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I’m in one of those moods again. No, not for grabbing little puppies and using them as sponges to help clean my back in the shower. That’s reserved for special occasions… like Wednesdays. Since today is a Tuesday, it’s safe to let your dogs out of the kennel for a walk. Just don’t take too long—I’m heating up the water as we speak. And that’s by turning up the temperature, not making use of the hellfire-style chili I ate last night. Heating up water and shooting fireballs out of my sphincter are two very different things, one of which is much more hazardous for any puppies that might be involved.

Yeah, it’s pretty obvious that the studying is going to my head, all right. Little bits of knowledge getting smooshed together, trying to find little cracks and crevices in my brain tissue and hanging on for dear life, hoping that I’ll keep them around for another few weeks until the bar exam. Once that’s over, it’s a quick burst of head-shaking and kapoof! They’re all gone, Etch-a-Sketch style! Naturally, I’m trying not to wiggle my head around too much before then. As much fun as I have mimicking the bobblehead dolls in my room, that might screw me over even worse than when I did it in the kitchen and bashed my head against the counter. About fifteen times until the bobblehead stopped moving. Thankfully, there was only a family gathering that night, so I could get away with “Hey there!” instead of admitting that I couldn’t remember my mother’s name. Or my name, for that matter, but I try not to talk to myself too often in public. In private, though… I’m glad the puppies can’t tell stories.

Sitting here and reflecting, I’m pretty sure that there isn’t any steam coming out of my ears from overheating. There might be steam coming from other places after dinner last night, but not my ears. Of course, it’s hard to tell with headphones in there—if I pull them out and they’re sopping wet… hopefully, those little bits of knowledge haven’t drowned. I could be charged with negligent brain-cellicide and get stuck in the slammer for a couple hundred years. As if banging my head against the counter didn’t count for slammage and brain killage. (Making up words is fun when you’re a little loopy…)

Oh Lordy… Hopefully, that’s enough for tonight. I’m feeling better, my stream of consciousness hath runneth dry and I don’t think a puppy shower will moisten it enough to soak down my headphones. Things might change within the next four hours, though, so don’t push your luck—keep the dogs inside. And watch your cats while you’re at it—remember, variety is the spice of life. As long as it’s not as spicy as hellfire-style chili, I might give it a shot. But given how well cats react to water, those claws might leave a sensation nearly as painful. I better keep them away from my sphincter. And probably my brain, too. Slash marks in my head results in nuggets of information pouring out of my skull and I don’t want to have to relearn everything if I can help it…

[First off, I’d like to apologize to my older brother, Brent—he turned 33 on January 9th and I never mentioned anything on here. My bad…]

Today is my little brother Justin’s 26th birthday. (Why little brother versus younger brother? Because I’m 6′4″, Brent is 6′3″ and Justin… is 5′8″. Compared to us, he’s the runt of the litter.) We couldn’t get the family together today due to schedule conflicts, so we all met last week for dinner. At Chuck E. Cheese’s.

For those of you who don’t know, it’s one of those pizza places that has a huge playground, lots of coin-powered games and a huge robotic mouse that sings and wiggles around to the rhythm of the music. Did I mention Justin turns 26 today? Yep, our family is a classy bunch. But dammit, skeeball rules! Especially since you can play it for hours, get lots of tickets and use them to buy practical stuff like stickers and a cheap-ass plastic Slinky! Happy birthday, little dude!

Tyson: “It would be an honor to be your love-monkey.”

Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and the world laughs at you, ya whiny little bitch…

My three picks are still in the game, which unfortunately came at the cost of Tyson and Thais. [Insert crying and sniffling here] On second thought, I better not cry, ’cause Chris thinks that’s girly behavior and he prefers cussing and spitting tacks. If only Tristin had taken her frustrations out on him…

The geeks found that while the “male” end of nails, screws and staples go into the walls, the “female” ends don’t always want to get pounded or screwed—I just hope no one drew blood. (No pun intended regarding Wes’s last minute addition to the wall…) Joe’s room was nice, but all the little candies and stuff on the comforter? I wouldn’t want to organize those on the bed every time I invited someone to my place. If Josh had used a shelf for the bear, okay, but stapling it to the wall? You might as well head back to the store to look for a big cross and turn the thing into a big, fuzzy crucifix with the bear sacrificing itself to redeem all geeks for their awkwardness.

