I had a rough day yesterday, and was more than ready to settle in on the sofa with the glass of red wine, fuzzy slippers and fuzzy doggie. It’s TV night at the Casita des Zapatos, and time again for the bitches and the hos. Whee. Good times, peoples, good times. Except. Not. Because at the end of the show, my sweet, gently bewildered Jael was the first girl to head back to the states. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Open on the usual shit talking about who went home and how nobody’s going to miss them. Random leaping about concerning who’s left.

Doorbell rings and in walks…uh, that pointy-faced girl from Season Two? The one who got her own on-line talk show? April. The one that Nigel was so hot for. The one who didn’t win. She’s going to teach them how to interview and be interviewed. She has a grinning little midget friend with her to help her with the examples of talking too much and talking to little. He looks like Teller, only shorter and with a rubberier face. Woof.

Then the girls team up and practice. Jael and Dionne get nasty with each other, but Jael is, and it pains me to say this, terrible. No, really, I mean terrible in new and different ways, most of them involving bizarre facial contortions and wildly inappropriate body language.

Natasha isn’t too bad, Jaslene has really big teeth, Renee is such a hateful ass that I don’t care if she does well or not. Brittney reveals that she doesn’t know if she can do this sort of thing because she got run over by a car when she was 17, bounced her head off the curb, had 8 (or 18—accounts varied) staples in her head and absolutely no short term memory any more. I wonder if that’s why she couldn’t keep her weave pretty? She couldn’t remember how to handle it? Wash/comb…don’t wash/don’t comb…

And then, they learn that they are going to have to take their newly-honed skills out into the real world and interview people on the street. The streets of Sydney, Australia. And there is Tyra in a broke-ass kangaroo suit. I love Tyra, because she is fierce and fabulous enough to let herself be put in a ratty roo suit and hop up and down on my TV screen. The woman deserves some sort of Emmy for that. Natasha doesn’t understand for, like, a minute or two that they are going to Australia, and then she starts shrieking like a banshee. It’s pretty funny, in an ear-splitting, nails-on-a-blackboard sort of way.

We see them pack, we see the little animated plane with their faces in the windows, and then we see them disembark in Sydney. Jael is wearing a flowered mini-tank dress over jeans and a lime-fucking-green tu-tu. It’s reeeeealy mind blowing, and not in a good way. Who had brain damage, again?

They are met by an Aussie supermodel who treats them to a slang-filled welcome speech. As you would expect, there are crickets chirping everywhere. Especially around Jaslene, who has really, really big front teeth. I’ve seen beavers with smaller front teeth. The model gives the girls (and Jaslene)a guide book to Aussie slang, a microphone and a big send-off to discuss American fashion faux-pas with the guy on the street. They will score points for each usage of the slang.

Dionne rocks that, basically by using what I suspect is her own verbal tic, but which coincidentally is also in the phrase book…“That’s cool.” Repeated two or three times after every response. But she says “I want to AKS you a question” which had me sticking my fingers in my ears.

Jaslene is just pathetic, Brittney talks to an American and is told that in the interviewee’s opinion, the worst thing American girls do is to wear skimpy tank tops with their bra straps showing. OMG! I was there being interviewed and I didn’t even know it. Brit, of course, is wearing a skimpy tank top with her bra straps showing. I love this show.

Natasha, who already learned one new language and has the skills for it, totally nails the use of slang in her interviews. She’s cute, and perky and just adorable.

Jael is, uh, not.

Then it’s off to their new digs and on to the Cover Girl commercials, where they have to memorize their lines and deliver them in an Australian accent. This is one time when I almost wished for closed captioning.

They are all just dreadful. Renee is dressed in poufy sleeves and really ugly eye makeup and delivers like (she says) Steve Irwin. In judging, the panel agrees that she did sound like a man, and maybe that wasn’t the best choice of role model when you are selling lippy.

Dionne comes back with her Jamaican-not accent. Brit cries and blows her lines even with cue cards and wahwahwahs about getting run over and having no short term memory. We know, because you already told us that story, and we do remember it.

Jaslene can’t speak American English, and her attempts at an Australian accent are embarrassing and awful and grating and pitiful. On the up side? She nails her lines without cue cards.

