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My oh, my, I am majorly starting to regret deciding to do a “Project Runway” blog instead of a “Top Chef” blog. MAJORLY.

My reason is simple: My excitement about the return of “Project Runway” after its long hiatus has dwindled into the negative column. The challenges haven’t been especially creative, the people on the show are like paper cutouts of personalities from seasons past and I’m not really convinced anyone in this group is amazingly creative.

All in all, this season, the show’s first on Lifetime is pretty lifeless.

Isn’t there a Voltaggio brother we can borrow? The Voltaggios are the stars of this season’s “Top Chef” and I look forward to their creativity, honesty and talent every week.

There’s not a single person on this season of “Project Runway” with half the talent those boys have for the kitchen. It’s almost embarrassing.

Case in point: Johnny the designer. This guy, if you may recall, was crying by the first commercial break in the very first episode of “Runway.” Yes, within less than 24 hours of meeting, poor mentor Tim Gunn was patting Johnny on the shoulder on a couch in the show’s green room consoling him about his past drug addiction. I thought at the time, “Man, this guy’s not going to make it, better send him home now.”

He made it through the first episode and even did sort of well in a couple of challenges, but he still seemed like someone not long for the “Project Runway” life. Well, he cut his own life short Thursday night with bouts of utter idiocy.

First of all, the challenge was to create an outfit using newsprint as fabric. Definitely the most cool/original challenge of the season, though it couldn’t hold a candle to some of the more exotic materials used in past seasons for this sort of challenge (Plants! Car parts! Candy wrappers!).

OK, so this challenge had “Go Wild!” written all over it. Johnny took this literally and decided to make a dress where paper “birds” would be holding the dress up as straps or something — it was kind of difficult to understand such a half-baked idea. Well, if you’re going to do something that “out there” you have to have, um, talent. Johnny, my friend, that’s one thing you’re lacking. But, of course, he thinks he’s the greatest designer ever (doesn’t everyone on this show?) he’s convinced his red-dyed bird dress will wow the judges.

Of course, the dress didn’t even make it past Tim Gunn’s mentoring. Tim, who has to be one of the nicest people in the world, was blunt in stating he thought the dress looked like a kindergartner made it and said he’s “woeful” about it. So, Johnny, because he’d either seen the light or can’t form his own thoughts, rips up the ugly thing with 4.5 hours left to go. His plan B comes off as a boring little shift dress that Heidi would later liken to something a “working girl” might wear.

Well, Johnny, not really thinking about this being a reality TV show where everything is filmed, decides to start lying about why he pitched his dress. Instead of owning up to the fact that he’s a wimp who couldn’t survive Tim’s critique, he begins saying that a steamer malfunctioned and spit water on his dress and he had to start over. Riiiiight. Like no one heard/filmed that. Cut to all the designers making fun of Johnny and complaining about his lying.

That lie actually made it to the runway, when Johnny was in the bottom three for the second straight week. There with him was Gordana, whose dress really was nice, but apparently boring, and Nicolas, whose punk rock dress failed miserably (apparently it’s near impossible to make “rivets” look punk when they’re made out of paper and not metal). The second the steamer lie fell from Johnny’s lips on the runway, Nicolas started shaking his head and called him out, to which Johnny called him a jerk. Nicolas may be Tom Petty’s lollipop guild step-cousin, but at least he’s honest.

If Johnny hadn’t lied to the judges’ faces, he probably would have watched Nicolas go home. But lying doesn’t mix well with reality TV, and neither does a boring guy with a list of excuses so long it could fill a double-page spread.

Random thoughts:

• Cat fight central this week. Kind of looking forward to Irina vs. Althea, round 2.

• I really liked Logan’s dress. It was different and cool, but it didn’t seem to get any love. What’s up with that?

• Everyone dogged on Shirin for her chattermouth ways. Somehow, though, that made me like her a bit more. Annoying? Yes. Real? Yes. And those two answers make her one step closer to identifiable and one step back from the Tracy Flick character for which I had her pegged.

• Another lie I believe Johnny told this episode? After elimination he said that the show was harder than beating his drug addiction. Clearly someone needs some perspective …