Screengrab by Various Today in Hooksexup's film blog: What movie best captures the George W. Bush era?
The Modern Materialist by Various Almost everything you want. Today: Steph wishes she weren't a blogger, so she could win one of the awesome contests going on right now. You still have a chance...
It was the media event of the decade: In 1987, rescue crews pulled eighteen-month-old Jessica McClure from an eight-inch-diameter dry well, two and a half days after the tot plunged into the ground of her aunt's Midland, TX backyard. Baby Jessica, as she was coined, survived (a chunk of her right foot did not) and so captivated the American public that she was lavished with gifts, letters and a trust fund to be bequeathed on her twenty-fifth birthday. According to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press in 1997, coverage of the ordeal rivaled only that of Princess Diana's death, winning a photojournalist the Pulitzer Prize and becoming, inevitably, the subject of a made-for-TV movie starring, inevitably, Patty Duke and Beau Bridges. Now twenty-three, McClure's a stay-at-home mom in Midland, where she patiently awaits her million-dollar nest egg (ka-ching!). Not everyone involved has fared so well, however. One of the rescuers committed suicide; another's serving time for, among other misdeeds, sexually exploiting a child.
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34. Willie Horton
William Horton was a felon from the pages of a Flannery O'Connor tale — a robber, a rapist, an indiscriminate murderer — but he has entered the cultural canon for a crime of an entirely different sort: getting George Bush Sr., elected. In 1986, Horton beat and raped a woman while furloughed from a Massachusetts prison, under an inmate rehabilitation initiative that Bush's campaign linked to then-governor-cum-Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. (In fact, the program was the handiwork of one of Dukakis's predecessors, a Republican.) In a commercial widely believed to have sealed Dukakis's political fate, Horton's black, hirsute mug — "every suburban mother's worst fear," to quote the ad's architect — flashes onscreen, as a voice-over declares ominously, "Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty, he allows murderers to have weekend passes." Bush won the popular vote 53.4 percent to 45.6 percent. Horton, now fifty-seven, is serving two life sentences plus eighty-five years in a Maryland penitentiary where he's presumably living out his days folding laundry, eating slop and taking very, very quick showers. Bush, meanwhile, spawned George, Jr., and together, they've started a number of interesting wars.
33. Kid Who Divorced His Parents
We all thought of it, in our darker childhood moments, sulking over time-outs and denied cookies, but Gregory Kingsley actually did it: He divorced his parents. In 1992, the twelve-year-old student got so fed up with his negligent father and booze- and drug-addled mother, he filed for divorce — and won. "I'm doing it for me," he told the courtroom, invoking the lingua franca of Splitsville, "so I can be happy." Kingsley was adopted by the Russes, a Florida couple with eight additional children to their belt, and changed his name to Shawn Russ. According to his adoptive father, Kingsley is a well-adjusted young man away at college, busying himself with books. Studying law, perhaps?
32. Homophobic Scout Leader
Sea Scout leader Eugene A. Evans once sued a city for refusing to sanction his anti-gay ethos, only to get caught — you guessed it! — touching little boys. In 1998, Evans filed suit against Berkeley, after officials refused gratis berthing to the Sea Scouts, which violate local discrimination laws by banning gays. Evans's reasoning: free speech. What he really meant: "Now it's gonna be mad expensive to lure boys to my boat and bed them." Evans, a former high-school teacher and U.S. Marine, was arrested last year for flashing porn to several scouts and sexually abusing them aboard the troop's eighty-five-foot SSS Farallon. Oh, the ways of seamen! In September, he was sentenced to pay $10,000 in retribution and serve six years in prison. We're sure they'll be really nice to him inside. Scout's honor.
31. The Price is Right Spokesmodels
Barker's Beauties: Scandal? Come on down! For nearly three decades, a trio of spokesmodels named Holly, Janice and Dian perched atop home furnishings for The Price is Right, and in the process became a sort of domestic version of Charlie's Angels. They left in the early '90s, in a storm of lawsuits and recrimination and ill-advised hankypanky. Dian Parkinson — the lapsed-Mormon sexpot who, in the words of hooksexup.com's own Will Doig, had "the look of a woman who went home with airline pilots and mechanics" — was the first casualty, leaving the show in 1993 just shy of her fiftieth birthday. It later emerged that she and host Bob Barker had carried on a three-year sexual relationship starting around 1990, though she claimed, in a sexual harassment lawsuit after she left The Price is Right, that Barker (also the show's executive producer) had forced her to have sex with him. Parkinson dropped the suit before it went to trial, citing the toll it had taken on both her health and her finances. The next year, Holly Hallstrom, the gaffe-prone redhead, went on prescription medication and put on fourteen pounds. She was fired in 1995, she claims, because of the weight gain. Barker denied the allegations, saying Holly was "difficult" and "not well-liked." Janice Pennington testified on her colleague's behalf in Holly's wrongful termination suit, and Janice, in turn, was shown the door. Holly's suit was settled in 2005 for "millions" of dollars, and she provided the epitaph for Bob Barker's career, not to mention the golden age of The Price is Right (now hosted by fatheaded unfunnyman Drew Carey): "This is what Mr. Barker has done with his golden years. Sue people and be sued."
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
