8 days ago: AWESOME! Unsolicited offers for people to send photos to me are always welcome, as are any other ways in which Fanpop can suffer all the social ills of Facebook! Just note these items from my Playgirl centerfold back in the 90s:

Harold's Turn-ons:
* long walks on the beach
* creative new get-rich-quick-by-helping-me-exchange-my-vast-savings-of-foreign-currency offers (I have a world map with little flag pins in it showing all the countries from which I've received such offers)
* cuddling by the fire
* hearing that random faceless people are interested in an intimate relationship with me, especially when we've never interacted at all previously. Who can spare the time for all that getting-to-know-each-other crap, anyway? I especially favor unshaven, middle-aged Australian men masquerading as college co-eds.
* laughing at my jokes

Harold's Turn-offs:
* writing "I" in lower-case. I hated it when it was just Ziggy, how much more will I hate it when you do it?
* users without profile pictures
* obvious spam. Put some effort into it, for pete's sake! Don't just paste in virgin copy! Give me some illusion that there's a real person online somewhere!
* enthusiasm for the Star Wars prequels. Nothing kills a romantic encounter like "Ooh, baby, you know episode 3 was actually pretty good!"
* failing to use spaces to separate words
* incoherent flames. If you are going to react out of all proportion and start attacking someone, at least have it scan well, so that people can follow your tirade.
* posting on a web site only to advertise for another site, especially a dating site.

8 days ago: Thank you. PLEASE REPORT! PLEEEEAAAASE! There is an incredible amount of crap and broken content on the site, making Fanpop less and less useful each day. More and more users I know are leaving because the site has so much bad content...

...well, to be honest, it's that AND the hideous ads that are driving users away.

And I add my big sloppy wet "Thank you!" to ineedcoffee for the note about the "follow these three simple steps to view your content" links. SPAAAAAAAMMM! While just saying that these should be reported doesn't actually get those off the site or change user behavior on a large enough scale to diminish the number of such posts, it is a great comfort to me to know that I'm not alone in despising these abominations.

8 days ago: Updated.

8 days ago: Nice. Not sure why it wasn't posted here to the image gallery, but that's your choice, of course!

8 days ago: It's a nice resource, though the layout is pretty hideous. My hope is that people will use it and stop asking for character names in this club, over and over again, but it's a hope tempered by a lot of skepticism.

8 days ago: Here's another article about it, in this club: http://www.fanpop.com/spots/christmas/articles/1397

9 days ago: Whether you can watch videos full screen or not depends on the source site for the video - Fanpop does not store videos on their own database machines. Instead, every video link is a link to another site's video content (think Blinkx or dailymotion). For many sites, Fanpop has made an arrangement to accommodate the site's "embed a video" code into Fanpop, so that if you post a link to that site's content to Fanpop, Fanpop will automatically recognize it as an embeddable video and both put it into the videos section and make it so that you can play the video on Fanpop, without having to leave for the other site (sadly, Fanpop hasn't done this with blinkx videos yet, so all those show up as "links" rather than "videos"). What this means, though, is that those other sites provide the complete video-viewing interface, so it's up to those sites whether there is a "view full-screen" version or not. YouTube is notorious for changing how their embedded video player works, so it's entirely possible that YouTube videos can no longer be played full-screen on another site, or that the people who post to YouTube can specify whether to allow full-screen viewing or not. The same can be said for other video sharing sites, of course, just that they tend to not change how their players work anywhere near as often as YouTube pulls changes on us users.

16 days ago: Attempting to play the video in the embedded player: "Video cannot be found"

following the link to the source site just sends us back to the Fanpop top page.

Maybe there's a special player that is needed?

Edit: no, it's just a browser compatibility issue. My version of Firefox won't play this, but Chrome will. Never mind.

16 days ago: Wow - this is an interesting list. I don't know all of the songs, but none of the eight or so that I do would I consider Christmas songs at all.

16 days ago: Every year I talk about taking video of my expedition to harvest some mistletoe from whatever dying tree I can find that has some. It's usually pretty funny, because it grows on old-growth oaks here in California, and most of those are difficult to climb without equipment.

It should be noted that the common reason that mistletoe features so prominently in so many myths and disparate cultures is that it was thought to be "evergreen"...it's not really evergreen: it has a life cycle and dies down like most other plants, but that change is not necessarily in sync with the seasonal cycle. Early cultures observed that it thrived even when the trees around it were dying. In oak and other deciduous forests, the trees lose much if not all of their foliage at winter, leaving only the bright chartreuse clusters of mistletoe visible. Of course, trees would also die off because the mistletoe colony was overwhelming them, but we don't know if that was clear to ancient societies. So it seemed like this one plant thrived when everything around it died, making it appear especially hardy. So you'd kiss (and do various other rites) under or near the mistletoe in the hopes that its health would be imparted to the participants by proximity.