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In my never-ending quest to find even the flimsiest excuse to post pictures of hot women in this blog, here’s the latest news from Mandy Moore, who’s pimping her film, “License To Wed“:

NEW YORK (AP) - Mandy Moore, the angel-faced actress and sometime singer, interrupted her recent concert in Manhattan to grumble for a moment about the men who did her wrong.

“You know, guys suck,” she proclaimed, her sweet facial expression diluting any post-breakup bitterness. “I don’t want to make a sweeping generalization, but some guys suck! And I’ve come across a few.”

That might well be because pigs like me can’t help but noticing first, and happily, that Moore doesn’t like wearing bras, and second, and even more happily, that she doesn’t need to.

Or maybe it’s the deluge of male critics who cannot find enough bad things to say about “License To Wed.”

In fact, the piling-on is so intense and creative, it’s hard to choose which is the best slight: “The sort of lobotomized, condescendingly lazy movie that leaves you resentful of Hollywood” is pretty brutal; “bad from top to bottom, front to back, and start to finish” is both repetitive and succinct, which is impressive; “the attempts at humor are hideous. They get hideouser” actually makes up words to plumb how awful it is, which should tell you something.

But producing good work — or even making wise choices when it comes to men — is hardly the measure of whether a celebrity female is worthy of attention; witness Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton, Jessica Simpson or Denise Richards.

A Somewhat-Relevant Diatribe About Official Celebrity Websites’ Retarded Affinities For Flash: For chrissakes, stop making your Web sites with Flash, celebrities!

Seriously, Flash sucks.

It’s nearly impossible to navigate most Flash sites, the text can’t be read, nonetheless indexed, the things usually don’t work right, it takes twice as long to load as a normal Web site and it’s not easy for many people with vision or other disabilities to use.

I realize you think it looks cool and 16-year-old imbeciles who waste half their lives trying to skin MySpace will praise it, but those of us who simply want to round up a few pics of you in a bikini and find out if you’ve left your man yet again are really inconvenienced by that nonsense. (End of diatribe.)

Anyway, Moore is a passable actress and singer who’s stuck with the fact that she’s got a girl-next-door look. That seems to have kept her in some truly crappy films: “Because I Said So,” which should be brought before the International Criminal Court any day as a crime against humanity; “How To Deal” (my advice: stand up, walk out, demand your money back from the theater manager); and “A Walk To Remember” (the Bataan Death March was a walk that’s remembered, too, and for startlingly similar reasons).

But that seems to be the milieu of all singers-turned-actresses: Has Jennifer Lopez appeared in anything worth watching? Does Simpson even qualify as an actress? Mariah Carey sure doesn’t, and it seems like Britney Spears is not much of either these days. And Madonna? Ugh!

Although there’s always an exception to a rule, I suppose, such as Cher, who’s a far better actress than singer. And I’d argue that there are lots of men who are better actors than singers: Will Smith jumps right out, and Mos Def may be one of the most underrated actors out there right now, even if his official Web site’s domain name is mosdefmusic.com.

There’s also Mark Wahlberg (who’s got the balls to use an unskinned phpBB forum as his official site), Dwight Yoakam. … Hell, Frank Sinatra was a great actor and a great singer.

But I totally digress. And since I am digressing, let’s bring in a seemingly random thought: Why is it OK, among male perverts, to be hot for Mandy Moore, but not for Sarah McLachlan?

You can go ahead and call me a homo for liking McLachlan but I assure you there are two things you should be glad about: she’s married and she’s a hippie.

Because if she told me she’d start sleeping with me if only you were dead, you’d want to start sleeping with one eye open. No woman is worth going to prison or going crazy, but you only go to prison if you get caught and crazy depends on your point of view.

(And yes, for those of you who know how much I love berating Canadians — largely because they deserve my worst and more — I know McLachlan’s Canadian. I suppose you need a lot of manure to grow a rose.)

Yeah, I know McLachlan’s music is a bunch of Goth-Celt-cosplay/SCA nonsense and Lillith Fair was pretty much a front for feminists and lesbians to push their agendas. (I’m kidding here, people. But only a little.)

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t sound good, and to quote Peter Schickele, “If it sounds good, it is good.”

A Somewhat-Relevant Diatribe About “Schickele Mix” And The Hypocrisy Of Public Radio: “Schickele Mix” was cancelled on July 1 after about a bazillion (OK, 15) years on public radio because no one wanted to sponsor it. Which I find baffling, because it was an outstanding resource for music education.

My guess is that’s because Schickele is a bit eccentric, and because you never quite knew what he would play next — maybe some Spike Jones, followed immediately by Tupac Shakur, then the Robert Shaw Chorale, and maybe then finish up his point with Pantera.