The beauties found that while the “male” end of computer cords want to go into the “female” ends, they don’t always fit properly—when it doesn’t work, no juice, no bright lights, no music… nada. And given that the host said they had to download “a song,” I wonder if there were a couple choices. “Get the Tupac! Tupac!!”

It looks like Cher might be creeping into Chris territory. Back when I had to choose someone to go to the elimination room, I had plenty of time to think about what I was going to say. When she stood in front of the group and said she hoped Brandon and Amanda would come back, that wasn’t off the cuff—she intended to say it and she deserved the same response for her half-assed apology that Chris received down at the hot tub during Episode 2. (I’m a little surprised that she bothered talking to Chris along with Tristin, but… well, I don’t know about her anymore.)

The same goes for her discussion with Josh after they came back from the challenges. “You only did one thing I told you about!” Here’s the lesson of the day, kids: support your partner. If they screw up, help them understand what they could have done better—chewing them out doesn’t accomplish much. If anything, it creates friction and pisses them off. (If you didn’t see Season 1… just trust me, I know what I’m talking about.) Josh said that he’ll end up having a chat with Cher about her attitude—I hope he gets up the gumption to do it.

Nazi Studier Tyson couldn’t hold up against the lead created by Tristin the Invincible (man, I could see the bloodthirsty look in her eyes every time she was on camera—she really wants a piece of Cher, no question).

Note to Tyson about the lesson of the day: give Thais a hug when you walk in the room. It was pretty obvious that you were really intense about being in the elimination room, but that looked seriously harsh—give her some love to let her know you appreciate her best effort.

Another note to Tyson: Way to score with two chicks at once!

A final note to Tyson: Beauty and the Geek, then Leno, now Twins? If you’re not careful, you could turn into a Richardesque media whore… (And I bite my thumb toward anyone who said Rubik’s Cube skills could never get you anywhere…)

On January 24th, the Tonight Show featured Leyan Lo and Tyson Mao, two students at Cal Tech who gots mad skillz when solving the Rubik’s Cube. They were both invited onstage, Leno showed the audience a Rubik’s cube, explained that Leyan recently set several world records and then asked why Tyson was there. While he held some records until Leyan broke them, he was attending the show as Leyan’s mentor. Why did he lose his title in those events, you might ask? In Tyson’s words, “I was spending time in a mansion with eight beautiful women.” What a sneaky plug for Beauty and the Geek… As would be expected, Leno wouldn’t pursue that statement (shouldn’t plug another network’s programming if the person isn’t a featured guest), so he paused for a moment, stared at the Rubik’s cube in his hand and said, “Well, I don’t believe you.”

Leyan was handed a mixed-up cube, they started a clock and he solved it in about 18 seconds. It was definitely impressive, but could he put those mad skillz to use in some other practical fashion? Leno decided to find out, so he brought out a line of real hotties (there were five or six—I forgot to count because I was laughing so hard… oh, and last week, a friend of mine was absolutely shocked that a Mensa member would use a word like “hotties,” so I feel obligated to keep saying it from time to time…). Leno asked Leyan if he’d ever unhooked a bra before—Leyan nodded over at Tyson and said, “He’s probably got more experience.” But Tyson stood to the side and watched as his prodigy went to work, getting them all opened up in eight seconds. Solving bra straps faster than a Rubik’s Cube… I guess it’s all a question of motivation.

I think Wendy’s is the restaurant that’s promoting its Dollar Menu by comparing the food to money (”A speeding ticket for 60 junior cheeseburgers?!”). Aside from the premise being rather stupid, there’s one comparison that could be reeeeeeally dangerous to make: “Honey, you look like a million crispy chicken nuggets!”

