That noise that sounds like the whispering wind? That’s me, sighing in contentment that all is right with the world. The Number 1 Surrogate Daughter came by last night with a pizza (banana peppers and spinach—new to me, but totally d’lish) and I poured the ‘tinis and we sat on the couch to ridicule the clueless. Girl bonding at its best. The RLA didn’t even last until the first commercial break.

For Cycle 9 (like, menstrual cycle, do you suppose? It is a little forced and artificial to call a season a cycle, but it is the house of women… and Jaslene...at least last year. This year we don’t seem to have a tranny in the house. But, never fear, we do have the requisite tragedies and horrible back stories. Nobody survived a plane crash from the diminishing heat of their mother’s dead body (my god, those were good times) but we DO have the daughter of a crack ho, the girl with Asperger’s (again, I have to hand it to Tyra, girlfriend has her finger on the pulse of trend: Autism is HOTT!), the Yalie, the dim blonde who was “born to win this thing”, the stripper (finally one made it into the house, but she don’t take her clothes off, she dances in a bikini, y’all… and she’s the designated weeper this season. She started crying after the third name out of thirteen was announced. Lisa. Lisa the Weeper), the “aesthetician” (read: bikini waxer, and she gave Tyra a faux waxing while we all watched. The look of abject horror on Miss Jay’s face was tooo much… and someone got called MRS. Jay last night which made me think that maybe The Little Orange Man got married), and a girl by the name of (and I am not kidding, although it fits perfectly into a long-running joke) Saleisha, or as I will be referring to her from here on out: Miss Salacious D. She currently has magenta bangs and a $25 dollar weave, but that will be going away very soon, or so Tyra and the Jays assure us.

The personalities started to come out as the 30? 32? 33? semi-finalists got put on a Caribbean cruise to somewhere or other. We see them in the dining hall, picking on each other’s food choices. We see The Girl With the Fauxhawk get up in The Bitch’s grill when The Bitch asks something like, which of you all have eating disorders. Bwhahahahahah. That’s a trick question, of course, because the answer is, if we all eat and purge like this then it’s normal, right? (oh, by the way, one of my Cafe Press shirts bears the immortal question from last year’s sent-home-too-soon girl Kathleen: “I know, right?”)

The Plus-Size Girl is shocked! Shocked!! to see how much skinnier the skinny girls are. But she’s rocking that full-figured size 6, so fuck ‘em. In fact, The Plus-Sized Girl is the subject of much discussion between Tyra and the Jays. Is she really a plus size girl? She’s on the small side of plus. Maybe, just maybe, they allow, she is merely The Real-Size Girl. Whoo-hoo for her, whoo-hoo for Sara.

The girls have to do an impromptu cat walk wearing life preservers and it is as ugly as it sounds. Miss Jay ridicules them and the tears start to flow. We see the duck walk, the pigeon toes, the knock knees, the stoop shoulders, and my personal favorite, the girl who walks like she’s smuggling the family jewels out of Westbumfukstan in her cootch.

We see the girls in their one-on-threes with Tyra and the Jays. There is weeping, there is a gift, there is the faux waxing (really. I may have to rinse my eyes with acid if I think of it too much). There is one girl who comes out stomping like the legendary Camille of season 2? I am Camille and this is my signature horse stomp… One of the girls allows as how she looks like one Adrianne Lima (pronouncing it LYE-ma and prompting catcalls from Tyra). Another has a walk evocative of Naomi (or so says Tyra, proving once more that she is so over that girl, and can too say her name without shattering). And yet another walks on her hands.

We see all the tragic back stories and the ones too tragic for the house are the girl with the fauxhawk who was sexually abused by her foster families and/or raped, the girl who was born with a hemmoraged right eye, but won’t let that stop her, and the bartender from Bahhstin who is even more unintelligible than Noxema or Jaslene. And that, my friends, is saying a good deal. The boat is rocking, and dinner comes a’knocking for one or another of the girls. This means that one or two try to look concerned and a couple others say yahoo, better chances for me.

There is a photo shoot on a beach, where they do varying levels of not-too-bad, with the occasional day-um, she looks good thrown in to confuse us. Jaslene appears here to tell the wannabees how fabulous it is to have won, and prove that speaking like you have a mouth full of gummy bears does not prevent you from winning a contract to be a

spokesperson. She still looks like a tranny, but she seems to have gotten more work than any of the other winners, so what do I know.

The Jays and Tyra look at film and decide who stays and who goes. The best is when they discuss the designated House Bitch (Ebony, the crack-ho’s daughter). The girls have all ratted her out by now, and the thought of beating her into humility causes Tyra and the Jays to cackle like the three witches in

Macbeth. All of us in television land are cackling too, because we know how much fun it will be to watch. Ebony has been gloating over her fabulous $500 weave (and it is pretty fly, I have to admit. How much do you want to bet that she’s the one with the shaved head or Dianna Ross afro make-over?

And then it’s the end, all too soon. Next week there will be DRAMA! FIGHTING! A new, faboo house decorated with lots of pictures of Tyra.

I know, right?

YARRRRR!!!!

Not only is today Talk like a pirate day, it is the start of Season 9 of America’s Next Top

Model! I could not be happier. I am wearing a horizontally striped shirt, a denim skirt and boots. I have on a funky vest and a lovely rhinestone skull and crossbones pin. I have told my boss that in deference to the media crisis going on in the field, which will result in any number of calls coming in to this office today, I will NOT be answering the phones “YARRR!”

