Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - April 2000
A hard man is good to beat
Galleries added this month.
Atomicboy has his own bookshelf now.
Stories added this month.
Movies added this month.
I've had a word with Lucretia, who checks the links each day, and explained how to tell the difference between a Geocities site that's still there, and one that's just a Geocities advert that says there used to be a site there. So the list of sites and which are stiull active will (I think) be more accurate now.
Also, people have started to use my Add-a-link form, which will mean more links for everyone. If you know a good link, let me know.
Diana's Magic Carpet is not just an alphabetic list of arm flexing ladies with biceps of varying sizes. This photo collection is the most extensive pictorial guide to female bodybuilding so far, in the opinion of the author who has followed the sport for about 30 years. And the scope for growth is huge.
"It's extraordinary, it's erotic, no-one a generation ago would have dreamt of it," commented one of Britain's leading male natural bodybuilders, a man who likes his women to be as muscular as possible.
These pictures also highlight the mystery over the way that bodybuilt women have only evolved so recently. Ms Hercules had no place in Darwinian evolution until the present era.
The rich depths of the Magic Carpet are indeed magical. We find the sumptuous physiques of several stars who seem to lead very private lives (presumably to escape the intrusive camera). Also photos of forgotten talents, members of the 1960s/70s generation of women who began to put serious muscle on the map.
These photos, in my opinion, prove the huge appeal of intimate private shots as opposed to public posing in contest line-ups or the great outdoors. For instance the German bodybuilder Christa Bauch, born in 1947 and still one of the most ripely defined women, looks far better in a smiling biceps close-up than stretching her limbs against a stark urban or mountain landscape.
There remains of course the question which no-one's fully answered. How does it arise that muscular women hardly feature in history prior to the first glimpses which appeared in photos in the second half of the 19th century ? Human instincts can hardly have changed in just 100 years, yet now we are seeing a whole new pantheon of physical culture with females building ultra-muscular bodies apparently for the first time.
It's true that just here and there the muscled female appears in painting and sculpture from the past. For instance Michelangelo's well-known fresco of the muscular Sibyl (a prophetic witch or the mouthpiece of a deity); also the heroic female stonework images on French municipal buildings in the 19th century. And the ancient Cretans depicted muscular girls leaping in somersaults between the horns of the awesome bull or Minotaur.
It's evident that the male Hercules has been a powerful archetype since antiquity, but that can't be said of his female counterpart.
There was no sign of focused interest until photos of circus, cabaret and fair ground strong women began to be published 100-140 years ago. Thereafter the early 20th century started to produce some minor magazine and newsletter coverage. Finally athletic women were celebrating the beauty of their strong arms and shoulders. Female biceps were being flexed in public with increasing pride and candour.
And the excitement of the last 30 years certainly shows that something major has been discovered. Not least that a hardcore minority of men are attracted to weight trained females. (It's as though men had lacked the courage to admit these feelings in all previous eras).
"It's a huge market," commented Andrulla Blanchette, the British bodybuilder, soon after she put pages onto internet.
Thus far, however, the female bodybuilder remains a somewhat obscure personality. The general public don't know much about her. Also very few of these women have launched themselves through career or marriage into high powered circles. The musclewoman has not become the trophy wife of the media or property tycoon (though perhaps a breakthrough on this front is imminent ?).
She remains typically the wife or partner of another weight trainer, perhaps running a gym or personal training business. She attracts plenty of fans and e-mail worldwide but still lacks serious fame and fortune.
Lorena Ferruzzi's Herculean physique at first suggests the fanstasy drawings of the muscle cartoonist. This mature Italian woman combines an Amazon warrior's demeanour with the most blatant vascular muscling that a female of her bone structure could aspire to. Ferruzzi's preference for combat accessories must tell something of her character. Her unique muscle quality generates Olympian authority and feelings of disbelief in the beholder.
Renee Casella, a prominent U.S. competitor since the 1980s, seems to duck the limelight. Which may explain why her world class physical development, particularly in her upper body, hasn't been fully recognised. These photos reveal the extravagant contours of Casella's pumped arms and shoulders; also the lean supremacy of her brimming pectoral muscles. No time wasting with plastic surgery boobs here. Upright rowing with serious weight on the bar must provide her most photogenic back view.
