America's Next Top Blog

More pimping of my blog roll: I began following Elyse Sewell because she came in third on the first season of America's Next Top Model, to which I am addicted. (New cycle starts in September, y'all!) She was vastly superior to the winner that season, Adrienne, who went on to reality show fame with her now husband, the guy who played Peter on The Brady Bunch.

Anyhoodle, Elyse is a working model, often in Hong Kong. And her writing is quirky and fun:

In Western restaurants, you order the broiled fish, your dining partner orders the steak, and you eat from your plate with a fork and knife while jealously looking across the table going, "Damn, I should have ordered the steak." In China, you order family-style, then everyone gets a little bowl of rice and you use chopsticks to pick morsels of food out of the common plates, transfer them onto your bowl of rice, and thence onward to your mouth (as grains of rice stick to every morsel, thereby carbohydratifying each bite). The Chinese method is vastly superior unless you're an idiot like me trying to dine out alone, in which case you end up at a huge table with a trough-sized bowl of Ma Po Tofu sitting in front of you, a searing-hot ceramic bowl of rice which you try to pick up and drop with a clatter back down on to the table, then the waitress tries to rush to your aid and doesn't realize that you're trying to upend the bowl of rice on to your tiny plate, then you have to go up and walk to the refrigerator at the back of the restaurant to point at the drink you want and all they have is beer (no), chocolate milk (no), and cardboard cartons of strawberry cordial (well, OK, I guess), then you're transferring pieces of tofu and rice to this plate and that bowl and the tablecloth and your lap, and swilling cordial and turning pages of your book and sending text messages and taking photographs while all around you families are trying to enjoy a nice banquet and looking over at you like who the hell is this provincial idiot who doesn't know basic table manners?

Also, for all you Shins fans, she sometimes writes about her long-time boyfriend Marty Crandall, keyboardist for the band. (They were together before either of them were famous, awww.)