Seems today whenever I see my friends, there is this obligatory, “Sorry, mate,” statement attached to every conversation. I apologize because as of late, I haven’t hung out much with cohorts I usually make a habit out of seeing. So to all of you reading this that haven’t seen my face in awhile, again, I am sorry. But damn if work isn’t keeping me busier than I have ever been. By the time I get home, I’m beat and just wanna throw on a TV on DVD boxset and kick it with a bowl of dry cereal and a beer. In bed by 9:30 doesn’t seem to bother me.

Though, it does wreak havoc on a social life. I should make a more concerted effort to see my mates more often, but when my favorite shows keep coming out on DVD, it becomes increasingly harder to pry my lazy ass off the couch and march down to City O’ City. So again, sorry all. You could always come over, I s’pose.

What was that?! How could she win over Allison! Teyona cant even do half of her job! which will be commercials!!!! She was the worst of the top three. A lot of people can get a good picture and she didn’t really improve all season! Allison improved so much, and will continue to do so! She has a decent commercial, a great walk, and a good picture and she has the ability to improve as she has shown us! Teyona had an okay picture, a robotic walk, and a terrible commercial…hmmm how did she win?! NO CLUE!!! I do not agree at all. Maybe next year there will be a GOOD winner…

Most of us figured out around the fifth season that America’s Next Top Model was rapidly becoming boring and repetitive. For those of you that are slower to catch on, America’s Next Top Model is now in its twelfth season and all the staples are there: the flamboyantly silver-haired and yet strangely attractive Jay Manuel, the other ugly trannie J, the undeniably good-looking and (more shockingly) nice model turned photographer Nigel Barker, and Tyra’s ego.

This season the crack team behind ANTM decided to hire a bunch of people with weird names and weirder faces. We have Allison, whose eyes are bigger than her fists; Celia, who’s older than Jesus (25); Fo, who I’m fairly certain is just a pretty guy; Aminat, whose smile extends beyond her cheeks; and Teyona, who has no face, only forehead. Put them in a house together and what happens? Black v. White, duh.

Allison

v.

Teyona

That’s pretty much how this season shakes itself down as more and more contestants are dropped for not being edgy enough, or for being edgy too often, or whatever lame excuse means that Tyra’s PMSing this week. Can’t blame her though; three seconds of listening to this show makes me want to /wrists. An example of dialogue verbatim from contestant Aminat:

I was on time. And that’s really good you know cos I’m African, so I’m always late.

Did I miss something? Aren’t Africans fast runners that, should they come to America, will be beating me in line for the last doughnut that will inevitably make them as slow as I am?

In any case, none of the other contestants are much better. In the “cleverly” named episode Let’s Go See the City, the girls go on go-sees in the “fashion capital” of Brazil (keep in mind that by this point they have also called Cape Town, Amsterdam, and Bangkok “fashion capitals”). Apparently none of the girls are talented enough to manage to see five designers in four hours, in spite of the fact that the majority of the girls accomplished this in previous years. Teyona wins the go-see contest and pitches a shit-fit when Celia attempts to touch a shirt. Then Allison (otherwise known as that girl who constantly belittles herself in a futile attempt to make herself look endearing) does well at the photo shoot and acts like a beaten monkey when Nigel attempts to praise her. Fo and Celia do poorly in the photo shoot, which basically just means that Nigel and Jay didn’t feel like seeing them that day.

In spite of Celia pre-dating the pyramids, Fo gets sent home because she’s short. You would think this problem would have occured to the judges of ANTM before when they met her and she was also short, but apparently this is beyond the scope of their judgement. Never mind! Celia gets sent home next episode, so ANTM takes care of that quickly enough.

In the final running we have: pop-eyes, forehead, and the Cheshire cat. Who will win? Who cares?

NV/R,

Margo

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Season 12: The Death of Hope

There isn’t an official release date yet, but Amazon has a pre-order page up for the Season 12 DVDs (via).   (The Simpsons DVDs seem to come out willy-nilly; there’s no real pattern to when they get released, so this one could be coming out in a month or two or not until Christmas or later, who knows?)  Speaking only for myself, 12 was when I knew the show I loved was never coming back.  Prior to that I’d stopped denying that it had lost a step, but I still held out at least some hope for recovery; 12 was when hope died.  

Assuming that the image at left is actually the cover image, I think it’s very fitting.  Obviously there’s the fact that the comic book guy is one of the many minor characters who works extremely well in small parts but falls to pieces when asked to carry an episode.  But the delusional nature of someone with as many failings as he has secretly believing that, despite all evidence to the contrary, he’s super is almost too apt for Zombie Simpsons: “Beneath this mild mannered disguise lies genius!”  Sadly, no.

