I’ve gotta hand it to the uber talented Aubrey O’Day – she knows how to make herself front and stage, albeit at the expense of her team mates sometimes rolling their eyes at her apparent need to be the constant focus of attention.  Sure, she’s a narcissist, but she is a talented narcissist – you’ve gotta give her credit for that, even as she’s throwing her team mates under the bus to Donald Jr. when they’re not in the room.

This last episode had the two teams going at it in a competition to see who could produce the most catchy jingle for Good Sam, a service that helps people who are stranded in their vehicles.  Both teams had talented singers, the one having Clay Aiken and the other having O’Day, who has a great singing voice by the way (so does Clay though).

I was a bit surprised that the normally perceptive Aubrey went with the somewhat risqué cheerleading outfits her team donned, hers in particular which seemed to let an ample portion of her breasts (implants, good ones though, they appear to be silicone) to be pushed up and out of the tight top.

The executive liked her team’s performance, and the song was very catchy. However, he did notice the somewhat risqué outfits, and wasn’t all too pleased with that since he stated this would be a jingle and performance that is safe for your grandmother and nephew to both view.

It was obvious all male eyes were on the voluptuous O’Day as she performed, and she seemed to really feed off of it. A true born performer, that one is, no matter how pushy she may be. She and Arsenio butted heads as usual as well this episode, him being upfront with her about her not hearing his suggestions since he was project manager, but in the end he was happy she was on his team since they won.

I like this show because you get to see a totally different side to these celebrities that you may have grown up with watching, or that you may not have known much about before you see this show. It also shows you that celebrities can be every bit as caddy, petty and generally whiny as the rest of us Average Joes. Some of them, you wonder how they’ve had so much success because of their personalities.

At any rate, I have enjoyed this season a lot because they have such diverse and explosive personalities.  The most explosive and surprising has been Lisa Lampanelli, a hilarious comedienne who seems to have it out for the gorgeous Miss Universe Dayana.  Her explosions are genuinely cringe worthy.

Well, doesn’t this job sound fun – for a guy at least.  The Hooters calendar search is now underway. The Hooters calendar crew will be hitting all the major cities and taking pictures of tons of Hooter girl wannabes along the way.  If you’ve never been to a Hooters, they’re a “guys bar” that has pretty lousy service unless you’re a guy, and great breaded wings.

And that’s about it.  My husband loves their breaded wings, which are actually off the charts in fat and calories – pretty much just as bad as eating a bucket of KFC fried chicken, and that is bad believe me, but these babies are soooo good once they cool down. I must say, they are good.

The other food there though in my opinion is so-so. Also, my experience has been that if you go in there as a women with her husband, the service is really lackluster. Perhaps it’s because many of the servers there think I’m judging them as a woman but I’m really not. It’s just always a weird vibe, at least if you just go with one guy and you’re the woman.

It is funny to people watch and see the older guys trying to flirt with these young girls in tight short shorts and tight shirts. And by the way, you don’t have to have large breasts to work at Hooters. I think it’s all about just being able to be a fun girl and have confidence in the relatively minimal uniform they provide.

The Hooters Calendar is a yearly calendar that has women in it that have that all American, healthy girl look.  They can be blond, brunette, and any race or color but they always have great bodies and they’re usually young. They have real breasts, fake breasts and everything in between. What is the actual criteria for being a Hooters calendar girl? I have no idea!

We can add Edie Falco on the growing list of celebrities that has battled and won the fight with breast cancer.  Edie, the actress most well known for her role and Ms. Tony Soprano on the acclaimed HBO show “The Sopranos” and now as the main character in “Nurse Jackie” on Showtime, battled cancer several years ago and had a very successful and full recovery.

Today, she looks just as beautiful and vibrant as ever and thankfully is still with us, healthy and happy and with children now too!  She has been a survivor now with no remission for a full nine years if you can believe that. She was very successful at keeping it out of the public eye, which she says really helped her personally to deal with it in her own way and to continue life and continue working even though she knew she had a potentially fatal disease.

Other actresses who have battled breast cancer and won the fight are Kylie Minogue, Christina Applegate, Guiliana Rancic, Jaclyn Smith, Cynthia Nixon, Sheryl Crow and Melissa Etheridge to name a few. Those were just the women who chose to go public with it. There are probably many more who just go through it privately.