Jael is totally done in by the need to be cute, sweet and perky. She proves to be utterly incapable of smiling on cue. In fact, she sort of reminds me of the scene in Addams Family Values where Cristina Ricci is at sleep away camp and is forced to smile, and all the other campers squish back and start to cry that she’s scaring them. Yeah. It was pretty much like that. She cries and climbs a tree to make herself feel better, but we all know that this is it for my favorite little anarchist.

Natasha does an Austrailo-Soviet accent, which is much more endearing than it sounds.

Judging! Jael is looking fabu in a dress and heels. We see the commercial and it opens and closes on Renee. She is getting the fucking redemption arc so large and blatantly that it looks like McDonald’s neon arches in Times Square. The judges comment on the fact that Jaslene has this history(?) of drag queens. What? First we heard that she was raised by drag queens, and now she has all this experience with drag queens. See? This is what I’m saying… Jaslene IS a fucking drag queen.

In a huge upset during panel, the Aussie model talks about how the girls got off the plane (we see the flashback to Jael and her lime green tutu) and of all of them Jael (says the model) was the one who came out with enthusiasm and joy and a passion for the job and and and. Well. She was out-voted. The looks that passed between Nigel and Twiggy and even Miss Jay? Hokey smokes, Bullwinkle, they could not have been happier to finally give Jael the old heave ho. But it was certain curtains for Jael when Tyra said that she didn’t look like a Cover Girl, she looked like an anarchist cruelly mimicing a Cover Girl.

Then the panel discussed Brit’s head injury and subsequent short-term memory loss. Right. Head injury. Sure it was. That’s not what they tell us in drug class. It’s something else that causes long term loss of short term memory. Well, I think that’s what I remember them saying.

The bottom two are Brit and Jael, and Brit gets to stay, along with this advice: Sack up ho, and figure out how to deal with your disability.

Personally, I thought Jaslene should have been standing there with Jael, and I would have preferred to see her skinny ass out on the tarmac, but so it goes.

The winner of the challenge, remember the challenge? was Natasha, who received as her prize a field reporter job on the Tyra Talk Show. No kidding. How cool is that?

Next week, I don’t know what to expect because I didn’t get any previews. All I know is that with my pet anarchist gone, who cares. I’m going to go climb a tree and pet the grass. Who will protect us from the evil ducks of the universe now?

As often as I am wont to say that I hate the living, I don’t think the answer is locking the doors and shooting everyone else.

And as much as I’m a Yellow Dog strict constitutionalist, and all, I think that the intent of the founders regarding the 2nd amendment had more to do with protection of the citizenry in the face of no standing national army and less about the right to bear arms for the hell of it, or the day the silicon chip inside your head gets switched to overload.

For the POTUS to deliver some mealy-mouthed inanity like he did: “Oh, jeez, everyone should have the right to bear arms, but they should obey the law”* just makes me want to vomit.

You know what? In this day and age, there is no need for the average citizen to own a handgun. Or an assault rifle. Or any other small arms. And if you want to, then join the fucking military and go defend us from the world.

Or how about this? You can own all the guns you want, but you can’t own the ammunition. Or how about the British model, and the guns are locked up in gun clubs and the only time you get to play with your toys is when you are out with other killers hunters shooting at animals. And not like here, where there are hunting farms, where the animals are penned until you get there to kill them. That would be the kind of hunting done by that masterful asswipe, the Vice President of the United States, who shot 400 quail and his hunting companion. There were 500 quail released that day. Oh, I made the numbers up, so sue me, I can’t remember everything I read. But he did go out shooting live skeet, and he did shoot his buddy, so do the numbers really matter?

But no. This is America, land of the freely stupid and bravely stubborn in the face of all logic. How many more? How many more people will be shot for no reason by people with no reasoning but plenty of guns and ammunition? When will the neo-cons and NRA apologists figure out that guns don’t kill people, but people with guns do?

To quote the Rude Pundit, have you ever heard of a drive-by stabbing?

A long, long time ago I dated a man who used to dream about killing his ex-girlfriend. Not in an abstract way, but vivid and explicit dreams about shooting her in the head.** (No, I didn’t date him long after I heard about that, and when he wanted to see me suddenly after a year or so had passed, I would only meet him in a public place.) A therapist told me that we all dream about or can dream about killing people, but that only a person capable of doing it in real life could see it all in that kind of detail. But that was twenty-some years ago, before hyper-real FX in movies, and first-person shooter games on every PC and GameBoy and Wii.

