1Oak & Random Thoughts

“If clubs could metamorphosize into men, I’d want to date 1Oak.”

Full article here

Other thoughts of the day:
- Are white plastic sunglasses in now? I’ve been seeing them everywhere, on men and women, from cafés to clubs. Someone take responsibility and explain.

- Why is the London Bachelor on ABC likable despite the fact that he’s a make-out whore? The kissing fiend is lip-locked in every scene with another woman, often while fellow suitors/competitors watch. I know we all rag on the immaturity of people on reality TV, but I have to give these Bachelor broads props because if some girl was tounging a guy I just kissed (let alone wanted to marry) there’s no way I could calmly watch through a window serenely sipping champagne and gossiping. I’d probably pull some sort of karate move that would land everyone (plus cameramen) in the hospital, or at least the psych ward.

- Why is the city raping Washington Square Park? It used to be so pretty and now it looks like a prison facility. If I were an NYU freshman paying $40,000 a year for a non-campus college and the one outdoor communal space my school had to offer looked like war zone, I’d demand a partial refund. Where will these students unwrap their sandwiches and enjoy picnics in the roped-off grass? More importantly, where will they buy weed from hobos?

Make Me a Supermodel Transatlantic

This weekend my DVR went ka-crazy recoding thirty-five episode’s of Bravo’s Make Me a Supermodel. I figured since the season finale had been on Thursday, there’d been some sort of triple marathon (the one contestant who’d have been successful in the industry regardless [assuming she drops an additional 12 pounds], took the prize.) As I went through monotonously deleting episode after episode, my thumb becoming numb, I noticed that all the descriptions were unfamiliar:

“I don’t remember the episode when they flew the models to Iceland???”

So I pressed play and whacky as it sounds, my DVR had recorded two seasons worth of Britain’s Make Me a Supermodel.

Weird!!

So I decide to watch some of it while I cooked eggs, just as a cultural enlightenment exercise (who says you have to go to school to do cross cultural studies? You can do it in your kitchen!) Naturally, the entire show, like England itself, felt muted, foggy and grey compared to our sparkly New World version. What’s odd is that they incessantly utilize a narrator, who introduces scenes saying things like:

“On the porch, Wally and Lauren discuss their anxiety about the upcoming panel while smoking a cigarette.”

Geez thanks, narrator. None of that would have been evident by just LOOKING AT MY SCREEN.

So that device got annoying super fast. Bravo inserted occasional subtitles to help us Americans understand these washed-out models’ jibber jabber (they were all Dracula-level pale with really knotty hair). My question is that if we’re using subtitles anyway, why create a Make Me a Supermodel series in England, which isn’t exactly notorious for six foot beauties strolling down your average street. Why can’t some executive pitch Brazilian, or even the small town I was in, Escarpas Make Me a Supermodel. They could certainly cut back on scouting since everyone in town could be a contestant.

Also, unlike the American version where our girl and boy models reacted like infants, wholeheartedly rejecting the opposite sex splitting into male and female teams, the Brits seemed to be hooking up and model-defiling each other. This would’ve been exciting had their malnutrition not been so strikingly apparent.

The ten minutes of the season I saw seemed to be from Make Me a Supermodel 2006, which leads me to believe the show existed across the pond before it landed over here. Fascinating. Fascinating. Changing the channel now as I eat my eggs.