Hello everybody! I am soooo super-apologizing for the lateness of this recap, I was in Las Vegas this weekend with my sister and my "little" brother as we celebrated his 30th birthday (and by "celebrated" I mean "got intoxicated" and "ate insanely expensive meals" and "played our favorite people-watching game 'Real Prostitute Or Just Super-Slutty Dresser?'"). I came home feeling like I had been reincarnated as a taxicab floor-mat, so I've been trying to recover a little and get back into the world of semi-tasteful design as opposed to some of the glitz-o-rama sparkle I was subjected to this weekend...

...not that Las Vegas isn't right up my alley as far as "taste" goes...

So here we gather, for one last time this season, to watch our three remaining taste-mavens duke (errr, slapfight & bitch) it out to see who has the Top Design. Oh yeah, and we're still stuck with Eddie VampiRoss in this last episode, so does everybody have their Egotistical Assclown Immunity Booster Shots? Trust, you're gonna need it after the jump...

Posted by J-Mo at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My BFF and I attended our high school's 20-year reunion this past weekend (Go Cardinals!... or... whatever the hell our mascot was) and although I worked out obsessively and ate nothing but Tic-Tacs and Diet Dr. Pepper for the entire week before the event, I somehow did not magically lose the extra 60 pounds I'm carrying, become CEO of a Major Corporation or invent Post-It Notes™ or Wite-Out™. So I had to go as myself... fat, gay, with a dead-end job and a side hobby of dancing backup for drag queens and writing cutting recaps of Bravo reality shows... and I discovered that, in the grand scheme of things, all of that was really okay, because I'm not Eddie Ross...

...I've been waiting for this screencap all season...

In tonight's next-to-last episode of this fabulous second season of Top Design we come to find out that our boy Eddie falls into the classic category of He Who Can Dish It Out, But Cannot Take It, Nathan does drag (urp!), Ondine can't sew, Preston is still pretty, and Jeff Lewis is back to favor us with his priceless facial expressions. If this recap is at all late, it is because of him begging for screencaps, so please do not kvetch at me, K? Time to get some real satisfaction out of this show after the jump!

Posted by J-Mo at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (27)

I went to Los Angeles this past weekend, which is why you got such a quick recap out of me on last week's show (for once) and I met up with Flipit, his friend Tricia, ChickBomb, and MonaMonzano for drinks on Friday night at the semi-famed Abbey, smack-dab in the middle of Boys Town (West Hollywood). Chile, it has been literally ten years since I was last there, the place is still like a big gay zoo (and I felt like the dancing bear... every time I went to go visit the Ladies' Room I kept getting whopped in the belly by people as I passed through the crowd... it's my own fault, really, they're just not used to seeing people with big fat bellies that deep into WeHo). Anyhow, we had such a great time, having a few drinks and yakking all night long about Project Runway and stuff... and at one point Flipit (who was facing me) made this funny eye-brow/head-nod gesture indicating someone was behind me... I turned around to look and OMG, OMG, OMG, I swear to you, here comes Silver Spoon Andrea Fucking Schroder!!!

..."I'd kick your fat ass, J-Mo... if I could muster up the energy."...

I felt the strength run out of my legs as she walked by and I thanked Jesus, Cher, Janet and Madonna that she has no clue who I am, because if she did, she would likely have beat me in the head with my own beer bottle over all the shit I've talked about her. Hey, it happened to Project Runway Season 4 finalist Rami Kashou in that very same bar just a few short months ago, and I may be fat, but I'd like to keep my chubby-cheeked face as free of scar-tissue as possible. It's not like Andrea doesn't deserve some of the trash-talk I send her way, and in tonight's episode of Top Design, you will see exactly why. Oh, and Eddie takes being a giant shitdickface (with extra cockcheese) to a level never before imagined (and I have a good imagination)! Get ready to be disgusted after the jump!

