian is appearing in this month's Complex magazine. Animal New York spotted the first image of her in their "web exclusive" gallery, but by afternoon she was looking recognizably altered and then removed from the site completely.

Three months ago, the photoshopping of Jessica Alba was all the rage.

For further examples of these,see the Retouching tag on Sociological Images and Jezebel's Photoshop of Horrors.

Shakesville writes about such images in a series called Impossibly Beautiful

because it's meant to illustrate how no one can ever be beautiful enough, that no matter what you look like subtle "perfecting" would be done to your picture by an industry whose continued survival is contingent upon women (mostly, although they're coming for you, too, men) feeling never good enough. ... If no one can ever be beautiful enough, then to what end is the pursuit of an elusive perfection?

According to The New York Times (video), France is considering legislation requiring full disclosure of photo retouching in magazines and advertisements.

But I'm getting tired of all these photographers who expect every model to look like Jessica Rabbit or something out of Image Comics.

So how about a reminder of what real women look like.

Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Gypsy Rose Lee!

__________
Updated with an important comment from my husband:
Note: Gypsy Rose Lee is a real woman: other real women may have other body types, as well.

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:25 PM

In a similar vein to my previous post, can you identify these three girls after their recent extreme makeovers?

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:45 PM

Can you identify the well-known actress on this magazine cover?

What's the point of paying a premium for celebrities to grace your product, and then airbrushing them to unrecognizability?