[TheZookie007]

I'd rather continue getting older than to suddenly stop existing so I'll take the occasional back twinge...

[TheZookie007]

While googling for something else:

The New York Times Magazine, January 15, 1995: "THE GREAT IVY LEAGUE NUDE POSTURE PHOTO SCANDAL", by Ron Rosenbaum

ONE AFTERNOON IN THE LATE 1970's, deep in the labyrinthine interior of a massive Gothic tower in New Haven, an unsuspecting employee of Yale University opened a long-locked room in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium and stumbled upon something shocking and disturbing.

Shocking, because what he found was an enormous cache of nude photographs, thousands and thousands of photographs of young men in front, side and rear poses. Disturbing, because on closer inspection the photos looked like the record of a bizarre body-piercing ritual: sticking out from the spine of each and every body was a row of sharp metal pins.

The employee who found them was mystified. The athletic director at the time, Frank Ryan, a former Cleveland Browns quarterback new to Yale, was mystified. But after making some discreet inquiries, he found out what they were -- and took swift action to burn them. He called in a professional, a document-disposal expert, who initiated a two-step torching procedure. First, every single one of the many thousands of photographs was fed into a shredder, and then each of the shreds was fed to the flames, thereby insuring that not a single intact or recognizable image of the nude Yale students -- some of whom had gone on to assume positions of importance in government and society -- would survive.

It was the Bonfire of the Best and the Brightest, and the assumption was that the last embarrassing reminders of a peculiar practice, which masqueraded as science and now looked like a kind of kinky voodoo ritual, had gone up in smoke. The assumption was wrong. Thousands upon thousands of photos from Yale and other elite schools survive to this day.

When I first embarked on my quest for the lost nude "posture photos," I could not decide whether to think of the phenomenon as a scandal or as an extreme example of academic folly -- of what happens when well-intentioned institutions allow their reverence for the reigning conjectures of scientific orthodoxy to persuade them to do things that seem silly or scandalous in retrospect. And now that I've found them, I'm still not sure whether outrage or laughter is the more appropriate reaction. Your response, dear reader, may depend on whether your nude photograph is among them. And if you attended Yale, Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Smith or Princeton -- to name a few of the schools involved -- from the 1940's through the 1960's, there's a chance that yours may be.

Your response may also depend on how you feel about the fact that some of these schools made nude or seminude photographs of you available to the disciples of what many now regard as a pseudo-science without asking permission. And on how you feel about an obscure archive in Washington making them available for researchers to study.

While investigating the strange odyssey of the missing nude "posture photos," I found that the issue is, in every respect, a very touchy matter -- indeed, a kind of touchstone for registering the uneven evolution of attitudes toward body, race and gender in the past half-century...



The entire article is both bizarre and fascinating. Have a look.

[MaxBigfoot]

This is twilight zone stuff.  Too weird for me to have even thought possible, until I read about it.

[MaxBigfoot]

Watch out for the bump!   

[MaxBigfoot]

What you don't want to see in your rear view mirror.   

[TheZookie007]

What you don't want to see in your rear view mirror.   

Straight out of a Mad Max nightmare

[MaxBigfoot]

Some talent and imagination used here! 

[rtpoe]

TOOT!

[MaxBigfoot]

Ok, that one made me laugh out loud!   

[MaxBigfoot]

Fashion is stupid?

[MaxBigfoot]

 

[rtpoe]

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WASHINGTON NATIONALS ON WINNING THE PENNANT!!!

First one in franchise history!

[CarlTL]

Thanos realizing he is so turbo fucked.

[MaxBigfoot]

Never in a million years, for a million dollars...   

[solvegas]

^ Man, I get vertigo and the chills just looking at that photo.