Brigitte Bardot turns 75 this week. Bardot was the bombshell of the 1950's and 60's. There are a couple of fun articles about how she led her life and on her unique style of beauty here and here.

Corinne Maier wrote a best-seller in France a couple of years ago about why she might not have kids if she got to do it all again. She's the mother of two kids and the book caused a bit of a sensation in France. Now it's been translated into English and it's one of the top-selling books on Amazon right now. Here's some reasons to not have kids;

•You will lose touch with your friends
•Your sex life will be over
•Children cost a fortune
•Child-rearing is endless drudgery
•Vacations will be nightmares
•You’ll lose your identity and become just “mom” or “dad”
•Your children will become mindless drones of capitalism
•The planet’s already overcrowded
•Your children will inevitably disappoint you

See more about No Kids: 40 Good Reasons Not to Have Children

Here's an unusually good ad where one man sees his ideal of beauty, but only after a beer or two.

Here's a free iPhone app focused on true love advice. It's a collection of 15 videos that address the central questions about love, such as what is true love, what is an ideal marriage and how to avoid split-ups.

There's a lot of love related apps out there but most of them are very airy fairy type of quotes and quizzes. Love Advice explores the deeper question, beyond simple ego love.

This season's America's Next Top Model sets out to find a top model who is under 5'7" (170 centimeters). See the contestants in the video below.

Here's a neat glossy black vinyl decal you can place on your laptop cover for $14. It's called Snow's Revenge.

An Adam and Eve decal would be an even cooler idea.

While many of us can expect to live to age 80 or 90 today, there are some scientists that believe our young children could live to 150.

Aubrey de Grey believes that "anti-ageing therapies will improve faster than we age, so that a young person today will be able to stave off ageing almost indefinitely."

See an interesting article about lengthening life spans here.

Here's a funny Old Spice commercial.

Susan Boyle's CD I Dreamed A Dream is now available for pre-order on Amazon. Even though it won't be available for sale until late November, it is already the number one best selling product in Amazon's music category.

Megan Fox graces the October cover of Cosmopolitan Magazine. In the interview inside, she has this to say about how she maintains equal power with men in her relationships and flirting;

“It’s fun when someone intends to put you in his back pocket, but instead, he walks away wounded. I make it a mind game so they don’t know if I’m hitting on them or mocking them. Male actors drop lines about their private jets, trying to seem powerful, but I don’t give a s—. I don’t need someone else’s power. I’m obtaining my own.”

We're off for another primitive, backwoods vacation where there will be no internet access and more than a few (figurative) mosquitoes.

We'll be back here on August 23rd.

In the meantime, hope you will enjoy the regular updates from some of our friends;

- In Your Face
- Celebrity Cosmetic Surgery
- Before and After TV
- Plastic Surgery 101

cheers,
Meg and Adriana

Here's a site where you can digitally alter your photos. They have a free Makeup Photo service that lets you whiten yellowish teeth, get rid of acne, wrinkles, red eye, oily skin or glare. It sounds a lot easier than using Photoshop.

Here's a neat drawing lesson using Megan Fox as the model. Start from scratch and see how to draw this picture of Megan Fox. See the video below;

The Times Online has a story today about how people are increasingly getting their holiday photos airbrushed and retouched, at significant cost. One photography chain in Britain has seen a 550% increase in people requesting photo retouching in the past year.

This is probably largely due to the popularity of posting your photos on Myspace and Facebook.

David Lewis, a psychologist and the author of Loving and Loathing: the Enigma of Personal Attraction, said: “There are very few people who are not vain to some extent and we are increasingly using vision to estimate someone’s true worth. People are now acting as their own PR agents to put a spin on their looks.

“It’s usually harmless, but the problem can come when reality meets the image.”

See the story and a 'before and after' airbrushed beach bikini photo here.

The airbrushed photo above is by Fraser Stephen

Have you got a question you need an oracle answer to right now? Here's a great YouTube Oracle exercise. Ask any 'yes' or 'no' type of question. For example;

Does he love me?
Will I be rich?
Should I quit my job?

Then click on the oracle that appeals to you. The oracle knows the right answer for you.

For entertainment purposes only!

The Alaska Report is reporting that Todd and Sarah Palin are about to divorce. They've apparently both had affairs. She will be moving to Montana and apparantly has a book deal worth $11 million. Todd will be moving back to his job in the oil fields of Alaska. See the Palin divorce story here.

Update: Palin's spokesperson is saying the divorce rumor is bogus. See her statement here.