Susan Myers, another U.S. front-runner for a long while, also seems to sidestep regular publicity. Indeed she preserves the stunning quality of her physique as something of a secret. The usual bodybuilding adjectives fail to evoke her special beauty. A women's muscle magazine a while ago reported that her arms were currently "very very muscular". Well that description conveys little of the rich ripening of her glowing biceps, and nothing of her overall glamour. Her smile reaches out like Helen of Troy.
Powerlifter and bodybuilder Jill Mills is a brilliant young newcomer to the scene who is striving to weigh 200 lbs (last reported at 170 lbs). She blames her slim appetite for slow gains. In her home town San Antonio, Texas, she finds she's really the only female anywhere near her own (U.S. National) strength level. Her cheerful internet pages, designed in France, have been up since last year. At about 5' 3" in height her vital measurements are remarkable -- biceps 17" and calves a bit more.
American Renee Toney is possibly the world's ultimate female physique. Her muscular bulk and definition are a match for many tall male bodybuilders with years of contest experience. Toney's flexed biceps and triumphant smile tell it all. These biceps are not just big cannon balls. Their highly peaked contours, rampant with detail, compel and amaze the eye. Toney is also a wild and flamboyant wrestler.
Caron Hospedales is a U.S. bodybuilder of truly striking elegance who sports possibily the world's most perfectly sculpted legs. A Madonna smile enhances her instinctive posing talent. Hospedales is not in the heavy duty 17" biceps league, but she knows how to make an even more telling entrance.
Sally McNeil's story lately has been tragic, as many people know, but the omens look fairly positive for her pending U.S. Federal Court Appeal. McNeil is still serving life in the Valley State Prison for Women in California following the fatal shooting of her husband Ray McNeil, a Mr California, back in 1995. She is deprived of weights, but manages to run a fast three miles and perform 500-1,000 press-ups several days a week. An ex-U.S. Marine and Armed Forces Physique Champion, she remains amazingly courageous and muscular. McNeil feels ready to re-enter her career.
Wendy Jeal, a British hurdler and track athlete, is another woman gifted with world class calf and thigh definition. She's shown here exercising her legs which are perhaps more remarkable than Tommie Moreau's when the latter was at her muscular peak some years ago. The cuts and sculpting on Jeal's calves when she's running or heel raising made her the star of any track event.
(Nationality not always evident)
Linda Bevlander appears as a thrilling biceps girl who cocks wild arm muscles while roaring with laughter. Carmen Brady, a superbly muscular blond, displays a classic upper body and whopping calves. Virginia Brady, sparklingly pretty, understands the simple truths of posing. Notice the way she dramatises her biceps and shoulders by gently placing her hands behind her waist.
Mario Calo, another hard core blond, clearly trains very heavy. She's extraordinarily muscular. Calo's brief shorts display her fighting legs; her lat spread is evidently too wide for any swimsuit.
Sue-Anne McKean was an intense and magnetic U.S. bodybuilder from the 1970s era who shone as a slim-built star with compelling boy-girl looks. Her statistics were well short of today's champions, but McKean's determined muscularity drew a lot of serious attention. Her telling eye, while absorbed in muscle building, told a very genuine story.
Ruth Bergenson, a strong woman from the 1960s, shows superbly acute biceps with a big smile. She was clearly very aware of her physical development and looked dramatic in a short sleeveless dress. Perhaps her background details will emerge.
Miss Mara, circus trapeze artist, was one of the heroines of Paula Mollerup's WPC bodybuilding newsletter in the U.S. in the 1960s/early '70s. Mara was an exotic Latin beauty with perhaps the most intensely peaked biceps of her era. These photos reveal her innocent smiling pride while flexing her arms. She was evidently a compelling trapeze performer with a lithe electrifying physique. She must have known how beautiful she was. You can sense this in her glance.
Lois Bosher is recalled in these intriguing though poor quality pictures of some 30 years ago. Like Miss Mara, Bosher was a leading light in Paula Mollerup's newsletter. She was depicted as a husky weight lifting maiden with particularly muscular arms and shoulders. Her occupation was never indicated, but her background could have been in farming or construction work. Bosher understood the excitement of high peak biceps.
March was a very interesting and exciting month for me on servers. You know the old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times".
