1:50 a.m. I found the most fascinating story on the front page of the Sunday paper today. Seems a bunch of mature, demure ladies in Yorkshire, England have found that age-old surefire way to make money and get attention.

When all else fails, take off your clothes. These ladies have done it all for a good cause, mind you. And of course, since they are proper British matrons, they are, perforce: tasteful. Hats and pearls and props, strategic.

You can catch a glimpse of them at their website, but unfortunately you can no longer buy their calendar. It's sold out. They had hoped to make maybe $2,000 for their charity, but instead they made $550,000. Gets one to thinking.

We are a funny species.

I watched the entire Golden Globes show this evening. And before that, I watched The Sopranos. I'm developing a serious crush on Tony Soprano, the character, and it was fun to see James Gandolfini, the actor, hold his new award in one hand and his notes in the other, shaking hand.

I liked Courtney Love's shredded dress and the way it nearly fell off her body when she laughed at Jim Carey's jokes. She said it was glued on, but you know how hard it always is to keep everything together when they're pouring the champagne for you, just you.

Little Meadow Soprano, like any girl growing up in New Jersey, and especially any Italian girl, is really plumping up this year. Shirley MacLaine looked very wide tonight. Even dancers thicken up with age. Barbra kept her sweater knotted strategically over her arms, as if the room were cool.

The women who are fighting to stay skinny often fight too vigorously and end up looking like Tootsie Roll Pops. It's hard to be perfect when that moment of thoughtless physical perfection is so brief and arbitrary. One minute you're the hot young thing and the next minute you're so last century.

You could line up every woman at the ceremony shoulder to shoulder on the red carpet in order of perceived value, from dewy newness to wizened tenacity. From Leelee to Faye. Tick tock Jolie Julia Jodi becomes Sharon Susan Shirley and then it's all over. The real artist at the ceremony was Time. Painting all the faces with his distinctive strokes.

And the most highly valued women, of course, were the ones in the Victoria's Secret commercial. They always will be. The girls who wear their underwear out there where you can see it. The girls who have nothing to say, nothing to do except inhale and hold their breath so that their little tummies are flat and their ribs are well-defined.

Smooth and perfect and immortal. Replaced each season like swans returning to a mirror lake ...

Yet, the ladies from England.

Sturdy and stolid and wearing their lumpy bodies like old mackinaws. What it means to be mortal, and human in a world of beauty. Pearls of great price.