Miss Hungary Loses New Title, Suffers Internet Humiliations

We've just received word from the Thai capital of Bangkok that Natalie Glebova, the Russian-born Miss Canada, was hours ago crowned Miss Universe 2005. The triumph of the stunning brunette from Toronto means that reigning Miss Hungary Szandra Proksa will leave Bangkok empty-handed. But that's not the worst news for Proksa, who is pictured left in an undated photo that may help explain why she was unable to become the latest European beauty to reign over this and every other known galaxy.

While details are sketchy, it appears that Proksa, despite being hot-hot-hot, may have flubbed the contest's poise and elocution tests. Indeed, in this report from the contest preliminaries, Proksa was the first example given of contestants unable to satisfactorily answer even the most simple questions in English, the official language of the contest.

Question: "What do you want the rest of the world to know about your country?"

Proksa: "My country err is in central europe...err, I like err... my country very much (giggle). Err... err... (short pause) this err country isn't too big. My country is in Balaton. Balaton (giggle) is the biggest err... (short pause) lake err... in central europe."

We tried to verify that this was how the conversation actually took place, but it appears that the interview portion of the Miss Universe website is either broken, or has been disabled to prevent further embarrassment to the contest's less eloquent entrants.

Proksa's case could not have been helped by another bit of online unpleasantness. Unfortunately, when you type "Szandra Proksa" (or "Proksa Szandra") into Google and do an image search, the only pictures that come up are four rather, well, skanky shots of Szandra with a bad dye job, lounging around in what looks like underwear from Aranypók - as opposed to several pages of tasteful and professional looking shots that you get when you type in Natalie Glebova.

It may be too late to help Szandra conquer the universe, but we feel it impossible not to do something. So to help even the scales, we've given the above picture the name "natalie glebova.jpg," and have otherwise done a bit of Internet mischief aimed at improving our still-reigning national beauty queen's online presence. Meanwhile, if next year's Miss Hungary needs a bit of English tutoring, remember, we're only an email away.

UPDATE: Here are some additional pictures of what we believe to be Szandra. For further information on this, and related Google-imaging problems, click here.