Self-Indulgence: 30 Day Music Meme: Day 5: Your Favorite Female Singer

If you know me, you might be able to guess this one.

Day 5: Your Favorite Female Singer

It's Shirley Manson.  No competition here, at least not where I'm concerned.  Shirley's a kick-ass singer and a great person and she doesn't take guff from anyone; she's her own person. 

The Insidious Technological Plot to Destroy Life As We Know It; or, Lela Thinks All That Terminator Stuff Might Come True

Ever since I was a young girl (I played the silver ball!)

Ha ha.  Oh, I am a caution.

Seriously.  Ever since I can remember, I've loved science fiction.  Books, movies, whatever.  If it smacked of technology and THE FUTURE, I was probably all for it.  Robots I loved especially.

Pictured: Your best friend and your
mom. Time travel and the impending
robot apocalypse tend to make people
somewhat careless.

And then, when I was around eight, I saw both The Terminator and Terminator 2 for the first time.  And I was sore afraid.  Not that I'd never been introduced to the idea of machines turning on their owners (that's a big part of the backstory of Dune, and Dune was, is, and probably always will be a big part of my life), but this...they were stopping at NOTHING to destroy this one guy BEFORE HE WAS EVEN BORN!  Also, I learned that time is really a mess (long before I got so fully immersed in the world of Dr. Who), Arnold Schwarzenegger is more than just a buzzard-biting barbarian, and that sometimes, the best friend you send back from the future to save your mom so that you can be born really turns out to be your dad.  Talk about confusion!

Self-Indulgence: 30 Day Music Meme: Day 1: Your Favorite Song

I always swear I won't get sucked into memes, but I always do...a friend was doing this one over on LiveJournal, and I decided to transplant it here...because I am a sick, music-loving monkey...

Day 1: Your Favorite Song
I go all 'round on this, always hearing another song or a new song and thinking "oh, this is my favorite" and then thinking the same moments later on another.  But "Milk" is one I go back to time and again. 

This Vain World...

So I read something on Facebook that upset me.  (I'm sure those of you who know me are shocked.  I'm cheesed off over some random internet thing!)

Shirley Manson asked her fans if it's possible that she's insane because she, unlike some of her friends and a large chunk of people in the entertainment industry, refuses to do the whole plastic surgery/Botox/"oh just go and pave your face already" thing.  Prior to this, Shirley has always come out strongly against that sort of physical tampering, at least for herself.  I suspect this sudden insecurity could be the result of a recent birthday, but it brings up a few important points for me.

I'm not against the idea of people changing themselves physically in any way that they find personally fulfilling.  Piercings, tattoos, nose jobs, body modification...whatever you're okay with, whatever you want, that's great.  However, I am against the way that the media continues to push a ridiculous and often impossible ideal of beauty, even with all of the backlash and outcry against such portrayals.

Once upon a time, it was all right for entertainers to look fairly like the selves they had been born as.  Oh, sure, someone like Fanny Brice might have a nose job, but a lot of the time, make-up and good lighting hid a multitude of "imperfections".  Then came Hollywood, and starlets had to be thinner, and thinner, and thinner...because the camera ads weight...and they've continued to get thinner and thinner until they look like a crop of starved urchins.  Now, I'll grant you that some people are naturally thin; but when you have to be so thin that you begin to look ill, that's too far.

After the jump: some photos of the way women in the entertainment industry were once allowed to look, along with commentary on how they might end up now.

Self-Indulgence: Ladies I Adore...

This is one of those droolerific posts where I admit to being incredibly homosexual in the way that some women are.
Over the course of my pop culture obsession, I've found myself drawn to certain actresses for any number of reasons.  So, after the jump, here are just a few of the lovely ladies who are tops in my book.