Apropos of having nothing to say, an update on the reality shows I watch. You missed them, I can tell.

On American Idol, the show has whittled its contestants down to the final 12, but with a hitch. One of the more popular contestants on the show quit due to some set of ill-defined personal reasons involving family matters. Of course, every yahoo with access to a two-bit message board is saying he's gay and didn't want to be outed.

Regardless, the show's change in format, where the 24 semifinalists competed every week rather than in groups over a month's time, actually went pretty well outside of throwing two and a half hours of programming at us a week. One problem was the gender-balancing of the contestant pool, as there was not equal talent in the men's and women's pools (this year in the men's favor).

I'm not going to get into the individual contestants, other than to note the greatest benefactor in this whole episode of a finalist quitting is the son of baseball Hall of Famer Ozzie Smith, who was voted off in the last round of the semifinals. He had more votes than the other guy who got booted, so he was asked back to take the open spot.

The Apprentice and it's book smarts versus street smarts is proving one thing very clearly - it doesn't matter how much education you have, your ability to succeed pretty much directly correlates with how much of a jackass you are.

The tasks have mostly been marketing-related, coming up with a way to pitch a new Burger King sandwich or promote a new body wash (a task one team tried to win by making an ad combining the fondling of cucumbers and surprise gayness).

The contestants are more interesting than last time out, though with that level of "interesting" comes worrisome, call a mental health professional moments. Such as when one contestant walked off the task, wheeling her suitcase aimlessly along the streets of a Jersey seashore town. Or another contestant going into fugue state while recounting her hardscrabble upbringing.

Anyway, it's better than last season, if still ridiculously over-hyped. I'm looking forward to Martha Stewart taking over for a series, if for no other reason than in hopes that she'll shiv someone.

America's Next Top Model has started its fourth season, and it's pretty much the same as before. Young women do something requiring photography and are adjudged worthy or not of becoming a housemate on The Surreal Life sometime in 2007.

Off the bat, I did not like the way the show went from 35 to the 14 finalists in one show. Perhaps a two hour episode would have been better, if at least to give more background to contestants. It was pretty easy to tell who was going to make the finals given how many of the women who didn't basically had cameos in the episode.

If the show's idea of a creative shake-up is a move from New York to LA, it may be a long season. They've also seemingly gone the "interesting" route with casting, given the number of contestants with children (and even, occasionally, husbands).

Tyra Banks, true to not wanting to create a stereotype in casting a bitchy African-American, did so again this season, finding a young woman who managed to antagonize the folks running the first shoot and complain about her makeover (after complaining about not getting one as her look was adjudged to be sufficiently "fierce"). Yet she survived the first cut of the finals. Thankfully, there was a contestant over the age of 21 who had the gall to be a weight closer to most of humanity than the rest of the contestants.

Should this season unfold like all the ones before it, I hope they'll take the summer to come up with some changes. Reality requires some tweaking with format to keep things fresh, and they don't seem to have tweaked enough yet.