On Thursday the ninth of March, we moved Vanessa to her destination, in Washington DC. She's about six feet tall, and weighs 500 pounds (that's roughly two -jabbers), so that was not a small job. To move her, we dismembered her, and when we put her back I was pleasantly surprised that she was functioning fine. Vanessa consists of five computers running Linux all working as a team, with about 1200 gigabytes (1.2 terabytes) of disk space, of which about a terabyte will be available for pictures. If the average size of a picture is 50kb, then I can get 20 million pictures into that. If you look at one picture every ten seconds, it will take you six years to look at them all. But while you're doing that, another 30 million pictures will arrive ...
On the 11th March, we got the newsfeed working, so that Vanessa could munch on Usenet and process the news into NewsThumbs. On the 12th March, Vanessa went live. Did someone ask about testing? We take the industry-standard approach here - chuck it in the water and see if it floats. Well, if anything bad happens, I can switch back to Mary. And over the next several days, I was fixing various little problems, hooking up to a second news provider, looking at what new newsgroups I could add, adding a power cycler.
Here's what this will mean for members.
Mary will still be around, to act as a backup for Vanessa, so if there's a problem, I can at least offer a reduced service via Mary. Reduced, because Mary won't have the wider range of newsgroups that Vanessa has.
With the extra space and power of Vanessa, I've started adding some additional newsgroups. Most of them won't be to your taste, because I've noticed that people don't usually follow more than a few newsgroups out of the total. But I started by adding all the ones that I've been asked for since I last added to the list, and then I added a dozen likely-looking ones. And then I added a few dozen more. I'm working my way through the list of all 30,000; I'm avoiding newsgroups that are mostly video (video CDs and MPGs), sound (realAudio and MP3s) and software. This is because there's simply too much of it.
Some of the new ones have pretty uninformative names, like alt.binaries.scanmaster, and alt.funk-you. You'll just have to check them out to see if you like them.
I can put up 30,000 newsgroups. But I'm not planning to. A lot of those are "joke newsgroups" like alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork, or "vanity newsgroups" where someone created a newsgroupjust for himself and his pals. All you ever get in those is spam, so we call them "spam-traps". There's also a lot of excellent informative newsgroups, such as es.comp.os.linux.misc, which is the spanish-language group for people with Linux questions, or comp.os.linux.answers which is an English-language group. There's lots of newsgroups in Chinese and Russian. And then there's groups like alt.usenet.kooks, and alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk. Not to mention the Nose, the Romathians and the Meowers (if you don't know, then don't ask). So it isn't a matter of just putting up the pictures from 30,000 newsgroups; most of them don't have any pictures (except the spam, of course). However, I'm quite happy to put up text-only newsgroups. All the newsgroups that I'm covering, have the text posts as well as the pictures via Newsthumbs.
Please email me with your requests (please make sure you spell the newsgroup name exactly as it's given). If I don't have access to the newsgroup, then I can't do much, but if it's among my 30,000 then I can add it. Also email me if you think that one or more of the newsgroups shouldn't be there. But this is the same stuff that you can access via AOL, Compuserve, and 100,000 other servers, and there's thirty or fifty thousand pictures per day, and no-one can look at all of them. And please don't ask me to keep pictures of type X out of newsgroup Y, I can't. I cannot look at, and make a decision about, 50,000 pictures per day. The only choice I have, is to stop getting newsgroup Y, so let me know if you think I should drop a newsgroup (or add one). For more details on this, see "I wish to make a complaint"
Don't tell me if you think that a newsgroup is not of interest to you; I fully expect that more than 95% of newsgroups will be of no interest to most people. For example, alt.binaries.pictures.rail is mostly railroad rolling stock, alt.binaries.pictures.motorcycles.harley is mostly bikes, and alt.binaries.pictures.animals is cats, dogs, wolves and a warthog. But I know that some people have a passion for railroads, others for bikes, and everyone knows that Fluffy owns usenet. So, ignore the newsgroups that you have no interest in, and put the ones you like in your Favourite Newsgroups and then you can simply ignore the full list of newsgroups (maybe you'll want to check back occasionally in case there's one that's been added that you like the look of).
Yes, it isn't clickable. If you want to know why, read my article about the spambots that harvest email addresses and then spam you.
More interest and excitement. On Monday, March 20th, there was a power outage at Telehouse New York, where Joan is. They have a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) to prevent this happening; the problem was caused by the UPS (of course, what else?).
