Instead of there being 13 or 14 women from across the country, we get seven women from the states and seven women from across the pond.  A little extra twist this season is that the seven British girls are considered – in a way – to be Next Top Model All-Stars since they competed on Britain’s Next Top Model.

This Season’s Models

There will be 14 models this cycle.  However, I have not been able to find out about it been the seven American’s against the seven Britain contestants.

The American Girls

• AzMarie Livingston, 24, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• Candace Smith, 22, Brooklyn, New York
• Ebonee Davis, 18, Seattle, Washington
• Kyle Gober, 20, Magnolia, Texas
• Laura LaFrate, 20, Scotia, New York
• Mariah Watchman, 20, Pendleton, Oregon
• Seymone Roth, 19, Augusta Georgia

The British Girl

• Alisha White, 20, London, England
• Annaliese Dayes, 24, London England
• Ashley Brown, 22, West Lothian, Scotland
• Catherine Thomas, 22, Kent, England
• Jasmia Robinson, 24, London, England
• Louise Watts, 25, Essex, England
• Sophie Sumner, 21, Oxfordshire, England

Guest Judges

Small Screen Scoop gave us a heads up who will be guest judges for this cycle:

• Kelly Osbourne
• Kris Jenner
• Beverly Johnson
• Nadine Coyle
• Jessica Sutta
• Cat Deeley
• Barney Cheng
• Georgina Chapman (also a judge on Project Runway All Stars)
• Estelle
• Nicolas Tse
• Jez Smith

A New Judge on Panel

Kelly Cutrone will be replacing André Leon Talley this cycle.  There is speculation that Cutrone’s persona will bring some dramatics to this cycle that have been missed since Janice Dickinson was on the series, according to a post on TV Over Mind.  The same post also states that she is a great replacement for Talley since she has been involved with several different areas of fashion  and her previous experience on reality TV shows will make this adjustment easier.

Prizes for This Cycle

According to an article on People Magazine‘s website, the prizes for this cycle are as follows:

• A Modeling contract with LA/NY Modeling
• A guest correspondent with Extra
• A fashion spread in Vogue Italia
• The cover of Beauty in Vogue
• The spokesperson for a perfume line
• And if course a $100,000 contract with CoverGirl

This Cycle & Onward

This cycle will be interesting of course.  However, according to an article on wetpaint.com, Banks and the rest of the Top Model crew is already planning on casting for cycles 19 and 20.  One has to wonder if these cycles – given the last two – will involve some sort of All-Star themed and will have top model hopefuls from other countries.

Cycle 18 premiers on February 29th.

Very much like the book and TV series Gossip Girl, Tara acts as the West Coast’s version of the Gossip Queen…minus gossiping about her classmates.  Instead of blogging about the Upper East Side, Tara’s position as Radio Rebel to try to fight the social hierarchy that goes on at her high school.

As this movie progressed, it is clear that this movie – as with pretty much all DCOM movies – serves as an after school special.  Radio Rebel showcases that you shouldn’t be afraid to do what you think is right, even if it costs you something that is important to you.

All though I enjoyed the plot line and the concept, but Disney seems to be focusing a fair amount of their DCOMs lately towards music themes: The High School Musical series, Lemonade Mouth, The Cheetah Girls Series, Camp Rock and Camp Rock 2.

I wish that Disney Channel would have waited until it was closer to prom time to premier this film since prom is one of the important things that is film focuses on prom.

Radio Rebel is a good film with a pretty good script; but I am sure that this film would have been better suited as some background noise for me since – unlike some movies that Disney has – the plot line doesn’t tug at my heart-strings.

Probably the must interesting trending topics is #LoveNotes.  Here are some tweets I found:

Not Picture Perfect Yet

The thing I have learned about working with the class wiki is that the pictures will be the hardest part for me.  I attempted to insert a picture into the wiki page I did on Bemidji State University and the wiki page on me.  I think that this is due to the fact that I have worked with blog posts enough to know how blog posts and pictures work.

I Googled how to put a picture in a Wiki and Wikipedia has a page on it.  That page seems slightly helpful, but not really.  And of course, looking at other pages on the class wiki isn’t as helpful as I would like.

Markup is for Magazines, Markdown is for Wikis

I believe that apart of the issue for the picture issue is that I don’t understand the markdown process.  Markdown just being the style in which we write on the pages.  I am use to HTML to an extent since I use to work on the BSU Student Senate website last year.

Bringing in Levinson on Wikis

Something I can see the upside about Wikis and Wikipedia is that they bring in sources on information on a topic much quicker than having to do several Google searches.  All though Levinson refers to Tim Russert’s death – who ever that is – in this book, I will use the example Whitney Houston’s Death.

Whitney Houston’s Death

Yesterday at 12:45 PM, my cell phone received this tweet from one of the people I’m following:

RIP Whitney Houston. IIIIIIII WILL ALWAYS LOOVE YOOOOUUUU—
Kari Cooper (@kari_minnesota) February 12, 2012

I did not see this tweet nearly four plus hours later since I was busy doing an interview process for the BSU Res Life department.  In over a day, Houston’s Wikipedia page grew from a short paragraph on here death to this:

The nice thing about Wikipedia is that the footnotes that each page has – or should have – is that they bring the reader to the website that the info is taken from.

Newspaper or Encyclopedia?  Both?  Neither?

Levinson asks what Wikipedia is?  To be honest, I view Wikipedia to be the jumping off point of research.  The reason why is because Wikipedia is updated fast, but it does give the resources that the writer of the page(s) used.

Now, the nice thing about Wikis – and according to class, Wikipedia is a wiki – is that they, like blogs, can focus on a particular subject matter.  Wikipedia is marketed as an online encyclopedia and it basically is.  But the nice thing about wikis on particular subject matters is that you have people working on the same information to get it right.

If honest is the best policy and if you nothing to nice to say, don’t say anything are the things we taught as children, what happens if when you’re honest, you say something hurtful?

This is one of the age old questions…or at least a question that’s worth asking.  After all, aren’t we all taught that lying is bad and that being truthful is respected?

According to an article written by Dr. Bella DePaulo, Dr. BePaulo states in terms of romantic relationships if it’s a small one:

In romantic relationships that are not married relationships, people lie in one out of every three conversations.  With a spouse, they lie in one out of every 10 conversations.

Dr. DePaulo does state that it is unclear why people start lying less once they are married.  Yet, when it comes to lies about affairs or other serious things in a romantic relationship, then the person will lie about that.

Yahoo actually had an opinion piece published in 2007.  The opinion, entitle “5 Lies Told by Men in Relationships” posted by Michelle Knudson states five things men lie about.  They are:

1. My ex was crazy
2. I would never do that to you babe
3. I’m sorry
4. I’m not ready to get married
5. They ask you to get married to soon

All though I can respect Knudson’s point of view on these lies being told in a romantic relationship.  But men aren’t the only ones that use these lies.

Now in terms of the truth in friendships, a website called Fearless Living had a post that stated:

Friends are only friends if they are willing to tell you the truth. Otherwise, they are just mere acquaintances.

In other words: you should not lie to people who are you’re friends, because otherwise they aren’t your friends.

Regardless of all of that, I don’t think there is any way to know what is the right thing to do.  After all, if telling the truth was the best thing, then we wouldn’t have to hold back the things that aren’t nice.