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This is Monica Bellucci:

Even if you don’t understand French, you can probably figure out the headline of this issue of French Elle magazine: Bellucci, and others like Sophie Marceau and Eva Herzigova, are shown without makeup, and without any Photoshopping or airbrushing whatsoever. That’s Monica Bellucci, 100%, completely au natural. Oh, and by the way, she’s 44.

She’s almost too beautiful for words!

Read more about it (and see pictures of some of the other women) here.

Back in the late 80s, I was a huge fan of a British program called The South Bank Show. It was kind of like a “Charlie Rose for musicians and artists” – each week there’d be a long, in-depth  interview with a notable British musician or artist. There were no distractions – just the artist talking about his or her work.

One episode I remember in particular featured Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys. The interviewer asked him something along the lines of “you are obviously a homosexual. How come you haven’t done more ‘overtly gay’ music?” Tennant said that PSB tried to not do “gay songs” because they didn’t want to alienate any part of their fan base; that, generally speaking, he felt that pop music was no forum for politics; and that he didn’t feel it was his place to “preach” to people.

I had a newfound respect for Tennant after seeing that interview. So many celebrities these days think it’s their mission to bring news of some “cause” to the “little people” out there, and Tennant specifically addressed how those celebs often come out looking like jackasses, and how he wanted no part of it.

It seems that Tennant still has his head on straight, as the Pet Shop Boys recently declined an offer from PETA to to change their name to the “Rescue Shelter Boys”:

The organization, the People for the Ethical Treatment for Animals (PETA), sent a letter to Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe acknowledging that its request, at first blush, might appear “bizarre.”

But, by changing its name, the band could raise awareness at every tour stop of the “cramped, filthy conditions” that breeders keep animals in before selling them to pet stores, PETA said in its letter.

The duo, which has performed under its current name for more than 20 years, reproduced PETA’s written request in full on its Web site.

The musicians said they were “unable to agree” to the request “but nonetheless think (it) raises an issue worth thinking about.”

I decided to take some time off from my unending war against misplaced apostrophes to address an issue I’ve seen cropping up all over the place these days: the misuse of the words “fewer” and “less”.

In a nutshell, you should use “fewer” when you can easily count something, but “less” when whatever it is that you’re talking about cannot be easily measured.

Here’s an easy way to remember the difference: “I have less beer in my glass than you, but I’ve had fewer beers than you”. You use “less beer” because it’s not easy to tell exactly how much beer is in each glass; on the other hand, it’s easy to count how many empty beer bottles there are, so you’d use “fewer” in this case.

Here’s another example: “as the economy picks up, there will be fewer layoffs, resulting in less stress in the workplace”. Since it’s easy to count the number of people laid-off from work, you use “fewer”; since it’s impossible to measure the level of stress in the workplace, you use “less”.

By now, you might be thinking about those signs at the grocery store that say “10 items or less”. Yes, they’re wrong. It’s easy for anyone to count to ten, and counting items is sort of expected if you want to use the express lane. So, in a perfect world, those signs should read “10 items or fewer”. But they don’t.