Match Report
By Weeksy
Here is the match report for the South Africa vs Australia game, sorry its a bit late. Hope ya like it.

Game 2 saw our under 19 boys travel to the land down under of Australia, with the game being played at Adelaide.

Rob Ward and Derek “Mysterious” Groenink walked out to toss the coin. Ward won the toss and sent South Africa into bat on an uneven pitch.
Groenink (55 of 71) and Tony Mullen (44 of 45) led the way brilliantly with a great opening partnership of 101, unfortunately, Jimmy ‘The Pain’ Hurter
could not add a single run to the partnership with Groenink as he was dismissed for a duck, then Groneink was out as well.

Loosing three quick wickets like that was not a good sign for the boys, they looked to Doug “The Giant” Kempen and Ray “maddog” Myall to steady the ship,
unfortunately Myall couldn’t do the job only making 4. With the team total now on 124/4 things didn’t look to good.
Kempen was now joined at the crease with Miles “North” Weston, these boys then went on to play brilliantly and stand up for their country when they needed to most.
Kempen ended up on 77 not out from 96 deliveries with Weston facing 74 balls for his not out performance of 77.
The end of 50 overs saw the score at 265/4, mainly thanks to the great opening partnership of Mullen and Groenink, then another partnership followed with Kempen and Weston putting on 141 together.

Now it was time for the South Africa boys to head out and defend their total of 265. The boys were on a high after they got a wicket with the first delivery of the day thanks to Pete Mbata bowling great lines and getting Frank Chambers to hit a catch straight to Shaun Mbatha.
Mbata then followed on to take the next to wickets to end with figures of 3/49 with 1 maiden of his 10 overs. Frank Dhanji was the star batter for Australia making 103.
Kris Nordien was another bowler who chipped in claiming 2 wickets off his 10 overs for 45 runs. Vic Mosheua also bowled good lines, but was unlucky to claim a wicket finishing up with figures off 10 overs 1 maiden for 41 runs.

Australia being at 3 fa 180 were looking alright, but some quick wickets by Nordien brought them back to be 6 fa 213.
The game was coming down to the wire, the crowd started to chew on their fingernails with 31 needed off the last 3 overs. You must say it was looking slightly in favour of SA.
Unfortunatley they got 17 of the 48th over. With Australia only needed 14 off 2 now and the ball was tossed to Phillip ‘Dennis’ Norden to trundle his arm over for the last over of the day.
He bowled well, but with luck not on his side, Australia won with 1 ball remaining, unlucky for our boys, after putting up such a great effort with the bat and then following up to get some quick wickets with the ball.
Plenty of positive to come out of the game, batting partnerships, and some good bowling when wickets were needed.

we now look forward to the next match against Pakistan at home, good luck boys, you are starting to play well together now and a win is just around the corner.

Match Report.

Yesterday, Season 12 kicked off with a home match against New Zealand.
Prior to the match we had a few players with jetlag and thus the choice of who to play was that much more difficult. With 3 spinenrs being in good form, the groundsman at Newlands went out and worked hard to get the pitch dusty to try help them out.

New Zealand won the toss and sent us in to bat.
Bill “whitewolf” Strydom and Dan “Toffee” Wilson opened the batting for us.
Strydom started well with a quick single to get the board ticking. A ball or two was quickly sent to the boundry, showing we are ready for the challange.

Fifth over Wilson missed a inswinging yorker and leg stump was gone and so was he.
Our keeper for the day, Tony “Mullet” Mullen came to the crease but only lasted 1 over before being sent back with to the dressing room.
Seeing wickets falling next to him, Strydom went the next over for 24.

Two new batsman at the crease and all preasure on them with us at 36/3.
Doug “The Giant” Kempen got a quick 11 to help with a few runs to get us to 69/4

Gerry Ledingham and Ray “maddog” Myall to try steady the ship after a dismal start.
With great bowlign from the New Zealand bowlers, our runrate started to slowly drop.
With four batsman down, these two had to get a decent platform for us.
In the 31st over Myall made his debut halve ton and sure was set for his 100.
Ledingham followed soon, but with our runrate at below 4, it was going to be difficult to defend.

