Since an unknown sample of people admitted that Miss America lacks relevance and popularity, the good folks at TLC brought together the an advisory panel of style-makers to revamp the American institution of the beauty pageant [link]. Following in the “oh-so-modern” the reality show format, we get a perfectly edited perfectly biased showcase of how this contest is new and exciting. Though I only caught this show using my DVR’s cache, here are a few things that I learned from the Miss America Reality Show.

1) US Weekly is the embodiment of the perfect American person. US Weekly the celebrity magazine gives us helpful day-to-day tips in their sections “Just Like Us: photos of celebrities doing things everyday people do” and “The Record: a roster of changes in the lives of stars — births, marriages, divorces, etc.” As one of the panelists for the show Dina Sansing, an editor at US weekly, helps the ladies out with tips on make pageants modern by “glamming it up” and walking more “red carpet” instead of “a stiff pageant walk”.

2) Everyone needs to dress like a celebrity and drop names of celebrities. I personally don’t have a stylist, but I’ve learned  it’s important to have a stylist with neck and shoulder tattoos like another one of the members of the TLC advisory panel, Jeanie Mae. If you don’t know what celebrities wore the labels that are currently on your back, get yourself a celebrity gossip magazine and head towards the mall.

3) Try to get a good sound-bite. Wait for a camera crew to sneak in your room… then pour your heart out about a personal trauma. Hopefully, that camera crew will add sound, personal photos, and perhaps a black-and-white reenactment of the trauma. Take this video reel to job interviews, dating services, or the parole board.

Thank you Miss America Organization [link], you really know how to make the near perfect Miss.

Did you see? The North American International Auto Show is going on in COBO Center in Detroit? Yeah..

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, has been found exchanging text messages with a top office aide landing him into hot water [link]. Scandal makers are taking the text and claiming perjury concerning an illicit affair. An affair that he denied having in a whistle-blower trial that cost the city millions of dollars.

The trial pitted the Detroit cops against the City of Detroit in a “he was having an affair on the public dime” v. “what affair?” pissing match. This left cops (save for the chief of police and the mayor’s personal security detail who weren’t going to tattle) reeling over the untouchable/unconscionable actions of the mayor. On top of the allegations of spending tax dollars on an SUV for the wife and an ‘exotic dancer’ mysteriously found dead in an adjacent town after the mayor’s wife crashed a party in the mayor’s mansion; things aren’t looking too good for our fair city.

I don’t live or work in the city. I live two blocks away and work twenty miles away so my taxes aren’t funding these shenanigans. I write about this because this is a high visibility time for Detroit. Whoever decided to break this story did it after the world press left the auto show and the presidential primary but there is still enough buzz in the air that the scope of this story could travel past the city limits. Enough people discount this city already, we need the Associated Press to validate it?

I understand the city residents are unhappy… just ask the mayor’s wife, but given the country is in a month long economic downturn and our state’s flailing manufacturing sector we don’t need this scandalmongering. Great – our mayor is a dog, we need companies and people to come into Detroit, people need to go see the lovely DOMESTIC cars at the North AMERICAN International Auto show [link]. Move on people, there’s nothing to see here but the shiny new cars.