Ok, so hopefully in combo with the lead photo, you can see the asymmetrical action on Amy Adams' glam gown. (It's off the shoulder on the other side.)


It's like Jaslene Gonzalez doesn't even care that I'm over the tummy-peep trend and its accompanying 10th grade-geometry-worthy tan lines! (Yeah, I know you smarter kids took Geometry earlier, but I was in the slow math group.)


Katie Lee (Joel?) is looking a lot more comfortable in her skin on the red carpet these days. It's too bad this coincides with everyone kind of turning on her for vague reasons that, at least in my case, have less to do with Billy Joel than with her career as a celebrity chef and restauranteur.


Okay, I friggin' adore writer and former French Vogue editor Joan Juliet Buck, so it's no shock that this beggar-princess-Arabian-Nights ensemble should totally make my day. I mean, can you see Wintour or her coterie in anything this bizarre? (ALT's caftans excepted, of course.)


Okay, there's something I'm not loving in the mix of low-key glitz and glitz-glitz in Claire Robinson's getup, but this is one of the few frocks that I can actually imagine wearing in yesterday's gruesome stickiness.


Many of us may know Frances Sternhagen best as Bunny MacDougal, but she's also a distinguished stage actress. And someone whose unabashedly white hair and equally unabashed hot-weather-comfort dress I am finding delightfully no-fuss.


Patricia Clarkson, obviously, looks crisp, cucumber-cool and like a total class act.


Chris Messina is, looks, extremely handsome. The end.


Jillian Bach models the "tearaway" bodice, a trend only available to those women with svelte chests. The rest of us would give "bodice-ripper" a new meaning.


What say you about Gayle King's racing stripes? I, personally, hate 'em, but it takes all kinds, as a man once said, to make a world.


Meryl Streep does no-nonsense, wear-anywhere.


Rachel Roy sports the extremely expensive I-Have-"Celebrity Skin"-in-my-walkman distressed jeans trend I'm really hoping is about to end.


Why is Barbara Walters wearing a coat? Because she didn't want to sport head-to-toe ecru?


Come on, even Rachael Ray's harshest critics would be hard-pressed to find much to criticize in this super-safe LBD.


Julie Powell, meanwhile, follows suit. As you know, I have a particular sympathy for the writers at these celeb-filled events; it must be a bit of an ordeal, albeit exciting.


[Images via Getty]

It would never occur to me to lie about any of this shit, but then, I live in New York, where nothing is even quite expected of me at 29, except that I have quelled most of the anxieties associated with once having been deemed "precocious" and are therefore a decent drinking partner — that is a good assumption; you can't be precocious after 28 and that is a fucking giant relief — and maybe begun desiring babies and am therefore a perilous romantic partner (a poor assumption, I am a late bloomer though.)

At 29, everyone knows they can flatter the shit out of you by saying you look 24, and they do, but at 29 you can also talk most bouncers in New York out of needing to see the ID you keep losing because bouncers can see in your skin that you are not bullshitting them, you are what you say you are: old enough to drink prolifically and profitably with minimal incident; old enough to remember the lyrics to most modern rock hits from the years between 1989 and 1996.

Anyway, so 29 is a great year; what can I say.

A part of me would like to be 55 and menopausal and "fulfilled" by nothing more than egg sandwiches and Dinosaur Jr. songs, just to get over the disappointment already.

Another part of me thinks "wisdom" is just another word for "having re-learned the same five things the Hard Way so many times my abused and feeble mind has actually absorbed the memories" and that fucking yes, I should really start putting fortnightly facials on a charge card so I can pass for 29 in six years, because fucking hell if I trust my own intellect and work ethic to carry me.

And then there is the part of me that flatters myself into thinking that, you know, something has happened in these years that has been coherent and somehow unwasted and that it will lead to something somehow, that I will always feel exactly the age that I am even though I still occasionally date checks "2003," and that maybe I should stay in tonight and struggle with that for a moment.

But it is Friday.

This We Take From Satchel Paige: How Old Would You Be If You Didn't Know How Old You Were? [WoWoWow]
Put Justin Down Madonna; You're Old Enough To Be His Mother [Daily Mail]

Macy's?!? THE HORROR! The extra-moronic thing about that statement is that Macy's is popular and accessible. When you're creating a media property, those are qualities to aspire to, not denigrate. And most women, even Wowowow's target audience of successful women over-40, do not want to hear about how Halston lent Candice Bergen a "white mink bunny mask and strapless gown for Truman Capote's 1966 Black and White Ball," or how Joni Evans made an embarrassing gaffe at a party, "gushing to "Calvin Klein" about how she adored his designs, only to realize that she was gushing to Halston." You know why they don't want to hear about it? Because it's name-droppy and completely unrelatable to the average websurfer. And what do people look for in a web community? People who make them feel at home, not people who make them feel terminally unfabulous.

Finally, this site is doomed because the sort of women who would relate to funny little anecdotes about that fabulous night with Calvin and the boys at Studio 54 are not surfing the web all day. The Times piece makes it sound like Wowowow wants a readership much like themselves: "seasoned" women who "who broke through glass ceilings." And those women? Like the founders of wowowow, they're mostly "cyberneophytes" who probably delegate email reading to their personal assistants. Maybe a little bit of that "Macy's" flair could go a long way.

Boldface in Cyberspace: It's a Woman's Domain [New York Times]

So Elizabeth Edwards has terminal bone cancer. How terminal? Good question! But not one they asked! She gets chemo and a bone-strengthener pumped into her veins everyday. That must suck! Not really discussed. Still, you know, to want to ride out the years of one's life shedding and barfing and being tired all the time in the preposterously stressful situation that is a Presidential campaign — what's that about? The shortage of strong Democratic candidates and plethora of charismatic Republicans running this time around? (which is to say, NOT?) Strong beliefs? Naked ambition? Hey! What about that new book out by that old Edwards consultant that makes him out to be an almost pathologically ambitious disloyal opportunist? Has the writer even heard of it? Who cares! Bet cancer will make her skinny!

She has also managed to change into a different pair of pants, some pink-and-yellow pique Lilly Pulitzers, and even though they clash, mightily, with the floral print on the enormous sofa she is curled up on, she looks really pretty in her long-sleeved pink T-shirt...She is barefoot (a pair of battered yellow suede Mephisto sandals are on the floor where she has kicked them off), she wears no jewelry except her wedding rings, and her auburn hair is pulled back off her face on each side by gold barrettes that once belonged to her elder daughter, Cate, now 25. When I tell her how good she looks, she says "Right, no sleep, no makeup"; when I comment on how much weight she's lost, she jokes that "you haven't walked behind me yet."

Queasy yet? Wait till we post on the LESS substantial pieces in the magazine.