Posted by J-Mo at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (28)

Back when I was a young boy, and still had hope for the future, I dreamed of a world in which everyone flitted about in personal hovercrafts and jet-packs (mysteriously avoiding zillions of mid-air collisions), computers would talk to us in British accents (they'd all sound like Joan Collins in her giant shoulder-padded Dynasty days), food would be teeny little pills (your asparagus pill would taste like chocolate cake), and everything would be very shiny, sparkly, glittery and holographic...

...like the inside of a Spearmint Rhino Gentlemen's Club...

Well, on tonight's episode of Top Design we get to see six other visions of the future, as well as more of Silver Spoon Andrea's mounting depression, SexOndineCity's bitter angry side, and Eddie SplatteRoss will say the word "bewbs" again. Oh, and he's still a total dickface (or shitdick... I can't decide between the two)... it's time to boldly design a brave new world (made entirely of circles!) after the jump!

Posted by J-Mo at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Offices, as a rule, suck as far as interior design goes. Unless you're Anna Wintour (editor of Vogue) or Diane Von Furburger (famously accented fashion designer) or Martha Stewart (God), you pretty much are stuck with a room that has all the personality and sex-appeal of a wad of gum stuck under the conference room table. That is, if you actually have an office... with an actual door... for those of us not in management who are stuck with cubicles, it's a helluva lot worse, and you actual-office-people need to stop bitching. Working in a cubicle is like living in an ice-tray or a fluorescent lighting fixture... it's too bright, too cold, and everyone can see when you're hung over by the way you've slumped over your keyboard and are currently shorting it out with your drool-flow...

...when you need some of the hair of the ALT key that bit you...

Well, Office-Slaves of the World, rejoice! Tonight's episode of Top Design shows you just how much eco-friendly decorating you can do with some time, ingenuity and stolen ideas from Black-Eye Nathan! We're all gonna just turn green (albeit for different reasons) after the jump!

Posted by J-Mo at 2:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

I'll be the first to admit that I am not the most athletic of men. When I'm motivated, I can get the hell up on a stage and shake my 250 pound ass so hard to the beats of Janet, Beyoncé and Rihanna that other people get injured... and then other times I find myself getting winded while typing recaps and I have to rest and have a cookie. SO, far be it from me to criticize others for their possible lack of athleticism...

...I'm not kidding, the sheer weight of that sweater is exhausting him!...

...but I have to say I was howling with laughter when I saw this week's episode of Top Design described as a "triathlon of decorating"! I imagine that hardcore Iron Man athletes everywhere are saying to themselves "Yeah, so I hadda consecutively swim 2½ miles, bike 112 miles and run a full 26.2 mile marathon... but those plucky interior designers over on Bravo had to decorate a chair, set a table, and paint an alcove!... how do they train for such a grueling event?" I'll tell you how: Diet Coke and cigarettes (and a magazine or two). Let's pull a few groin muscles in sympathy after the jump!

Posted by J-Mo at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

In the world of Design, there is a fine line between looking chic... and looking like you take it up the ass. Well, actually, no, there really isn't any difference between the two, and that's why a lot of straight-male bachelor pads are probably "decorated" with generous quantities of dirt, body hair, stiff kleenex and porn...

...Captain Masturbation's Bat-Cave...

...and on tonight's episode of Top Design we learn that Jon-Jon thinks he knows what boys like, Eddie's still proud to work for a convicted felon and Jeff Lewis is offended by the word "a-hole" (if he's not the one using it)... let's join the swatch-fest after the jump!

Posted by J-Mo at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (18)

Remember back in the late 90's when ABC held their "Viva Las Vegas" night, and there was a massive crossover with all their hit shows of the time, between "Coach" and "Ellen" and "Grace Under Fire" and "The Drew Carey Show"? Over the course of two hours you got to see separate episodes of all four of these shows, but characters from their fellow network compadres kept popping up or wandering through for no apparent reason? Remember how exciting and chatworthy it was? Huh? 'Member?

...chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp...

