RD here, texting a recap on her phone and pretending she’s Gossip Girl for ANTM, only snarkier.

So we’re down to the final five, as the contestants repeat 10,000 times. After they get back to their Maui home in their “Eco-friendly” bus, a wrong guess about the Tyrant Mail is made by Laura speculating the Munchkins are going to be “sea turtles.” Sadly “sea turtles” would be better than most of their Hawaii-themed shoots thus far. Oh, did I mention that it’s Laura’s birthday? This is very important, according to Tyra, as we see Laura eating Spam, watching Erin make cupcakes for her, wearing a bra blindfold for a birthday buffet…This is very important stuff, people!

Despite being a decent judge at panel, Marisa Miller humiliates the Munchkins by making them jump in the surf and roll in the sand while on her faux Cleopatra power trip. Sadly, several of our Munchkins think they can be Victoria’s Secret Angels like her. Sorry, Munchkins, Angel wings weigh twice as much as you do–you’d never get off the ground.

The Munchkins are forced to wash the sand off their bodies and then jump off a cliff while looking “fierce” and “SMIZing.” This whole segment, along with the presence of Nigel Barker, is painful like Sundai’s eventual water-caused earache, so I’ll move on…

to another painful segment not shot on Laura’s birthday, Russell James’s underwater shoot. None of the pictures from this shoot were good. NONE. And Russell James is a decent photographer, as evidenced by his Cycle 11 swimshoot photos and his AustNTM Cycle 5 shoot in the desert. You know who I blame? That jealous bastard Nigel Barker. You know he intentionally wanted to ruin Russell’s shoot by making him shoot underwater in bad conditions so his awful CoverGirl commercial shoot would look better in comparison.

Much to the chagrin of the viewing audience, Tyra wore a blouse only a drunk, insane Hera would wear on Olympus. Much to the chagrin of the Munchkins, though, their least favorite Munchkin of the now, Erin, is not kicked off for the home audience’s least favorite Munchkin of the now, Sundai.

I leave you with Laura being shell-shocked by the smell of her bikini blindfold.

You know they’re Munchkins,

xoxo

RD

I won’t be able to post this week’s recap or, possibly, next week’s or the finale.  At least a non-text only version, which I may do.  After getting a DVR recorder and having no less than two flash drives on a 2+ year old computer, you’d think I would back up my work.  I didn’t.  And now, we all suffer.

Unlike my last computer hiccup, where the computer was okay, it just needed to manually have the dust removed and a new keyboard (I pulled the keys off because I was paranoid of the computer having water in it when it didn’t), this time the monitor is coming up dim, which either means something in the monitor is broken or the motherboard is dying.  In that case, thank goodness I backed up my music I bought from iTunes and wherever.  So I may see you later this evening once I charge up my iPhone and fire up my WordPress app?  Maybe?  I’ll try to make the recap less than 500 words and have a picture attached.

I apologize if I don’t have any non-ANTM posts ready in advance because I’m working on NaNoWriMo.  Again.  But I’ve decided to forgo the founder’s advice on writing a novel (i.e. the following:

You will also, however, write some flagrantly nonsensical chapters, create pages and pages of dialogue that make you cry (in a bad way), and endure a few shameful days where the only thing keeping your word-count afloat is the fact that your protagonist has a habit of reading the dictionary aloud whenever she gets nervous. And she’s always nervous.

This is totally fine.

No, this is not.  If a character is reading the dictionary aloud in your novel and you didn’t have a plan to begin with, your novel will suck.  Point blank.)

I’ve got some ideas I’ll work on for some non-ANTM posts: a thing I wanted to talk about on Halloween, but I didn’t have it put together and some of Weezer’s weirdest collaborations (Muppets, Hugh Hefner & the Playboy Mansion, Leighton Meester), some other things.  If there are weeks that the only things you see on this blog are ANTM posts, I’m busy doing other things (which may or may not be my novel, which I hope will be salvageable because I’m listening to myself and not some word-count obsessed PTB.  And speaking of Meester, well, maybe I should apologize to Blair Waldorf, because the swooning thing is not exclusive to Gossip Girl; it’s in Meester’s new music video for “Somebody to Love” (with Robin Thicke, to premiere on the CW’s Gossip Girl music page after next week’s threesome episode of Gossip Girl).

Other than this video of Meester fighting over Tamagotchis, I have not seen anything not-Gossip Girl related with Meester in it, so I don’t know how long she has done the Meester Swoon™.  So am I to assume every time Meester swoons, she gets an orgasm?  I certainly hope she does, because it’ll be a small condolence to my worried soul.

First things first:  This whole “biracial Hawaiian” (yes, I know the term Tyra used, but I don’t want to use it on my blog) shoot was Tyra being Tyra.  First, there was the sepia and black and white tones in the pictures.

She can’t ever take a good color picture.  Ever.  No, the picture of Sundai does not count because it is not taken in good color.

The last time we saw Blair Waldorf on this blog she was complaining to Chuck Bass about how lame the CW has gotten. The last time Blair did anything important in her Gossip Girl storyline, though, she was playing her “woman scorned” bit where she makes other people feel bad for cheating with Chuck Bass.  (Why?  So she could give a toast at a freshman dinner at NYU.)  She also swoons funny when she’s around people like Chuck.

You may have heard of this on other blogs, but, um, Chuck was “cheating” on her with a guy.  Blair seemed to get into it a bit too much.

I know I complain about (ANTM) cycles a lot, but this was a clever highlight in what otherwise was a trip through Batman’s Rogues Gallery:

This is the only kudos the editors get this season.

(Title reference.)

Chamber 1: the Bankable Vault

I see they fixed the Bankable vault.

I’m very disappointed in you, Laura.  I thought you’d break the wheel off that fake safe and throw it in the pool so we wouldn’t have to see Tyra’s vanity in action over and over again this cycle.  Well, at least five percent of her vanity.

The set-up of “Dan de Fleurette” reminds me too much of Pop-Up Brady, a spin-off of Pop-Up Video for Nick-At-Nite when Nick-At-Nite wasn’t showing Home Improvement and Family Matters reruns.  The bubbles aired during the Brady Bunch episodes would tell the viewer about how the episode was separated into two distinct subplots resolved by a single event by show’s end.  It’s the same with “Dan De Fleurette” except there are three subplots that are resolved instead of two. Plot A, part of an on-going “Queen Bee” plot since Gossip Girl started (and, sadly, the most interesting plot of the episode), involves Blair Waldorf meddling in Jenny Humphrey’s reign as the new Queen Bee of Constance Billows High (Blair’s alma mater and Jenny’s current school).  Plot B is the story of how Dan Humphrey (Jenny’s older brother) and Olivia Burke, an actress (inspired by Emma Watson…and sadly, Gossip Girl didn’t go for the roommate who was on Next Top Model as well) played by Hilary Duff, hook up.  This leaves us with Plot C: Serena van der Woodsen looks for a job after deferring a year from Brown University (so she can be angsty while being in the proximity of Blair et. al. and the series can continue, for the most part, in New York).  This is also the Tyra Banks subplot.

Blair is not happy about this recap.

Laura Said Something Cute #2

I guess someone broke Tyra’s Bankable Vault this week.  Whichever model did that, please step up now so we can be BFFs forever.

The reaction the contestants had to Brittany Markert getting Photo of the Week (and immunity, $1,000 from the M Resort Spa Casino and her design sold at Macy’s) more than made up for last week’s lack of anything interesting.

Without further ado I’ll skip the informal CoverGirl product placement makeup lesson and head straight to Mr. and Mrs. Hairy Chest Barker’s new model derby league.