We love Meryl Streep as much as anyone (er, sort of the way we love poached salmon, with more respect than affection), but her haircut here is so suburban mover-and-shaker that she looks, to us, like she’s about to take over her kid’s PTA. Viciously and violently.

It’s not that we need our fictional fashion editors in Diana Vreeland-style kabuki makeup or whatever, but a little more … quirk would have been nice.

It’s Fourth of July. The midpoint of the summer. Part of us is like, “It’s all downhill from here,” but the other part is: “Fireworks. Hurrah!” Of course, since we’re in Britain, we get no fireworks, and we concentrate on the downhill part. There are, however, advantages to being away from home for the Fourth of July, like when you have your own party, with Duncan Hines lemon cakes, and these people, who are from countries without cakes that emerge from cardboard boxes, say things like, “I love your cake! So delicious!” And you nod sagely, and proudly.

Ah, Britannia. Ah, America. Ah, cake mix. Oh my God, on British television, a sex educator just instructed this call-in viewer to take her daughter—who has some bizarre discharge going on—to take her to the “family planning clinic,” because then “[the daughter] will like you are sharing this experience, together.”

Moving on: These are our eight essentials for this weekend, which is in our case, sort of hypothetical, but not entirely.

1: Bikini: Brown is the new gold, we think, when it comes to beach attire. Melissa Odabash halter bikini, $185.26

2: Cover-up: James Perse cover-up ($185). Or shirt-dress. Either one.

3: Sandals, non-functional: These are so amazing, all we want is someone to give us a pair of these Loeffler Randall platform sandals ($446).

4: Sandals, functional: Their pictures are the smallest, but as far as we can tell, their prices are also the cheapest. Blue-on-white Havaianas, $11.95

5: Hair product: All of the hair enjoyment of the ocean lacking problem with sharks. Bumble and bumble Surf Spray, $18

6: Beauty product, sole: Tarte 24/7 Lip Sheer, because the beach requires nothing else of us. Except….

7: This is, we swear, the only SPF we’ve ever worn that did not make us break out on contact. Philosophy Shelter for the Face, $16

8: Beach bag: What we really want is one we could bury beneath the sand, thus avoiding irritating problem of beach-theft paranoia, but this will have to do until technology advances. And really we were looking for something a little less … J. Crew, but we haven’t found an independent producer of beach totes yet. Summer straw critter tote, $39.99

And two more:

1: We are not unaware of the cheese emo factor, and we are sure all the teenagers at art school would laugh at us, but it is so summer on CD. Or iTunes. Whichever. Dusk and Summer, $8.99

2: What can we say , Bill Bryson cracks us up. Notes From a Small Island, $12.60

This makes us feel like this woman is always pregnant.

Which is almost true.

We’re giving the slighest of nods to the Bazaar cover. The Elle one, as far as we’re concerned—and we love Elle, but this was the cover … oh, you’re just like, “Who is that refugee with that terrible hair?” Britney Spears seriously has like $70 million or something, so we’re just not going to feel that guilty.

And seriously, we’re heterosexual, and female, and we didn’t exactly see it as a big step forward for women when Britney decided to pull off her panties for Rolling Stone. What is that dear-in-headlights look, anyway?

But seriously, show this to a 15-year-old girl, along with the Elle cover picture, and I guarantee you that 15-year-old girl is saying no to sex without a condom.

We would be so much more into Pharrell Williams if we hadn’t just seen Paris Hilton, dead-eyed and slurring, interviewed during the 02 Festival in Hyde Park, and she bizarrely kept dropping his name, his and James Blunt’s, who is apparently her BFF. “James and I just had dinner last night,” etc etc. Ugh. Her passport should be revoked. It’s just so embarrassing.

That’s a pretty slick-looking ad, though.

Yay! We’re on myspace. It’s not exactly “pimped out,” as our friend Dax likes to say, but it is slightly, slightly ho-y. However, we have only one friend, and that is that horribly embarrassing one. Tss. http://www.myspace.com/bunnyshop

We used to work at the Gap. Gap Kids, to be specific, which automatically made us second-class citizens in the Gap Universe, and was, at 16, something we were quite annoyed about. We were only marginally more successful working at the Gap than we were at EMS, which we quit after one day because someone came in and asked us a complicated question about climbing equipment and we became convinced that our ineptitude would result in a mountaineering death. We tried to explain this to the manager, who we now recognize as the pot-smoking, latter day-hippie he was, and he did not understand.

Anyway, the Gap. Oft derided, but still, for some reason, our Long and Lean are, unbelievably, the most reliable jeans we have, better than even the discarded Chip & Peppers which lost their shape. Like Janet Jackson, pre-slimming, lost their shape. Lost it. Etc. So as much as we may snicker at the crochet halter top, jeans <$20 are nothing to get all snobby about.

Speaking of: These are nice for people who have decided they’re just going to wait out the whole skinny-leg thing. Original Long & Lean, $39.99, and Original Distressed Long & Lean, $29.99. But could they not have bothered to make the catalogue shots here just a teeny weeny bit less matronly? Tss.

