Padma Lakshmi Makes Yet Another Lachrymose Gay Man Cry...Uncle

Human vale of tears and Season One semifinalist Dave Martin is the latest armed combatant in the ongoing battle between Padma Lakshmi's outfits and the Gays' twinned senses of fashion and outrage. As we all know, it takes a lot to send Big Gay Dave over the edge, but Padma has accomplished the impossible. From his OutZone blog:

Padma is back as well and who is doing her wardrobe? She looks trampy, sorry but gotta speak my peace [sic].

And:

At the judges’ table, Padma talks about Sam’s sophisticated ceviche with popcorn, did she not see Season One when Harold made a similar dish? Whatever.

Meow! We say, Never put these two in the same dressing room at Barneys.

Big Gay Dave's take on the most passionate onscreen affair since Duel in the Sun and Shaving Ryan's Privates :

Marcel and Ilan start things off by going at it, big time....Marcel is back in the lab and making more foams and leading up to a French press explosion all over everything....Marcel and Ilan are still pissing on each other and both making desserts with chocolate in them.... Ilan slams Marcel at the dinner presentation....

Goodness, we need a moist towelette after that.

And finally:

Tom loves Sam’s dish, how unpredictable, not … and is it me or does he seem angrier than he was on Season One?

That's a double meow with a hair toss there. We're definitely your Amuse-Biatch, biatch.

First Reaction: Irony is the Eighth Deadly Sin

Well, irony in the Alanis Morrissette sense, not in the true sense, but we'll get to that.

So, after two weeks without a new episode, Bravo treated us to a "supersized" episode packed to the gills with sin. We encountered all manner of deadly sins, and learned that fuglitude is the ninth of these, as Padma Lakshmi made our new year by returning in an outfit so whorendous that it really must have required the full two-week hiatus to come up with it. It was a fuck-you to viewers' corneas, and we almost had to admire Bravo's brazen disregard in showing it without a warning stating, "Some Viewers May Find the Fugly Outfits Disturbing. Viewer Discretion Advised." Raggaydy Andy is lucky the FCC levies fines for swearing and not for fugly clothes.

The Quickfire Challenge was to create a dish based on a color. As Miss XaXa pointed out, it was the gayest of challenges, as it involved recreating the rainbow (well, with the exception of blue and the addition of brown). Beer Bong, enervated by the Vicodin in his system following an emergency tooth extraction, won the Quickfire Challenge, but, alas, no immunity.

The Elimination Challenge was to create a meal for yet another busty B-list celebrity with a gay following and a group of sketchy friends. Instead of Jennifer Coolidge, we got former Madonna BFF Debi Mazar hosting a seven-course dinner based on the seven deadly sins. The top three dishes were created by Sam, Elia, and Beer Bong, and wouldn't ya know it, the result was a tie, a win to be split equally between Beer Bong and Vicodin. The bottom three were Marcel, Betty "Spice Rack" Fraser, and Ilan Hall. And just like that, Spice Rack was in the soup and undone by the nitty gritty of the thing. She packed up her knives and readied herself for the ten-minute drive home to her restaurant in Hollywood. As we pointed out this morning, Spice Rack, honey, we named ya but we hardly knew ya.

So what did we learn?

We learned that getting a good performance out of Michael "Beer Bong" Midgley really is like pulling teeth. As Tom Colicchio put it, he should cook on Vicodin more often.

We learned about Alanis Morrissette irony (AMI), with the "brown girl" (Elia Aboumrad) being assigned white, the African-American (Cliff Crooks) being color blind and seeing black, and the chef who drew the sin of wrath waxing very wroth indeed. (We also learned, together with Sam Talbot, just how handy it is to have Sicilian blood to blame one's anger on; we wonder whether Frank "El Bully" Terzoli left behind little Sicilian heritage cards to pull out whenever the holder throws a hissy fit in the direction of Marcel. No doubt we'll find out next week that Ilan Hall yells at Marcel because he's a Sicilian Jew.)

A propos, we learned that Ilan Hall is unnaturally fixated on Marcel's cherry, all the while insisting that cherries lower libido. Of course, AMI struck back when Padma described Ilan's effort as "limp and flaccid."

And we learned that Marcel Vigneron still can't pronounce "gelee" to save his life or his virginity.

Padma Lakshmi: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who's the Fugliest of Them All?

Well, we can't say we weren't warned.

For over a week now, Raggaydy Andy Cohen of Bravo has been warning us repeatedly about Padma's bikini top in this episode, which he personally approved.

And for the decision to approve that outfit, Andy, we are making a gay citizen's arrest and summarily taking your gay card away. You're on probation, son. We're giving your gay card to Tom & Lorenzo over at Project Rungay & Project Gay, and you'll have to convince them that you will not use your gay powers for ill again before it is restored to you.

For God's sake, what were you thinking? The whole One Million Years B.C. meets cancer victim meets Destiny's Malnourished Child thing, the combination of jeans mini, bikini top, sheepskin vest, cardigan, paisley 'do-rag (we forget, what does the brown hankie stand for?) and extensions--oy, it just made our synapses weak in the knees.

Could it be a covert plan to give Michael Kors a heart attack (or perhaps a cheap face lift, the hope being that the shock will be so great that his eyebrows will stay permanently raised)? Speaking of which, perhaps Nancy Pelosi should hold Congressional hearings on just how bad this outfit is. The American people deserve to hear Raggaydy Andy's testimony under oath.

But here's the thing. We actually loved it. Fashion this apocalyptically, epically, Oliver-Stone-with-an-unlimited-budget bad comes along but once in a generation. And Padma seemed to know it. She appeared on the verge of giggles the whole time.

For our part, we roared with laughter, pounding our wee tyrant fists on the Regency-striped silk of our fainting couch in uncontrolled, orgasmic mirth. We can't remember the last time we laughed so hard. Could it really have been ten years ago (when Kate Beckinsale was an actress and not just a pair of tits with a British accent), as we were watching Cold Comfort Farm and Ian McKellen's stern warning that "There'll be no butter in hell!" nearly gave us an aneurysm?

Well, we definitely saw something nasty in the woodshed, and this outfit is it. Hey, Anon47, we sure hope you were watching. We would have paid a goodly sum to see your crestfallen face as your words about Padma being "one of the most stylish women around" turned to ashes on your lips.

And the Fugly