Four Houses equals a train wreck

So I watched the "Mediterranean Face-off" Miami episode of TLC's Four Houses last night. I had not seen the show before. Aesthetically and ethically I was not impressed. (These people have *that* much money and they do *that* with it?!) But the train-wreck-you-can't-look-away-from factor? Quite high. Moral superiority? Ditto. *I* have way more taste and class than all these folks put together? Oh, yeah. The basic premise of Four Houses is four houseproud people with similarly themed homes give each other tours of their abodes. And then snipe behind the owner's back about how tacky the place is. They score each other on general impression, creativity, livability, and style. The winner gets $10,000 and may have his or her home featured in a magazine. Not that any of the contestants I saw last night need $10K. They had all spent well over $1 million on their dream homes and each thought they had impeccable taste. They were wrong. Each home screamed "I have more money than I know what to do with." The scripture passage about taking the beam out of your own eye so you can see to take the speck out of your brother's eye comes to mind. Each contestant had no trouble seeing how grotesquely ostentatious the other players' houses were while steadfastly maintaining that their own home was the very definition of style. Only one of the four houses seemed to contain even a single book. Yes, I looked. A house without books is simply of no interest to me, regardless of whether there are red chandeliers (one house had several), see-through glass walls between the two potties in the master bath (same house) or a wine "cellar" conveniently located just off the dining room. That house, by the way, was the most costly of the lot at $7.5 million and it deservedly came in dead last in the competition. Will I watch the show again? Possibly. A "Keeping Austin Weird" episode is coming up, so that should be good. Would I hire any of last night contestants to design my home if I won the lottery and had an unlimited home-building budget? Hell no. Four Houses airs Saturdays at 9 p.m., 8 p.m. Central on TLC.