We have not become, as our Moron-in-Chief says, a culture of life, America has become a culture of glorified violence. It is approved by our government when we dance around the definitions of torture re: the Geneva Conventions. It is approved by our government when we out-source our prisons to folks without the same delicacy of nature that America pretends, as a nation, to have.

How many more students will be shot down? How many more innocent folks, putting gas in their cars? How many children caught in the cross fire of gang wars? How many more gallons of blood will paint the hands of the NRA and their spineless puppets in Congress before we decide that maybe, just maybe, in the 21st century, in this place, we all don’t need to have a sidearm strapped on?

I hate the living, but that doesn’t mean I want to kill them.

* Especially since the POTUS and his entire administration seem unable to obey any laws theirownselves. You know, the little ones, like perjury, and destroying evidence, and doctoring evidence, and leading this country into an illegal war, and wiretapping, and illegal search and seizure, and spying on US citizens, and you know, the whole rest of the ten commandments and most of the US constitution.


** That boyfriend? Killed himself. I was never able to find out how, but there were hints… he’d watched Blue Velvet a hundred times, it involved massive amounts of drugs and, yes, a gun.

I see that Kurt Vonnegut has died. And I’m sorry, I really am, because in my youth, I adored his work. Unfortunately, it was the work from his youth, and as we both aged, I lost any appreciation I had for him. His later works pretty much failed.

The Chronosynclastic Infindibulum

But his early works, in which he coined such phrases as that above (the time/space continuum from Sirens of Titan and in which he was still full of piss and vinegar, and had yet to succumb to morbidity and chronic depression, those were brilliant.

Everything was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt

I hope his widow, the photographer Jill Krementz (whom I met once in college, when she reviewed my portfolio…which she threw to the floor once she figured out what, exactly, was in the hotdog bun in that sort of blurry black and white photo) has the good humor and questionable taste (well, she and Kurt were married for a long, long time, but she did throw the hotdog picture) to put that on his tombstone. Assuming he has a tombstone. If not, then on his container of ashes.

From the wire story obituary comes this:

“We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard… and too damn cheap,” he once suggested carving into a wall on the Grand Canyon, as a message for flying-saucer creatures.

And, like so much of his social criticism, he was absolutely dead on.

Maybe I will miss him more than I think. To quote from another dead and favored author,

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

BTW: Poor Impulse Control also notes his passing here.

As does the always excellent Rude Pundit.

Let me first set the record straight, and say right out, I am not a cutter. I do not find pain (mine or anyone else’s*) enjoyable. However, I tend to be just a wee clumsy, and especially when I’m depressed.

Many years ago this tendency was spotted by a boyfriend, who commented that I didn’t just hurt myself, I hurt myself in complicated and very torturous ways, like some kind of exotic, oriental pain. That immediately became my club name: Oriental Payne.

So. Last week, after a brilliant morning (I found the very first spot in the parking garage open, and I met a new person on the train—an Apple-carrying, clog-wearing film person) and an ok work day, I trotted out of the building, aware, as always since last year’s Valentine’s Day tumble down the stairs, of where my feet were as I went down those steps. The light on Biscayne Boulevard turned red as I reached the curb, and so I took off across the street without breaking stride.

I saw the red car in the first lane. I saw the blonde boy with light eyes and no helmet on a yellow sport motorcycle in the second lane. I don’t know who or what was in the next lane, because I stepped out of my very high, very fabulous brown mule and went ass over tea kettle and did a magnificent face-plant in the middle of the third lane.

Thankfully, nobody ran the red light.

My glasses went flying. My book bag went flying. My titanium Mac in its chic little Vera Bradley bag went flying. My shoes, ditto.

I have a road rash on my left leg that extends from mid-calf to knee. The knee is completely skinned - flayed, even. The bruises are impressive and keep traveling around (yesterday a new one appeared below my ankle and wrapping around under my instep).

The right knee turned purple immediately and swelled to the size of a pie pumpkin. It is now green, with interesting purple undertones, and the right leg is also host to travelling bruises.

The only person to even acknowlege me sprawled across two lanes of traffic was a man on the far curb, who called out as I was gathering up my possessions and my wits “You OK there?” He did not, nor did anyone else, offer to help me.

