WHY GOD CREATED YOUTUBE™: A Very Special Episode Of Tyra

At the behest of Shady, today's video concerns my favorite living embodiment of the Peter Principle. Yesterday on a very special episode of Tyra, Tyra lashed out at the tabloids who ran an unflattering photo of her on the beach under headlines like "America's Next Top Waddle." So to get back at them, Tyra quite gutsily appeared on her show in that very same "unflattering" swimsuit and managed to turn what could have been a self-absorbed "Look, I'm not really that fat!" moment into a surprisingly cogent (though no less comedically delivered) rant about female body image in mainstream America. And while you need to find the video included in her official site's episode recap in order to get the rant's punchline (complete with gratuitous audience whooping/crying), these three YouTube videos still do the trick.

Granted, she may have let herself give in to some late night attacks of the munchies, but Tyra's got a ways to go before you can say her look is entirely "average" since she's still spending a schmillion dollars on more bleaching and straightening than Beyonce. Regardless, it's car-wreck fascinating to watch her efforts to keep a toe in both the "average American woman" audience of a daily talk show and the fashionista crowd of Top Model. I'm not ready to give up my Peter Principle talk just yet -- she'll need to be able to present this stuff without the shrieking and crying she resorts to on every episode of Top Model when she shows her "girls" how to "act" -- but I gotta cut her some slack for trying so hard.

Truly, this is why God created YouTube.