Last 10 overs to go, 158/4 and we could still set up a decent total.
In the 45th over we got too eager and lost 4 batsman in 1 over, with New Zealand bowler, Killen, taking a hattrick.
Myall running himself out and our 2 AR’s not putting anything on the board.
Down to 190/8 we were just hoping to get 200 on the bord and defend when we field.

A low target of 206 was set up with a required runrate of 4.12 needed.

New zealand started well, as we did, and a early runout was joyfully accepted by the spectators and team.
They kept the runs keeping ticking over and had wickets in hand.
Phillip ‘Dennis’ Norden struck in the 10th over and took the settling Tsimba.
Fitness was showing on our bowlers and we just did not pitch the ball in the right places and did not keep the runrate down.
On the NT side our lads were looking good agaisnt India (93-3, runrate=4.65, reqrunrate=6.47 (286-4)), and RL, SA just needed to stay in.
Back on topic
Caleb “The Ambassador” Ferreira came back for his second spell and got Shanks just before he made is 50.
Runrate still being a problem and NZ having depth, wickets is what we needed!
Pete Mbata struck two overs later and New Zealand 176/4, we can still pull it off.

Mbata clean bowled Carter-harris, the danger man at that point, 2 shy off his maiden debut century.
With it all being too little too late,we lost the match with 5 overs remaining.

Bad day for SA cricket

I have come to the conclusion that The CW enjoys torturing their audience. Why, oh why must you present a reality tv personality in such a manner causing me to grind the already worn enamel from my teeth only to annoy me further by keeping said personality on the show for another week of torture??? You’ve flustered me to the point of run-on sentences.

Oh, ANTM what am I going to do with you? I just don’t think I can take another season of corny themes (the Goddess of Fierce?) and script writing. This show is good all by itself. Don’t try so hard in adding all the extra fluff. Tyra. Girl, you are better than that ridiculous Sasha Fierce/Goddess of Fierce montage. That was torture. Let’s get back to the real point of the show, the modeling. I also think it needs to be written into the clause that the potential models have to sign that there will be no screaming, squealing, and/or screeching of any kind while filming ANTM. If I hear another squeal when one of the Jay’s or Tyra or the Domino’s delivery guy walks into the room my ears may start to bleed.

As usual, I cringed my way through the first episode of Season 12. I wasn’t too surprised on the top 13 girls that were picked. Sandra immediately was on my nerves and remained that way throughout the whole episode. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard someone talk so highly and so much about themselves and then fall so flat on their face. I thought the bottom two girls definitely deserved to be in the bottom two. And, just as expected but not as I hoped, the over the top annoying girl stayed and the sweet girl had to leave. I disagreed on many levels with the decision to keep Sandra. Sandra’s walk was not good and she only walked a small portion of the runway. Sandra’s shoot and picture was not good. And, she downright has a bad attitude and is not appealing to watch. Isabella, on the other hand, is incredibly sweet. She did a good job on the runway. But, her shoot and picture was not very good. Sandra’s negatives clearly outweighed Isabella’s negatives.

ANTM Models:

Allison: Has a very different look, teetering on the edge of weird/scary. Her picture was really good, but, will she be able to provide any other look than that?

Aminat: The one word that comes to mind when looking at Aminat is beauty. She is absolutely beautiful. Her features are amazing. I loved her runway walk. Her picture was good.

Celia: The jury’s still out for me on Celia. She’s another one with a different kind of look. Her attitude turned me off at first, but I really admired her strength in standing up for herself to Sandra. I really liked her picture and think she’ll be in it for a while.

Fo: I love this girl…fo’ sho! She is so stinkin’ cute! I thought she did a great job on her photo shoot and I loved her picture. Go Fo!

Isabella: Pretty girl. I wish she had more time to spread her wings and learn how to accomplish the right looks. Good luck girl!

Jessica: Hmmm. As a rule, I’m not a fan of someone who states that she’s the prettiest person wherever she goes.

Kortnie: This season’s plus-size model. I don’t have much to say on Kortnie just yet. I thought her picture was Ok.

London: Not a fan, but her picture was pretty.

Natalie: Again, not much to say on Natalie. I didn’t really like her picture.

Nijah: Pretty girl. Pretty picture.

Sandra: She’s got a good look, but a bad attitude.

Tahlia: Cute girl. I don’t know if she has what it takes to deal with her issues that this process is bringing to the surface and still keep up with the group. I thought her picture was cute.

Teyona: Very unique look. I didn’t get her picture, but I think she’ll be here for a while and will get a chance to learn.

I’m praying for my sanity during this season because I have a feeling it’s going to be a bumpy (and annoying) road.