*OK, I admit, there are a couple of people in whose pain I would take pleasure. My ex, for one. My ex-bosses, for two, three and four. And, you know, a few Neo-cons and a POTUS or two. But really and for the most part, no.

Years ago I read a fairly lame and unmemorable first novel with the promising title of film had a total A-list cast, though it was made in 1997, when none of the actors were known. Jack Black, Luke Wilson, Andy Dick, Jeremy Sisto, Jamie Kennedy, Alicia Witt, Brittany Murphy. So I clicked and added it to the old queue, and last night the RLA and I watched it.

Except for the title, it bore such faint resemblance to the book, that I had to look it up on imdb to confirm that it was, in fact, allegedly based on the novel. Then I went to Amazon and read up on the novel, just to be sure it was the SAME novel.

I may be the only person to have read Bongwater, so let me assure you that the only thing the two have in common is a funny title and content that falls flat. The action takes place in the same cities, but most of the characters have been renamed and recreated to the point that they bear little or no resemblance to those in the book. And while, since the book was so vapid and unremarkable, this could have been a plus yet, it was not.

The only reason I bring this up today is a scene about three quarters of the way through the film, when Alicia Witt comes back to Portland to see Luke Wilson, and his friend, Andy Dick tries to keep her away. Andy is playing a gay man, and he hurls this insult at her: “blahblahblah, something, something, FIRECROTCH!”

Huh. Not only was Brandon Davis an ass, he was a plagarizing ass. To use a lame quote from a lamer movie, delivered by the lamest of the actors within, and never give credit that the epithet that made him a tmz/YouTube star was originally spoken by Andy Dick in a third-rate flick about stoners. I mean, if Andy Dick didn’t even want to grab his five minutes of continued “fame”, you know it has to be bad.

How low can you go? I’m a little surprised that nobody has come forward with this revelation prior to now. I think I’ll go over to tmz and drop this dime.

The best parts of the movie, if you want to waste 90 minutes with it, are Jack Black (but of course) as the pot farmer in the forest, and the audio track over the closing credits. The track is the phone message tape from the Luke Wilson pot-dealer character, and it is a non-stop series of coded messages like “I think I left my green shoes at your house? or “Has the printer gotten back to you yet? Is the ink on the brochures dry? Can I come pick them up?”

And that’s how bad the movie is, in a nut shell. The closing credits are the funniest parts.

Last night the most amazing thing happened: the RLA watched the show with me. It took a while for him to figure out the players, because he said they all looked the same. That said, he was quick to pick up the following: Renee is a beeyotch. Jael is peculiar. Saying “Just cuz” to Mr. Jay is going to get you sent packing.

Another day dawns with mist on the swimming pool at the House O Hamsters in the LA hills. And that, dear readers, is why the swimming pool in Spain was icy: they were saving budget dollars for this year’s pool heating to get that mist to rise.

We open with Renee getting all up in Whitney’s face, asking her with “sweet” sincerity if she (Whitney) really truly believes that a fat girl will ever grace the cover of Vogue. ‘Cause, you know, rilly she just wants Whitney to face reality and not get all bummed out and all. She’s just asking. Whitney shows that she’s the real deal classy babe by not punching Renee’s skank ass out. Diana wanders in and gets pissed off for both of the fat girls.

A sidebar, if you will: please remember that by “fat girls” we are talking about women who are NORMAL by all other standards; they wear size 10s, not XXXXLs. OK?

After seeing the girls in some of their own clothes at judging, the PTB have decided that this is the week to give them lessons on style. Thankfully, we no longer has arbitrary assignments of personal style that they will have to learn it live it love it. Just, you know, a little bit less skank.

In what is my favorite scene to date, the girls are dressed up and asked to evaluate their looks to the head of Elite Models and one of her real working girls.

No crickets chirp, but they all gamely announce that they luv-luv-luv what ever the hell has been thrown on them. HAH! Fooled you! These are all TERRIBLE Fashion Mistakes. Natasha explains to Miss Elite Models that they all said they liked the clothes because as working models, you have to believe in what ever is tossed on your back. (Like her. By her mail-order groom. And please, if there is a God, do not show any more footage of her talking on the phone with him and playing sex games involving meowing. It just skeeved me out. But then, all the hamsters, once they wrapped their collective mind around it are a little skeeved by that marriage. Of course, some of the hamsters are less skeeved than just bitchy gossips, WHITNEY! But I digress)

There is a little round of clothing swappage, and the girls now look less awful. Except for Diana, who really, really, really needs to put on a little lipstick and wash her hair now and then.

