Building on yesterday, I'm now torn regarding Orlando Cabrera. Not so much for my reasoning, but for the apparent tightness of the NL voting between Benito Santiago and Geoff Jenkins. Given that keeping Jenkins off the team is a secondary reason for my support of Cabrera, should I instead start voting for Santiago, who has a better chance of winning? Probably. Sadly, I don't have the luxury of 2000, where I could vote for pretty much whoever I damn well pleased because the winner wasn't in question.

Also building on yesterday, I can further erode my guy qualifications by noting that I found my summer crutch for American Idol not in its pre-teen doppleganger, but in UPN's America's Next Top Model. Then again, it is a show about picking a model out of ten young, attractive women, and it's not like I was watching for make-up tips.

Created and hosted by Tyra Banks, we got to watch week in and week out as the finalists participated in various facets of modeling, sometimes with some challenges (modeling swimsuits outside in January, a photo shoot with snakes as props). At the end of each episode, the judges (including Banks, a designer/model friend of her's, the fashion editor from Marie Claire, and first generation supermodel Janice Dickinson) would select one woman to eliminate, thus narrowing the competition each week.

Unlike most of the reality that's aired this summer, Model was actually done with some level of taste, class, and production values. Like all reality shows, you had some force-fed conflict and fun with editing, but as the number of contestants dwindled you did get a good sense of who these women were and how they interacted.

Religion was an unusual factor in the competition, as there were three devout Christians in the group. This not only led to some conflict between women, but also some times when one or more of the women would express concern about how what they were asked to do conflicted with their faith. Given that, at times, the conflict was over something very clearly a common part of modeling, you had to wonder just why the given woman was even there.

In any case, it was fun while it lasted, certainly better than Dog Eat Dog or all the craptacular sitcoms on ABC. A sequel has already been greenlighted (if you'd like to try out, hie thyself over to the UPN website), so if this sounds like it's up your alley, give it a look-see.