It’s a very personal choice on who you tell, and everyone deals with this disease differently which is how it should be.  There is no rule book that tells you how you should handle it. It’s entirely up to you. There are many coping mechanisms that can work, it just depends on your personality and the way you tend to handle these types of matters in your life usually.

Edie Falco recently went on television to promote a hotline that is open 24 hours which is totally devoted to help women with breast cancer talk about their feelings.  It is anonymous, and you can talk to women who have gone through it themselves.  It’s a great way to vent and have open discussions with other women who have gone through the exact same thing you have.

It’s also a great way to unburden yourself without feeling that you are burdening family or friends. Women so often feel that way because we have that built in nurturing mechanism that some how doesn’t make us feel comfortable asking for something from others, even if only a shoulder to cry on when we need it.

But what we don’t know is that those people we’ve been for over the years likely do want to be there for us, we just have to reach out and let someone take care of us, even if only for a few hours.

Certain newer forms of birth control have been found to cause as much as a doubling risk in women of developing breast cancer. That is just plain scary, and you should definitely take heed to this because this particular form of birth control – the injectable kind  such as brand name Depo Provera, is also linked to blood clots in women and even increased risk of stroke.

I happen to know a women personally who had a stroke while on this form of birth control and she was only in her mid-thirties when this happened to her. She was advised to immediately come off this form of birth control after the stroke and in fact was advised not to go on any other birth control after that.

To me, this paints a very alarming picture of birth control, particularly the injectable form since it is now found to not only cause blood clots but also to double the risk of breast cancer. The active ingredient in the harmful one that causes breast cancer is progestin. It uses progestin only as its main form of birth control by tricking the body into not becoming pregnant.

See our related stories in “Can IVF or Birth Control Cause Breast Cancer?” and “Being on the Pill, Breast Health and Risks”

It is likely not simply the fact that the birth control is injected that causes the increased likelihood of breast cancer, but rather the type of estrogen it uses.  The study was done over a five year period and involved women in two groups, one that had breast cancer and the other that did not.

The groups were not older, they spanned in age from mid-twenties to mid-forties, so this could definitely happen to anyone.  The women in the cancer and non-cancer groups were asked a range of questions, including what type of birth control they used. Women had the higher incidence of breast cancer who were on the progestin-only injectable type of birth control for 12 months or more.

It only took one year on the birth control to have the higher rate of breast cancer, so apparently the type of estrogen used causes cellular damage in a short amount of time, adding to the alarming results.

If you are on this form of birth control, you may want to seriously consider getting on a different one as soon as possible to effectively decrease your risk of developing breast cancer.  Talk to your doctor if you are concerned. I’m not usually overly alarmist about stuff like this, but this is some pretty startling information for a form of birth control that is so popular.

I just read an interesting article about how Beyonce was spotted breast feeding her young new infant Blue Ivy Carter, in a restaurant. Hey, it makes sense. You have a baby that young out of the house, and you are definitely going to have to put her to your breast at some point ’cause baby gets hungry, and baby gets hungry often!

But how do you feel about it?  Well, the answer is, it doesn’t really matter what others think about it. It matters what you, the mother thinks, and if you are comfortable enough to do it in a tasteful manner in public, then by God you should be able to without judgements from other people.

But let’s face it. We’re still not the most sexually unrepressed nation here in the US. We’re progressively thinking in SO many other ways, but sexually speaking we are still behind the 8 ball when compared to European countries, Brazil and Latin America in general.

I remember the first time I saw a woman bring out her breast to feed her baby. It was actually a friend of my parents, when I was really young. She covered her breasts with a towel, and put the baby’s head under the towel so she could obscure the majority of her breast, but a little bit of it sort of popped out and I remember feeling confused and embarrassed as a child that she had just exposed herself.

Someone else later said that what she did was in appropriate, so that wad kind of the idea that I grew up with, that women nursing in public was not acceptable. But that’s hogwash, darnit!  It should be perfectly natural for a woman to do it. There are of course human etiquette parameters around it, just like anything else – like brushing your hair at the dinner table and things like that.

What I’m saying is that we need to unravel a bit of our cultural tightness that surrounds the breast and other sexual body parts. Breasts have been so sexualized over the paste few decades here in the US that it seems like anything having to do with breasts is automatically considered a taboo.

What we are talking about here though is a child being nourished by its mother. That isn’t weird – it isn’t sexual, and it sure as heck is something to be celebrated and not frowned upon in public.