Why dangerous? Because the Dollar Menu is really a 99 Cent Menu and some women might take offense to a man saying, “Honey, you look like $990,000! Just add a little makeup to cover the bags under your eyes and you’ll look like a cool million!” And then he’ll be stuck eating alone at Wendy’s for the rest of his life… but at least it won’t be too expensive.

For starters, I want to reflect back to last season—the teams (especially myself) who did well got the least exposure during the initial episodes. As such, I’m predicting that Wes and Sarah, Joe and Brittany, Ankur and Jennipher… those couples will be going deep into the season.

Chris and Amanda switched up with Brandon and Tristin. Amanda didn’t have to strangle herself, Tristin explained to Chris that he acted like a pompous ass and he discovered that it takes a lot more than a brief apology to soothe ruffled feathers.

I remember thinking, “Karaoke? I would have preferred that to dancing in front of a crowd…” Then I saw the camera moving around, showing a completely filled nightclub and changed my mind. Tyson rocked the house and I haven’t the slightest idea how he worked his Rubik’s Cube into his routine, but it worked.

I was in debate in high school, but we always got to prepare a speech and read from notes while presenting our argument to the judge. We only had one topic to focus on, so we rarely diverted to talking about stuff like our nifty debating outfits. (No offense, ladies.) Cher scored big points by talking about her grandmother regarding Social Security.

That’s one thing I noticed about the scores: both winners got over 70% of the votes, in part because they worked their personal experience into it. Doing something you know about = less nervousness. Whoa… I never would have believed it if I hadn’t seen it…

To-ga! To-ga! To-ga!

Chris knew that if he and his partner didn’t win a challenge, they were headed to the elimination room. He was right. What he didn’t realize was that Amanda, his former partner, would join him there as a member of the other team.

Chris and Tristin came out victorious, so two big questions remain for Episode 3:

1) How will people react when they walk in the door instead of Brandon and Amanda?
2) Even though Chris “saw the error of his ways,” will he follow through with his threat and send the Ty duo to the elimination room if he gets the chance?

If you’ve been to Burger King recently, you’ve noticed that they’re now putting little sayings on all of their drinks/wrappers/cleaning products, etc. Why? To drive home the fact that when you’re at Burger King, you can have it your way. And probably to distract you from those freaky commercials with the plastic King standing at random people’s windows in the morning, handing them free Super-Duper-Greasy-Globs-Of-Instant-Heart-Attack-But-Really-Yummy-So-It’s-Okay breakfast monstrosities.

Anyway, I went there with my older brother last week and decided to play it safe, ordering the Minor-Artery-Blockage chicken sandwich value meal. The meal came with a medium-sized pop—for the life of me, I will never understand how they got rid of “small”… now they start with “medium,” then upgrade to “large” and “King”-sized cups. Shouldn’t the medium cups be considered smalls since they’re the smallest cup you can get nowadays? Or maybe the fast food industry will keep making things bigger until you’re stuck choosing between “King,” “Jug” and “Keg o’ the His Royal Majesty’s Brew.” (God knows what effect that might have on their coffee sales…)

After we sat down to start eating, I noticed this message on the side of my cup: “Maybe you want a lot of ice. Maybe you want no ice. Maybe you want your top securely fastened, or maybe you want to go topless.” There was more, but after reading that, I had an image in my head of my drink sitting on the table and suddenly the lid flies off and a small voice screams, “Cups Gone Wild!!!” I think the grease from my sandwich may have clogged up something important in my brain…

[Updated on Jan. 17th, 2006]

All these questions posted all over the place… it’s tough to provide answers when you can’t find them anymore. Consequently, here’s the place to do it: ask whatever you want in the comments section and I’ll either extend the post to incorporate the answer or I’ll tell you to bugger off because I don’t want to scare the children. Assuming I haven’t scared them already on my own.

