America's Next Top Model: Season 12

I am proud of my abysmal record in picking the winners of America's Next Top Model. Season after season, my pick gets booted off by Tyra often for the very same reasons I liked them. Seeing as Tyra is a maniac, this feels like vindication. "She was too good for them," I think, as they skip gaily off the stage to better lives for themselves far away from the snarling bearpit that is the judging panel. But this season I excelled myself, picking Natalie and Fo as finalists, with Fo winning. Naturally, Natalie went out four weeks before the end, followed by Fo a week later (for her height!?). Feeling like I had done pretty well for myself, I decided to cave and meet the Tyra halfway. I would play by her rules, just to show that I really could pick the winners — I was just choosing not to. Out of the remaining three girls — Allison, Aminat and Teyona — I picked Aminat to win. She was the first to go out. Now it was down to two: I chose Allison. She lost to Teyona. That means I got three seperate chances to pick the winner, with increasingly favourable odds, and I got it wrong every time, right through to the end. Only the end of the compeititon — the sight of the winner, Teyona, standing there, weeping — stopped me from getting it wrong again.

This is disconcerting. All the time that I was picking the non-winner so consistently, I felt that I was, in essence picking the winners, but in reverse: you simply took the opposite girl to the one I chose and — presto — you had the winning girl. But Tyra has really screwed with my head this time. Even when I attempted that process of reverse-engineered selection, I still picked losers. This leave me with two options: either I am genuinely and randomly clueless, or Tyra really is, as I have long suspected, a cruel and wicked God, impenetrable to fumbling mortal minds.