Happy Holiday

To those of you in the USA celebrating a holiday.

Thanksgiving is a double holiday for us. In addition to the obvious, it's also the day we adopted as our anniversary date for the Funhouse. I know that I started publishing in November of 1995, but I don't remember the exact date, so I use Thanksgiving as a safe marker, since it's at the end of the month.

And that means that today is our 15th anniversary. The site started as a free site on an AOL URL in November of 1995, when Bill Clinton was still in his first term. It moved over to scoopy.com some time in 1996, then became an "adult verification" site on scoopy.net in the summer of 1997, and finally became a subscription site on scoopy.net from May of 1998 to the present day.

Anybody remember when it was a partner with another celeb site called Atlantis, and both were free sites sponsored by another site called A Sexy Cafe? Were any of you actually around all the way back in the AOL days, when I wrote the whole thing in a character voice? Those things happened a long time ago, 14-15 years in internet time, which is like 200 years of real time.

It's been a lotta years.

Miley Cyrus turned three years old on about the same day the site began.

Both of my parents were alive when the site began. Now they're both gone. When I started to write this page my youngest was nine years old. Now she's a music video co-ordinator who works with some big-time stars in L.A., as well as an experienced world traveler whose life is far more interesting than mine. My second-youngest was eleven years old. Now he has two daughters of his own. My oldest son, known to many of you as Scoopy Junior, who collaborated with me on the site for years, is nearly 40 years old.

In the early days we had an Industry Insider who would occasionally send in celebrity pics of parties at his own house, sometimes even with a little C-list celebrity nudity! The Insider was really Dale Davis, the surfing photographer. Dale became a close friend of mine. We talked on the phone every day, and he sent me all kinds of cool memorabilia and various photos and videos which I still have sitting around somewhere. That seems like it happened about a week ago, but Dale died of a stroke more than nine years ago, when he was younger than I am now.

But, you know what? It's still fun.

 

 

Some site trivia:

• The first picture ever to appear on the site was the one of Madonna hitchhiking naked.
• The first "branded" imager/contributor was a guy nicknamed Helcrom. I have no idea where he is now.
• Tuna, once our most prolific contributor (although OZ and Aesthete may actually have passed him by now), and a daily columnist for about a decade, is now a spectacularly good photographer. He's an amateur, and I'm not an expert, but I think his best nature photography could be in National Geographic. He has the eye, and he also has mad Photoshop skills to polish it all.