After they learn about Bauhaus art theory as it relates to the fashion industry (Less is Still More, hos.) they are sent off to their challenge. In a warehouse somewhere, they find lots and lots of high fashion clothing from Sears, three platforms and two male mannequins. Renee thinks that they are terribly life-like, and they may very well be. Since they are actually two male models. They said they were identical twins, but either one of them was wearing lifts, or they weren’t all that identical, because boyfriend on the left was a couple inches taller.

The challenge consisted of getting separated into teams, and nobody was at all happy with their team or their team members. Each team had a few minutes to put together three looks (that had to work separately and together as a group), some props, and pose on the platforms. Dionne the Dentist used to work in retail, so she pulled the looks together for her teammates Renee and Sara. Natasha, Jael and Whitney called their look Afrodity’s something or others and when the twins pointed out that the hamsters has spelled Aphrodite wrong, Natasha stepped up to the plate and explained that when you make up a name you can spell it any way you want so there. Phhhhhtt.

The final team was composed of Diana, Jaslene and whoever I can’t remember and needs to go home. Right! Brittney! Brittney and her ratty weave that looks worse each week.

The prize this week will go first to the group who does the best, and then to the individual girl. The prize is getting to take all your challenge photos, then review them with Mr. Jay, and then re-shoot. I have to say, that’s a fucking GREAT prize. PS: If you aren’t in place when the boys say time, you will be disqualified. You know it. Someone isn’t on point. Want to guess who?

The winning team is determined to be Jael, Natasha and Whitney, except for the fact that they weren’t on their posing platform when the boys said time. Natasha, who really, really stepped up her game this week, was all but yanking Whitney up to the platform by her arm. Maybe if girlfriend was one of those anorexic hos, she could have pulled her into place. But she isn’t and she couldn’t and so Whitney, who would have been the Number One girl two weeks in a row became just another also ran.

That meant the second runners up were the winners. Sara, Dionne and Renee were the winners. Sara was chosen as the best of the three and won the prize. And, OH. MY. GOD. the stink face that Dionne put out was astonishing. Renee, of course, opined that she was the best, yadayadayada, and should have won something or another, because after all, she was the one who picked the accessories for Sara. Dionne, though, she picked out the outfits, and so Sara shouldn’t have won dick. Boy-howdee, were those two girls miffed. Big time. Dionne wore a puss for the rest of the show.

The other three? Chopped liver.

The photo shoot this week was the season’s gender bender, where the girls (and Jaslene) had to dress as boys. The twist, and it was funny… OK, I know I keep saying that this show has jumped the shark, but I gotta admit, this is the best season yet. The shoots are good, Mr. Jay is adorable, and Miss Jay is out of the picture most of the time (except during judging when he’s wearing that ever-growing clown ruffle). But I digress. The twist. The twist is that they are going to pose as men, with women. The women in question are drag queens. That’s right, throw those little cluesless hamsters to the she-wolves, and see who can keep the camera focused on them.

Jael was cast as a boho, and really had a great time and threw around a lot of poses. Dionne had to be a powersuit. Whitney was a f(r)at boy. Britney was a redneck (best quote: Hi. I kill things). Sara was a glam rocker and totally channeled David Bowie. Jaslene was one half of a pair of chaty-yachtys and Diana was a red-carpet star (HAH!-not. She looked stiffer than the giant paper mache Oscars) Renee was a rocker… but she was no Brian Setzer. The star of the shoot was, no kidding, Natasha. She had to be a hip-hop guy, and she even made her own grill out of chewing gum foil. Insert Soviet Union joke here. It was awesome. She was chillin like a villain. She was down wit it, dawgs. She was stylin’.

Jay said something inane like, no wonder the Russians take home all the gold at the Olympics. She’s competing. She brought her A-game. While he was trying to get something, anything out of Diana, Mr. Jay asked her why she was there. Her depthful reply: “Just cuz.” That’s when the RLA said: she’s history, and in the next scene, at judging, she was.

When it finally came down to Whitney and Diana, and Diana got sent home, Jael ran over and jumped on her, throwing her legs around Diana’s waist. It was awesome. I love me some Jael.

Next week, Jael finally bitch slaps Renee. Is life great?