Aye, he has no idea how lucky he is. I, on the other hand, have a ‘ery clear idea o’ how lucky I am, because before I left for work, the RLA composed a two-hour Pyrates playlist and uploaded it ont’ the ole i-pod, ya savvy? Aye, me parrot concurs.

Tonight will be t’ traditional popcorn and cosmopolitans, fuzzy bathrobe and bunny slippers, run t’ husband out o’ t’ livin’ room and settle in t’ watch t’ best train wreck on television. I love, love, love Tyra Banks and her haphazard crew o’ wannabes who can’t walk in heels. Sigh.

While my passion for baseball has been well documented in this space, perhaps I have not been quite as forthcoming about my dalliances with football. (American football, for you readers from Down Under and abroad) It’s true that I went to games in high school and junior high, but only because in a tiny Southern town, that’s all there is to do on a Saturday night… except watch the sidewalks roll up. In college, I went to the first home game of my freshman semester, and no others. Now, again, there is this to factor in: the University of Miami Hurricanes lost almost every game during all four of my years there, and it wasn’t until Jim Kelly came along that UM became the quarterback and running back factory it is today. During the glory days of Bernie Kosar and Vinnie Testeverde, et.al. I went to every home game and some away games, most notably the Fiesta Bowl against Penn State in which Vinnie so spectacularly needed a Heimlich maneuver on the field.

But I haven’t been totally up front about the fact that I used to call my father to discuss the Dolphins, the Hurricanes and/or the (shudder) Florida Gators. Or that I found out John Lennon had been shot from Howard Cosell because I was in a hotel room 40 miles from home so that I could catch a Dolphin game that wasn’t broadcast in my area. Or that I bought a hi-def, giant screen tv so that I could watch the Superbowl commercials in HD and letterboxed.

All that being admitted, last night I was watching Sunday Night Football (San Diego going down in feeble sparks, not even flames, to the awesomeness of the New England Patriots—with their star, Randy Moss coming out of UM many years ago). There were the usual commercials for trucks, trucks and more trucks, and for various erectile dysfunction treatments (do not use if you have high blood pressure, low blood pressure, normal erectile functioning, liver disease, heart disease, stroke, vision problems, are breathing, are left handed but bat right, get erections lasting more than 4 hours!! etc…) and I was pretty much ignoring them all. But. Then a terrible thing happened. Viagra has co-opted my very favorite song not originally recorded by Bruce Springsteen or Bob Dylan. And when I say favorite, I mean it. I have an instrumental version featuring Johnny Ramone and Lemmy, a soulful rendition by Shawn Colvin, a couple of live takes by Bruce, the original by Elvis, the Tort Elvis/Dread Zeppelin reggae version, a punk version by the Dead Kennedys, and a few others. Have you guessed the song yet?

Viva Las Vegas has become Viva Viagra and I’ll be having nightmares about this for a month.

Well shut my mouf and stuff it with hush puppies. My purple boxes quilt has shown up today on the front page of Etsy as a hand-picked favorite.

And yesterday I went to temple and said kadish and heard the shofar and said my prayers and didn’t cry. In fact, it made me feel good to be back at services and I realized how much I miss the community of my temple. Next week is Kol Nidre, and I can’t wait.

I believe that this is going to be a good year.

Lord knows that I am the first to point fingers and laugh at the misfortunes of others, but not today. Today I am going to tell you something: I fear for Britney Spears. I have put her on my personal suicide/early death watch.

I saw her performance at the VMAs and it was so pitiful and sad that I could barely laugh at Sara Silverman’s routine. I did laugh, though. Inappropriate or not, cheap shots or not, the woman was funny. But Britney wasn’t funny. Nor was she there. She looked lost. She couldn’t walk in those heels, either because she was somehow impaired (drunk, high, downed out, a and b only, a and c only, all of the above) or because she somehow didn’t practice enough in them. Her movements weren’t the crisp dance movements of just a couple years ago, they were flacid and half-hearted. She didn’t seem to know the routine. Poor thing looked like a deer caught in the headlights.

And while personally, I could just kill for that body (not, you know, actually work out for it though), it wasn’t a body that should have been on display in that costume. Take a tip from her royal highness, Miss Cher, and if you want to expose yourself, do it through sheer mesh and under a shit load of sequins. Nobody will ever notice anything, and you will look Fabulous.

But poor Miss Spears. If, as the tabloids say, she is insecure about herself, this fire storm of “Fatty, Fat, Fat” and “She Can’t Dance” could put her over the edge. She has displayed enough self-destructive habits, displayed enough bad judgement, that one has to wonder (well, this one has to wonder) if she could totally self-destruct. Suicide? Overdose? A simple slip behind the wheel and over the high side of the PCH?

I hope someone gets her help. I doubt it will happen. But I think I’ve finally seen my fill of this particular train wreck. I’ll just turn the page.

It is no shock to constant readers of this blog that I am a gear head. A gear head from the first. And an aberration in my family, where nobody knows anything about cars. Well, there is a legendary uncle on my father’s side who used to come to Florida for the horses, arriving in some flash convertible with golf clubs in the back and leaving by hopping the train… but I digress.

Anyway. Cars. Love them. Love to drive them. Love to look at them. Loved this article about them.

The 50 Worst Cars of All Time

I actually had some sewing room time this weekend, and some lolling about in the pool with the dogs. I started another tallis, and it should be ready for the holiday later this week. Tomorrow night I have to bake a honey cake. The RLA asked if I would be so kind as to make the traditional, dense, brick-like version this year, and I will happily oblige.

Later dollinks.