There’s really nothing wrong with these white tab shorts ($19.99), but that’s the problem with the Gap sale rounder, yeah? You’re walking around it, looking for your size, and you’re never going to be like, “Holy shit, that’s fantastic.” It’s always, always going to be, “Erm, nothing really wrong with it.”

Everyone needs a pair of white jeans, not the same way that everyone needs, say, a Hepatitis A vaccine, but still. Preferably ones like these straight boot-cut jeans that cost $19.99 and can be tearlessly dismissed after the first hot dog bun disaster.

It’s just like, you have to wear something to get the mail or the Diet Coke or whatever, and sometimes you can’t find any of your regular shoes. Criss-cross sandals, $8.99

If we were going to play at Wimbledon, and we knew we were going to lose to Venus Williams, and we really loved that whole American Apparel perv-aesthetic, we would totally have dressed up like Bethanie Mattek did yesterday. (Score: 6-1, 6-0, Williams.) Personally, we find the whole thing quite hysterical, in the hysterical-verging-on-excellent way, because seriously: She’s going to be out there for 45 minutes, and then she’s going to spend the next two weeks shopping. Might as well make a statement. Our favorite element: the rolled-up short shorts.

Says the Evening Standard: “The white Sixties-style headbandnad dangly earrings may have been nothing out of the ordinary. But those kneesocks?”

And the Daily Mail: “Jaws dropped as the 21-year-old blonde, resplendent in a huge white headband and enormous earrings, stepped out on centre court to play defending champion Venus Williams … But it was time enough for tongues to wag. ‘She looks like trailer trash,’ shrieked one tennis pundit.”

Forbes: “Better known for her outlandish outfits than for her tennis talents, American Bethanie Mattek wore a broad bandanna, knee-high socks, short shorts and a tube top over a halter top with two sponsor patches on her chest. So where were her skates? ‘I was going for kind of the soccer theme,’ Mattek said.”

As our ex-roommate would say: Don’t hate the player, hate the game. OK, so that applies a little too literally here, and really not all that aptly. But we loved it. We just think it takes a lot of guts to go out in front of thousands of people and try to keep it together when you know that, barring a miracle, you are going to be eviscerated by another player. Especially in what appear to be white silk short-shorts. This is an obvious occasion for the official Bunnyshop seal of approval.

We were looking online for some of the excellent Liberty [of London] bikinis we’ve seen here. First we found one, on sale, and we were very excited, until we could not figure out why the sizes (2, 4, 6, were followed by “years”. Then we realized they were, derr, for kids. Our search resumed, and we then found this (below.)

Ladies, our Fourth of July swimwear has arrived. What we like best is the seam, or ridge, down the middle of the bra cups. Liberty belt bikini, $79

Vivre tricked us with their kids-only Liberty print bikinis, but they sort of make up for it with this orange boy-short bikini, now on sale for $104.99. The search, otherwise, continues.

These week our Reader Questions were a little more question-y than usual, which was fine by us, because if we had to read another question where we were like, “Fuck if we know,” we would have been really annoyed with ourselves. Anyway, the question:

What piece of jewelry do you want more than any other?

Well, truly, we want giant, giant, giant diamond earrings that we can wear to our extended family’s Thanksgiving dinner, the one with the crowd that actually, literally said to us “So you finally managed to get a boyfriend” [verbatim] at our grandmother’s funeral. The diamond earrings would say, silently: Fuck you. Oh, the power of jewelry to say what we cannot. Oh, actually, we probably could say it. Though not at our grandmother’s funeral.

OK, seriously, we find the whole diamond thing overloaded politically and symbolically and all that, so moving forward, the slightly more realistic piece of jewelry we are absolutely creaming over is this butterly necklace from Paul & Joe, which net-a-porter irritatingly highlights but does not offer. We are still on the hunt for it. By “hunt” we mean that we are going to the Paul & Joe store on Ledbury Road tomorrow, which is not so hunt-ish, but still.

Then there’s the skull crest necklace for Giles & Brother. Usually we are resolutely anti-skull (really, they just freak us out, sort of like salamanders), but we like the shapes and length of the chain, so we’ll deal. $115

Or there’s this one, Winged Migration, from Fred Flare. $30. We can live with that. Actually, we sort of love this one. Planes! Our heart lifts every time we go to the airport. Until we get to security, and then we get all homicidal. But still: planes!

Please ask us a reader question!

Besides the TV, and all the women tottering around London in the highest heels we have ever seen outside of that corner in Gramercy where all the prostitutes stand, our favorite thing about Britain is its print media, specifically the newspapers, which have our favorite headlines, anyway. This week, it’s in the UK edition of OK!: There’s a picture of Britney Spears looking like a professional did her make-up, rather than, for example, a professional clown, and not wearing denim shorts with that little skin-bulge around them. It’s not as if we’re immune to the bulge … but really, we’d get it together for national television. Anyhoo, the headline: “My true feelings for Kevin and staying fit during my pregnancy.” Honestly, the unintended self-satire is enough to make you weep. We’d feel more optimistic about her chances for a comeback if her whole thing wasn’t built on the sands of that fuck-me-I’m-Lolita thing. You live by the pervs, you die by the pervs, is what we like to say.