The 27 finalists were announced last month, and the winner of the pageant, the lady with the most bodacious rear end in Brazil, will be chosen November 9th.

There have been the usual petty controversies. Eight of the contestants, clad in skimpy bikinis with their charms on full display, posed in a tableau imitating Leonardo da Vinci's painting of the Last Supper. A pageant official justified the tableau as follows, quote:

The Last Supper … was where Jesus was betrayed by Judas, because of jealousy, and like it or not the woman with the most votes [in the pageant] is also the target of jealousy.

Poor taste? This is the Miss Bum Bum contest, for crying out loud.

There is an innovation, too: this year's pageant will for the first time include a separate contest for over-55s. I guess the pageant organizers just wanted to introduce a new wrinkle.

Oh, and this year's finalists include a mother and her daughter. The mother is 35 and the daughter is nineteen. That's their ages: the Daily Mail gives their lower circumferences as 43 and 42 inches respectively.

Which of these two callipygian competitors is more likely to take the Miss Bum Bum crown? It's hard to call. The Daily Mail describes them as "neck and neck," although that doesn't seem to me to be the right physiological idiom. Whatever: if either of them takes the crown, the other will be left behind.