The Independent has an article today about some famous men who are growing old disgracefully. They lambast them for not acting their age. Check out their opinions on the silly old goats

Fat Princess is a Playstation game and users were asked to choose what celebrities they would like to see digitally fattened up. See the photoshopped photos of fat Victoria Beckham, Cheryl Cole, Keira Knightley, Amy Winehouse, Angelina Jolie, Paris Hilton, Madonna and Naomi Campbell here.

Here's a YouTube video that took three months to edit and required participation from 80 people and their webcams. The video editing makes it look like they are all having a good time with each other, though in reality, these people never met.

Does this woman look like she is 76 years old? Not at all. She rather looks like she's had lots of plastic surgery.

Joan Rivers has a new show on TV starting next week called How Did You Get So Rich? She goes around knocking on the doors of mansions, or stopping super expensive cars at stoplights to ask people this question. The answer would probably be of interest to lots of us. It has the potential to be a great show.

Does your husband blow all your hard-earned money on frivolous stuff? Or are you the one who spends more money in your relationship?

It turns out that even when it comes to habits of spending and saving, opposites attract.

Reuters: "Surveys of married adults suggest that opposites attract when it comes to emotional reactions toward spending," Wharton's Scott Rick and Deborah Small and Northwestern's Eli Finkel said in the paper.

They found that people who generally spend less than they would ideally like to spend, and those who spend more than they would like to tend to marry each other.

Image source.

Monty was in his teens when he met a Zen master for the first time.

The reason he met him was not because he had some interest in Buddhism, but rather because he had the hots for another student who wanted to visit the Zen master.

Well, this was almost fifty years ago and Monty has been trying to uproot his endless blind passions ever since. It was a long time after this first encounter that Monty began his Buddhist practice.

Monty is like the rest of us as far as endless blind passions go. But there's a new blog he's just created to discuss his experiences. He's an unusually good writer. Subscribe to his upcoming Zen-inspired short stories.

Image: Source

Recently I've experienced several synchronistic events in my life. "Synchronicity" is defined as meaningful coincidences. It is a much more powerful feeling than serendipity. It's been so much fun for me I had to look up the term synchronicity and now I think some of our readers will find this interesting too.

Here are some great quotes about the meaning of synchronicity;

"...these "meaningful coincidences" are not coincidences at all but spontaneous realizations of the underlying interconnectedness of all things within the Universe." Laurence Boldt - Tao of Abundance

Meaningful Coincidences fill us with a sense of awe, even shock, as we experience more and more unlikely events.

Source: quotes and image.

Here's an amusing beer commercial about the various types of men, or the key characteristics of the male species.

RIP Frank McCourt. He died today at the age of 78. He's best known for his Pulitzer prize winning book, Angela's Ashes. This book is a memoir of his poverty stricken childhood and youth in Ireland and New York. It really is an incredible book. Here's one of the best reviews at Amazon;

"Angela's Ashes is a book so filled with remorse and sadness, it's amazing that the reader somehow finds themself completely and joyfully satisfied. The novel revolves around the penniless childhood of Frank McCourt and begins in America with four-year-old Frank and his three year-old brother Malachy, who bears the same name as his father, and the infant twins, Eugene and Oliver, and the memories of the baby Margaret, "already dead and gone." Your heart goes out to the poor family, blessed with a loving mother, Angela, and yet cursed with a father who means well, but is constantly drunk or yearning for the "pint," as they call it. Early in his life, McCourt's family moves to Ireland, with help from his aunts and grandmother. Unfortunately, money is not easily found in Ireland either, and the McCourt family migrates from home to home, barely surviving on the few shillings Malachy McCourt doesn't spend at the local pub. The McCourts experience tragedy upon tragedy. His physical romance with a young lady named Theresa Carmody sick with consumption, his unfortunate habit to "interfere with himself," and the sad moment when in a drunken stupor on his first pint he strikes his own mother causes Frank to fear he is doomed to an eternity in hell. Unbelievably, despite all of the terrible things that happen in Frank's childhood, there are moments described in the book that give the reader a complete sense of joy and hope. I immensely enjoyed this memoir and would recommend it to any reader. I was especially enamored of the style of writing in which Frank McCourt chose to write. The words seemed as if they gently tumbled directly out of the mouth of the seven-year-old Frankie, or mischievously flew from Frank as an thirteen-year-old "working man." This novel was exquisitely written and is a jewel to read, as well as a treasure to remember."