Well, Schickele probably wouldn’t go that far. But the point is, you wouldn’t put it past him, and that means his program drew only two types of people — those with extremely broad musical tastes, such as myself, or those who don’t know much about musical history or theory and who are genuinely interested in learning about it, such as myself. (OK, so there’s a third type: “all of the above.”)

Which is definitely not true of the average public radio listener — at least, not the ones who give money to public radio. Truth is, if you don’t appeal to the MoveOn.org or chamber-music sets, you aren’t getting sponsored; you’d best be liberal, or intellectual, or predictably (and thus, mildly) amusing in a non-controversial, non-judgmental way.

And that’s a shame, because Schickele was doing exactly what publicly supported radio should do: Benefitting the public.

(Hey, I like public radio; “This American Life” is probably the best thing being broadcast, period. But I defy anyone to explain how Tavis Smiley can find sponsorship, but Schickele can’t, if there isn’t a vast, left-wing conspiracy at work here.) (End of diatribe; begin aside.)

An Even-Less-Relevant Aside About Tavis Smiley’s Name: I’m disturbed by the fact that Tavis Smiley’s name is so close to that of Tava Smiley, the super-hottie hostess of “Clean Sweep” on TLC:

Seriously, that’s pretty creepy. (End of aside.)

OK, before I steer this post completely into a ditch, let’s get back to the original point: Moore’s misandry.

As I alluded earlier, I think it has a lot to do with the men she’s chosen.

Andy Roddick is what, 10 years old? There’s a reason why strippers hate young guys, and Moore ought to hate Roddick for the same reasons: If they aren’t broke, they’re certainly idiots.

OK, One More Somewhat-Relevant Aside, This Time About The Difference In Timing Of Emotional Maturity In Women And Men: I’m not that old, but I’m old enough to start offering some life lessons, and one of the clearest — and most fascinating — ones I’ve noticed is the difference in when it is women reach emotional maturity and men do.

With women, it happens right around the time they turn 25, give or take a couple of years and excluding the occasional odd duck who never quite settles down.

For the most part, a magic switch gets turned on when a woman hits her 25th birthday: All the partying and “Girls Gone Wild” stuff comes to a screeching halt, and they suddenly become all about whatever they’re going to be all about.

If they want to be a married or a mom, every effort is devoted to finding a man or, at least, a sperm bank; if they want to have a successful career, they quit Wal-Mart, get rid of the free-loading boyfriend and the club wear; if they want to live someplace else, they pack their things and go.

Whatever the case, when the woman hits that point — and, just like getting breasts or her period, it does seem to happen overnight — if you’re a man in her life or looking to become one, either you’re part of the solution, or you are the problem, period.

With guys, there’s not so much a sudden revelation like that, but more a current that carries you in a given direction until suddenly, sometime around 40, you look up from SportsCenter and notice that you’re in your life, and that it’s turned out in ways you had not expected.

You then either have the stereotypical mid-life crisis, thus delaying your emotional maturity until you discover that whatever you use to relieve the mid-life crisis is even emptier than what you started with, or you are happy with whatever it is you have in life and what you’ve become — which, in my case, is “by design, nothing of value” and “exactly what I want to be: free to do as I please.” (The way I see it, Tyler Durden is right about just about everything.) (End of aside.)

So it may well be that Moore is hitting her emotional maturity, and Roddick isn’t exactly of the age, or the professional stature, that’s going to tie down.

A Final Aside, And This Time I Really, Really Mean It, On Being Faithful: Heck, even All-American good-guy athlete-hero poster-boy Tom Brady can’t be tied down by a relationship, and he’s got a total hottie pregnant!

Then again, I don’t think there’s a man on Earth who wouldn’t like to be confronted with the problem of whether he should trade in the hot mother of his unborn child in order to tap an even hotter, better-known, richer woman. And not many who wouldn’t have made the same choice. Witness Kevin Federline [but fat lot of good it did for him].

(End of aside.)

Again, back to the issue: What is Moore thinking by dating Wilmer Valderrama? Have you seen “Yo Momma“? It’s a long fall from the middle, I suppose. Seriously, the guy gets more women than Scott Baio did in his prime, and for even fewer reasons. Moore has to exercise better judgment before she uses a never-been like Valderrama as a benchmark.

Then again, she couldn’t make a go of it with Zach Braff (Arrgh! More Flash! Ix-nay on the Ash-flay!), and he seems to me like a pretty solid guy: funny, talented, down-to-Earth, not a big partier or making a damned fool of himself in public. So maybe the problem is with her.

Or maybe it is truly endemic in Hollywood that romances are fated to fail.

So Moore could always look past the stagelights for her next man — say, to someone who doesn’t care about celebrity and thus would never feud with her about her success; who doesn’t want material things and thus, wouldn’t date her for her money; who’s totally happy with his life and therefore, won’t mind as she tries to find her own.

Just a thought. …