Joan carries the main server (galleries, movie theatres and library), and also the main chat room. After power came back, Joan was still sulking, and had to be coaxed back to life, with numerous fscks (if you don't know how to fsck a server, don't ask; if you do ask, be careful how you pronounce it). So, as soon as it was clear that this wasn't just a two-minute job, we switched the main load over to Diana (which means slower service, but that's better than none).
Diana carried the load for a few hours, then when Joan was feeling fit and hearty, we switched back to Joan. I got a letter of apology from the Technical Manager at Telehouse, and I wrote back offering to send Sandi Stone to help explain to the engineer responsible why he shouldn't do it again. So, my backup systems worked, which is nice.
Then, some hours later (and according to plan), I took Vanessa down so that we could add a remote control for the power switches. This means that if there's a problem, I can power off and back on again, even though Vanessa is several thousand miles away!
The list of muscle women was getting very long, so I split it onto two lists, one for named women, and one for sites that cover the whole area.
I also added a handy little form for people to send in new links that they've found.
A new Bookshop! Collector is offering 30 stories, priced between $3 and $11, or you can buy the entire bunch of 30 stories for $50. You can see the free Collector stories, then visit the Shopping Mall
We're sponsoring Helen Von Mott to go to Florida to compete in the Brazilian Ju Jitsu contest organised by Gracie.
And Christine Envall has joined our growing list of Sponsored women. Christine is our first Australian to be sponsored.
We're also sponsoring two women to go to to the world powerlifting finals, Sandra Mobley and Suzanne Hartwig. I hope they both do very well, and they'll be bringing back lots of pictures for the web site.
The Ms Olympia will be in Vegas this year; they're including the Mr O in the same event, which should help its popularity. Check out BA's Bashes Message Board, he'll have the latest info there.
By Runner
A lot of frustrated power squeeze fans have found the old Power Squeeze site with its description and "squeeze" criteria, but no way of signing up. And the message board was of no particular help either. So the original program, good idea that it was, lay dormant and uninspired for many, many moons.
Enter a new, better, and exciting concept--Power Squeeze clubs at the local level and a way to get them started and active. The problem with the old way was that there was no machinery to connect women and men who are really into power squeezing, mixed-wrestling, self-defense for women, and inter-gender hands on rough and tumble. So we've developed a new, improved system.
To begin with, there is no Power Squeeze program without the participation of strong, able women who like the challenge of doing friendly combat with respectful men who aren't afraid to wrestle and get squeezed (and no doubt vanquished) by stronger women who are delighted to have the chance to kick some male butts. But how to find these delightful Amazons?
Diana the Valkyrie to the rescue. With her able assistance we have set up an INFORMATION-GATHERING form at the New Power Squeeze Advertisng site in Diana's Clubhouse. Here, Power Squeeze hopefuls can list their gender, geographical location, e-mail address, Squeeze "Criteria" (as found at the old Power Squeeze site), and other helpful info. With this information I will create a list of Power Squeeze enthusiasts by geographical location, and once we have a core group in a particular place, I'll help them connect and start an informal Power Squeeze club, where they can meet, make wrestling or power squeeze dates, find favorable places for battle, get professional guests for wrestling and power squeeze tips, have group dinners, go on outings, and have one great time with people who like to get physical in a rough-housing way. But, again we need every interested party to get out there and recruit eager, fit, and powerful women. And we need women to recruit other women, and get them onto our lists through the information-gathering form.
So fill out the information-gathering page so that we can:
And make Power Squeeze one of the most fun, dynamic, and successful programs in Diana's realm.
There's a new Power Squeeze Personals page, for squeezers and squeezees.
Lady Victoria has a message board - she's a professional wrestler, and you can also see her web site
Diva also has a new Message Board. Diva is also a professional wrestler, and she also has her own web site.
Renee O'Neill is doing a survey on the future of women's bodybuilding. Please take a few moments to fill in the form
If you look in the chatroom archives for 3/19, you'll find that Tre agreed to a wrestling match with Gabrielle when he visits Las Vegas in August. Various members pledged their support for Gabby's fee. Here's Tre's plan:
Quiet Tre' - She's an attractive woman...I don't see her being capable of hurting me...and if I give her a massage *before* we fight, well, she'd be putty in my hands : )
Dragon - Gabby will be waiting for you in your hotel room to chew bubble gum and kick ass. Whoops!!! She forgot her gum!