All right, where to start…

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I’m single, but not looking very hard—I’ve got the bar exam to look forward to in February. And it doesn’t help that I’m living at my parents’ place these days. Sure, I can get together with someone for dinner or coffee or something along those lines, but if she ever wants to come over to my place for a game of Strip Scrabble or something, “I’d like to introduce you to my parents.”

On a related note, I spend most of my free time by myself or with friends, so I’m not sure whether my new-found confidence may have carried over from the show. If I start hooking up with a bunch of random chicks, then you’ll know it worked. But I probably won’t tell you if I start hooking up with a bunch of random chicks, so I guess you’ll be in the dark either way…

I still keep in touch with people from the show. There’s an occasional group e-mail that someone will send out to everyone, let them know what’s going on. I’ve chatted with Cheryl and talked to Bill, Chuck and Scarlet on the phone recently, so it’s all good. If you want to know what they’re doing with their lives… no one’s sent a group e-mail recently, so I couldn’t tell you for sure. If you want me to make up an answer, you’ll find out all sorts of interesting things about them…

I’ve still got the highlights.

No Myspace or Livejournal page—just the blog, baby. Just the blog.

Hiking during Episode 5: Most of the running happened right at the beginning—gotta make it look exciting. Our packs had canteens, sleeping bags, thin sleeping pads and whatever else we added, which in my case was extra clothing made of light materials, a thin rain jacket, etc. (It may have looked full, but mine wasn’t that heavy.) As for breaks, we had one in the middle that gave them time to move cameras and that was it. Unless you count stopping to reel in the fish. But there was only one assigned resting spot and that’s where I emptied the contents of my tummy. If they’d given us a map so we could have seen the length of the trek and how high the hillside reached… I would have treated it more like a hike than a race.

Love: I couldn’t tell you about the girls’ past relationships. It’s not something that comes up in regular, friendly conversation, but I imagine that they’ve had their share of deep emotional relationships, regardless of how they were portrayed on the screen. Likewise, I’m not sure how many of the guys have, either (myself excluded, of course… and yes, I’ve been in love before, so you don’t need to ask).

Between Chuck and Richard, it was pretty much Richard pushing his buttons and the viewers seeing what Chuck would do afterwards. When Richard started calling me “Shawnee of the Pawnee,” I wanted to smack him, but since I didn’t follow through and since Chuck had a stronger reaction to what Richard was saying and doing on a constant basis, theirs was the “feud” that was one of the highlights of the series.

The reality of reality TV: It was us. The challenges were set up for us, the host sometimes had cue cards and we sometimes had written questions that we were supposed to answer, but everything that came out of our mouths were our own words. The interviewers would prompt us sometimes (”Did you think the swimsuit was sexy?”), but what we said was all us. And that’s not to say that the prompting always worked: a few days into the show, I did an impression of Richard for some of the guys—during my next interview, they asked if I could do any impressions of any of the cast members… I said no. They asked if I could do an impression of Richard… I said no. They could ask all the questions they wanted, but any answers they got were what we chose to say.

I imagine most everyone was as nice and kind as they appeared to be. I don’t want people to assume that Scarlet’s getting pissed off at me was an exposure of her “real character.” That was just her getting pissed off. I can get pissed off, too, but I never reached that point on the show and it wouldn’t mean that I’m a bad person because of it. People might make it sound like those monstrous changes in someone’s attitude was who we “really were,” but given the small amount of footage they took while we were living in the mansion 24/7, the common viewer saw only an inkling of what people were doing. If Scarlet was only pissed off for half an hour the entire 2+ weeks we were there and they focus a lot of attention on that single 30 minutes… you get the idea.

The only example of religion I saw was Richard telling Mindi he wanted to pray. There were no Bibles, no one made a big show of saying grace before a meal together… if anyone was extremely religious, that person kept it under wraps very well.
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Whew! I think I’ve covered all of the comments listed below now. Anything else?