Well, they've resisted the temptation for quite some time, but it appears the walls separating Bravo's sister-shows are growing thin, and it should come as no surprise that tonight's episode of Top Design features several losers former contestants from Magical Elves' favored child Project Runway who are apparently still hungry for another five minutes of reality tv fame... I'm waiting for the inevitable crossovers with Top Chef where we can watch the designers have to create a room around a cheftestant's competing variations of steak and 'taters, while the Project Runway people have to make a Victorian-period dress out of pasta dyed to match the color scheme of the room design, and the stylestants from Shear Genius have to give everyone new haircuts that tell the story of Antony and Cleopatra if they lived in the year 2008 and were both transgendered prostitutes living in Pocatello, Idaho... but for now let's just see how life is treating Jeffrey Sebelia after the jump, shall we?

Posted by J-Mo at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (19)

In my tremendously exciting and stimulating day job as a Medicare D Claims Analyst / Adjuster (*snort*.. my job title has the word "anal" in it...) I am often forced to tackle projects with a "teammate" or "partner". Sometimes this pairing is super-simpatico and the two of us spend our planning sessions eating Chex Mix and giggling about the stupid girl who accidentally emailed a super-religious Senior Vice-President a traffic-speed-cam picture of a guy getting a handjob at 85mph from his girlfriend. We have such a good time that we completely ignore the boring-ass project at hand and end up giving a presentation made entirely out of shadow-puppets. Other times I get paired with someone hideous...

...assholes & trannies are not so "matchy-matchy"...

...and I spend our planning sessions silently envisioning something large and heavy and medieval falling repeatedly upon their head while waiting for a chance to insert the traffic-cam-jackoff picture into their segment of the PowerPoint presentation. Either way I always try to have a good time. On tonight's episode of Top Design, we are treated to the full range of positive and negative interpersonal dynamics, and find out sometimes it would be better to die slowly of radiation poisoning than have to work with some people. Let's dive into a bubbling pot filled with cream-of-haterade-soup after the jump!

Posted by J-Mo at 6:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

When I was a wee lad just 15 years old, I told my mother that I wanted to "redecorate" my half of the horrible basement room I shared with my older brother. The people who had lived in our house before us had been extremely patriotic and had wallpapered the room in an eye-searingly hideous stars'n'bars pattern. The carpeting was blue-green shag. It was lit by giant 8-foot fluorescent bars. I'm sure my request sent my mother running for the liquor cabinet (where she would find a bunch of watered-down alcohol, because I sometimes ran there, too, and I didn't want her to know about it) but she did allow me the freedom to change what I wanted. So I tore down the ugly wallpaper and painted the walls a deep eggplant purple. I also bought paper-lanterns from Pier-1 Imports and hung colored bulbs inside of them, while also fashioning my own Oriental linen scrolls by copying characters from a Chinese take-out menu (my bedroom wall said "Shrimp With Lobster Sauce" and "Five-Taste Vegetarian Delight" and "Visa/Mastercard Accepted"). The room became so much... uglier than when I first started fucking with it, but lucky for me we moved within a year and my fledgling design attempt became somebody else's problem.

...a fresh set of Designing Women with big dreams (and lotsa issues)...

So, while I can appreciate interior design, I am by no means an expert in it, so anything you might see me write about Season 2 of Bravo's reality-show competition Top Design is coming completely at the whim of my individual brain cells, who often work together to trip the rest of me up by saying really stupid things. I try to keep them quiet with alcohol. This might account for my taste, which tends to run straight past "good", springboard off of "questionable" and dive right on into "tacky". I never met a lava lamp that I didn't absolutely love, and that's really all you need to know, isn't it? Good thing there are just scads of other hapless people out there with tacky taste who fancy themselves designers that I can sit back at my computer and make fun of! Are you ready to go visit Todd Oldham's wet dreams? Ugh, me either, let's watch this TV show instead...

Posted by J-Mo at 9:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (16)