Folks, I apologize for the mess here earlier today. I rather botched my WordPress upgrade, resulting in a borked blog for about six hours and then (after technical support bailed me out by the judicious application of almost-fresh backups) the loss of comments made in (roughly speaking) the last 24 hours. If you’re one of the people whose comments were lost, my apologies.

An alert reader sent me this link to a Craigslist post featuring what looks like a semi-nude (one boob) shot of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin in her beauty queen days, complete with huge 1980s hair.

The nude picture was found in company with this pageant bikini-contest shot:

Is this Palin? I dunno. It could be a random brunette with “Alaska” photoshopped onto the banner. It could be her. I just dunno.

Moving along to the nude picture you’ve all been waiting for:

Now, understand, I’m terrible with faces. My face recognizer is so bad that I don’t recognize my friends at the grocery store, half the time. And to me, this grainy black-and-white face doesn’t jump out as “obviously” Sarah Palin — either the current mother of five or the pageant beauty we saw yesterday. It’s just some random brunette showing a breast.

But if we believe the bikini shot…

It’s a clever sort of misdirection. Similar backgrounds, same white drape, similar hair. But to my eye, the face is much more bland. I can’t say it’s the same girl; I don’t think it’s the same girl. But, you know, it maybe could be, if a guy wanted to believe badly enough.

While still trying to decide whether I had a picture worth showing you, I moved my attention to the awesome hot leather miniskirt photo in the same Craigslist post. I was suspicious of that one; Palin is not that tall and her legs aren’t quite that thunderous. Final nail in the coffin: The Museum of Hoaxes has the source photo that Palin’s headshot was chopped from.

From there, I followed links through a ValleyWag story to this photoshop contest page, where, hey guess what? They have the nude picture already! It turns out to be an old internet photo widely circulated as being a nude photo of some celebrity I’ve never heard of, one Julia Louis Dreyfus. And even then, the majority of the sites showing it advertise it as a fake — so it may not even be Ms. Dreyfus.

I deem it unlikely that a nude photograph of Sarah Palin has been circulating for years on the internet, being deliberately mis-labeled as a Julia Louis Dreyfus nude. I guess it’s a theoretical possibility, but if I were you I’d be more worried about flying monkeys shooting out of John McCain’s ass.

Bottom line, folks: You can’t believe just anything you see on the internet. This will not be the last “nude Sarah Palin” picture we see. It may not even be the last nude Sarah Palin photo you see on ErosBlog. But the next time you see one, it would be good to remain skeptical.

To be honest, the most interesting photo to me is the bikini one of the girl with the “Alaska” sash. Is that Palin? Finding it in company with Photoshops makes me skeptical, but it’s an attractive photo (actually, video screen capture I believe) and I’d enjoy having it confirmed.

As always when Photoshop enters a discussion on ErosBlog, commenters need to remember that I am ruthless about deleting expressions of insupportable certitude. Opinions and arguments are welcome, but absolute claims and excessive certainty (“that’s obviously fake”, “Of course that’s real”) are rude and foolish and will be moderated away.

I’m crediting Wonkette with establishing the “GILF” meme back when Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska got sworn in:

She’s a former Miss Alaska contestant (Miss Wasilla 1984), and so you’ll see this old beauty contest mugshot being widely circulated:

Now that the cable news networks are reporting that she’s been tapped by John McCain as his vice presidential running mate, it’s time to remind the world that there’s a persistent rumor of a Sarah Palin nude photo “out there”. If it’s real, and it’s out there, and you have it, please send it along to ErosBlog, would ya?

The rumor surfaced during Palin’s gubernatorial campaign, when allegations flew around Alaska (and even reached my tender ears, the Internet being what it is) that such a photo was being circulated by her political opponents as part of a dirty tricks campaign. Although the story was not much reported by responsible press outlets, I got emails asking me if I knew where to get the photo, so I know the rumors were real; and there’s a shadow of them in the cesspools you find wherever newspapers publish “blogs” and then leave the comments open and unmoderated. (Ask Violet Blue how much to trust the stuff people write when they are fingerpainting in that sewage, though; she’ll give you an earful.)

I’d be more dubious about the whole story if not for the fact that one of my email correspondents claims to have seen the nude photo of Palin. Admittedly, the provenance on this story is so bad it’s classic: he says a guy in a bar showed him the printout of the email that was circulating. And, you know, it was a bar; the light was bad.

Since Governor Palin’s wild teen years were (if they happened at all) in the early 1980s, before the advent of digital photography, I’m pretty skeptical about the whole “nude photo” story. If the alleged shot ever surfaces, I’d expect it to be a photoshop of one of her beauty pageant pictures. She was a pretty girl in 1984, and she’s still – as they used to say in more delicate times and bad western movies — a fine figure of a woman.

Her husband, by the way, is a commercial fisherman (think Deadliest Catch), oilfield worker (think “drill rig at forty below zero”), and endurance snowmobile racer. He’s perfectly capable of kicking your ass, or mine, so be nice.

Remember the foot with the pussy in it? That was a manufactured fetish object, sadly no longer available.

The foot nipple, on the other hand, just growed. It’s real, all right; there are pictures. The foot nipple even has those wayward nipple hairs growing out of it. (We’ve seen them before, too.)

Apparently nipples in unusual places are not that that unusual, in the grand scheme of things, but the foot nipple is a first in the medical literature:

A 22-year-old woman sought medical care for a lesion in the plantar region of her left foot, a well-formed nipple surrounded by areola and hair…. To our knowledge, this is the first report of supernumerary breast tissue on the foot.

…

Anomalies associated with breast development are not uncommon. Supernumerary nipples, and less frequently supernumerary breasts, are present in about 1-5 percent of the population. Such alterations are more common in women, usually occurring along the embryonic milk line, which extends from the axilla to the groin.

Supernumerary breast tissue (SBT) is rarely found beyond the mammary line. However, the back, shoulder, face, and thigh have been described as sites of SBT development.

Thanks to The Beautiful Kind for blogging this.

My sister is a big fan of the Olympics and sent me this picture during the Chinese games:

All she said in the email is that it’s the world’s largest penis and it is somewhere in China. If that’s true, my question is why is it a circumcised one? I thought automatic chopping was just an American thing (fetish, mutilation, whatever).

Since Bacchus is grooving on the medical drawings this week, here’s a fun, older post on penis evolution from Pharyngula. Some of the comments are pretty funny.

(B., I asked my GYN once about that fingers-in-and-pushing-down-with-the-outside-hand action……she said it was to feel how big the uterus is. Soooo. Sexy. NOT!!)

Aphrodite didn’t like the “icky speculum”, so maybe fingers will serve better?

I must confess to some puzzlement, however. WTF is the anchor doing in this diagram?

Update: Source found: Married To The Sea webcomic, direct link.

I never thought I would call “that special part of a man,” as the enhancement commercials refer to it, as man junk. I’m just too fond of penises, and all the fun that’s possible with a willing one…..provided it’s attached to a decent guy of course.

Not that I’m automatically dissing the guy in this photo, you understand. It isn’t his fault that the picture-taker obviously forgot to check the background when composing this shot:

But I can see (Ha!) where someone would look at that picture and call his goods “man junk.” The lesson here is always check the background of your photo before taking the shot. And have a good telephoto lens handy in case you see something that looks interesting!!

[Isn’t that a nice way to push that icky speculum diagram down the page? I’m still cringing.]