Quiet Tre' - She's 6-2, so I'm only giving up 4 inches, which I easily overcome with my 'testosterone advantage
And so on. Read it yourself, a bit after 1.45 am.
By the way, in case you're wondering why Clepsydra announces the time every so often, it's so that you can find things when someone says what time they were said.
Member | Posts |
| gaily304 | 4799 |
| mike1965 | 4683 |
| tre1313 | 3999 |
| jabb6328 | 3004 |
| jmcst107 | 2884 |
| Diana the Valkyrie | 2756 |
| dgt321 | 2662 |
| stone001 | 2579 |
| pan314 | 2228 |
| dragon321 | 2090 |
| TomNine | 2066 |
| boomer444 | 1722 |
| cry2cin | 1512 |
| stu666 | 1337 |
| cp999dv | 1310 |
| rainer0000 | 1227 |
| envallc | 1172 |
| sen | 1040 |
| 1568pjr | 1039 |
| baa218 | 970 |
Gaily is top chatter this month, but Mad Scientist is very close behind. Tre, despite his busy shooting schedule, manages a respectable third place
The Events message board has been renamed and revitalised; it's now being kept up by BA. So there will be lots of opportunities for web site folks to meet up and socialise with each other, and go on the usual "muscle safaris".
Remi and Giselle Sass have both announced that they're pregnant. Congratulations to each of you, and the best of luck to the new babies!
I've changed the Message Board archiving, so that when the number of messages reaches 100, the oldest 50 are moved to the archive area (previously it was 100). The reason for doing that, is that when you load up the list of posts, 200 posts takes twice as long to load as 100. This also means that each file added to the archive will be half as big as they used to be, which also means faster loading.
Board of the month | Poster of the month | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Scooby's board is still the most popular, of the on-topic boards. TomNine is close on his heels, but if you combine the "Session Economics" and "Low cost session" boards, which are pretty much on very similar topics, their combined total is greater. Boomer has out-stripped Wwwilddude, which I'm sure gives hima lot of pleasure! | The most prolific poster is still Shanice, mostly on the Chess board. Followed by Patrick, also on Chess. But the biggest on-topic poster is still Andrez de Tijuana. |
Will Tre survive his meeting with Gabrielle? What happened when TomNine met Jazzmon? Who's the mystery Australian competitive fbb doing sessions for $63 per 90 minutes? What will happen when Jabber meets Denny in New York? Will Boomer attend the art show in New York, or will he send Bud to take his place? Why have both Remi and Giselle Sass, almost adjacent on the list of message boards, both announced a new baby within days of each other? Just a coincidence? Or is there Something in the Message Boards?
It's Spring! The daffodils are out, the cheery blossom is pink, and don't forget that on the the first day of this month there's the annual Internet Spring Cleanout. It's synchronised to run from 11am to noon local time, the Internet Cleaning Bot visits all sites to delete files that haven't been accessed for the last 12 months. Make sure that you're connected to the internet at the time if you want your hard disk to be tidied up; last year it reclaimed 12.6% of my disk space for me. Alternatively, if you don't want your systems swept, make sure that you're not logged in to the net at 11am. Here's a list of the files that are on your hard disk. Double-click on any folders if you want to see what files are in that directory. You can help speed the work of the bot if, before noon, you delete any files that you no longer require. To delete files, you simply choose the ones you want to get rid of, and hit the delete key. But make sure that you don't delete anything important!
Now might also be a good time to take a backup.
I checked the site statistics. that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of March 2000, there were about 259,000 pictures (13.0 gigabytes), 17.6 gigabytes of video, 3700 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 31 gigabytes.
On Vanessa, the new Newsthumbs server, there's the NewsThumbs, which is another 1,028,000 pictures in 80 gigabytes and 1.3 million text files, a total of 83 gigabytes. So Vanessa has got more than half as many files as Mary already - that's because Vanessa is carrying more newsgroups.
In addition, on the old Newsthumbs server, there's the old NewsThumbs, which is another 1,944,000 pictures in 150 gigabytes and 2.4 million text files, a total of 155 gigabytes.