shawnbakken.net

I vaguely remember what my bed looks and feels like. Vaguely.

…

Okay, fine, it’s only been a couple days, but it’s waiting for me at home and won’t be seeing me for at least another night. (more…)

Now that the show is on the air and Tommy is seeing DraculAmber’s lovely behavior when he wasn’t around, maybe he’s decided his odds are of dating a supermodel aren’t as high as he thought.

Kudos to Jillian and Chris for stepping up instead of having each team whittle people down until they picked a half-willing participant.

Seriously, saying “You’re going to be playing some kind of sport” is one thing, but boxing gear? Most of the geeks aren’t very coordinated—how many of them do you want to send to the hospital on stretchers?

Apparently, being a mediator while preparing for the challenge wasn’t good enough for Chris. Nope, he had to become a leader for his football team, too!

Apparently, being a mediator while choosing beauties for elimination wasn’t good enough for Joe, either. The results… not quite as positive. Just imagine how the meeting from last week would have turned out if he’d been running it with the same amount of energy and excitement: “You’re supposed to second the motion before we can pass it! What the hell were you thinking?!”

The last time I played flag football was during law school. There are a couple law schools in the area and we put teams together to play a couple games. (Incidentally, no one wanted to play against the U of M team—one of their guys used to play for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Seriously.) It can be really hard to grab flags that are flapping around, so it was reeeeeally easy to start running into people instead. “I was aiming for the flag on the other side of her waist!”

They couldn’t show much of the game due to time constraints, but from what I saw, it seemed like the best plays were pretty much “Give the fast guy the ball and have him run around the edge. And then have Tommy whack him out of bounds.”

When Matt got rocked by Tiffany, two thoughts crossed my mind.

1) I blamed it on karma—he got hurt because he took out the cameraman during warm-ups.
2) I felt his pain, though not quite in the same way. I got up and finished, but Lord knows Matt wanted to. Also, our situations would have been more comparable if he used to play football, but got hurt anyway. Not that I’m trying to garner pity points or anything.

The girls were talking about who to eliminate, Jonathan walked into the room, they told him what they were talking about… and he stayed. That was a pretty good sign that he needed to be in the mansion: they don’t want to say bad things about you to your face, so move your face so they can say bad things about you.

“One geek will not be selected and they will have to leave tonight.” HE! HE! A guy will be going home! HE!!!!!

Obviously, Chris made a good impression on the beauties and a bunch of them wanted to be his partner, but what if no one did? They won the challenge and he was safe from elimination, soooo… someone would have been stuck with him. Ouch.

While the beauties were talking about which geek they were going to pair up with, Tiffany said she could straighten out Jonathan. When they did pair up, she picked Jim instead. Finally, Tara walks up and starts crying. You think the plan was for her to partner up with Jim, but now she has to make a decision on the spot and make up a reason for her choice?

“Hey, Jim, how did you stay on Beauty and the Geek so long?”
“Divine intervention.”

Given my prediction after Episode 1—Jonathan barely appeared on screen—I think Joe’s going home. That was a bad last impression, cowboy. You may want to keep your eyes on the beauties so you don’t get shot in the back on the way out.

Just in case “Dragging You Outside Right Now” wasn’t good enough for you, I went looking through more papers from college and found even more really good titles (some better than others, but some papers were better than the others, too):

Ma’am, You May Be Ugly, But I’m Not Drunk

Is Intelligent Life Out There Or Is It Just Me?

I lost track of time on Tuesday, so I only saw the last part of it and didn’t want to write half an entry. I’d work on the recap now, but it hasn’t been posted on the CW’s website yet and I’m leaving later this afternoon to spend the weekend at a B&B about three hours north of the Twin Cities (see: no Internet access), so… Consequently, things won’t change much for a few days unless there’s a sudden surge of readers’ comments, but I’ll make up for it next week.

[They posted it an hour or two after I wrote this! Recap of Episode 3, here I come!]

I’ve been looking through stuff I wrote back in college—papers, poems, stories, etc.—and one item was from a journalism class I took back in 2000. It’s a personal ethical code to “try to live my life to the best of my ability.” There are six bullet points, some based on the Boy Scout Handbook and writings by the Dalai Lama and Peter Singer. However, there’s one that I developed on my own that is just awesome:

“I will treat everyone and everything with respect and be willing to forgive those people who regret the harm they may have caused me or those close to me. However, I reserve the right to verbally and/or emotionally abuse those individuals who choose to close their minds to other possibilities and go through life wearing blinders. While these acts may cause temporary harm, my efforts will hopefully show them what they’ve been missing or ignoring and allow them to grow, thereby making the abuse a beneficial act in the long run.”

In other words, if you brush me off when I try to explain something, be prepared to cry like a little baby the next time you’re in earshot.

This is probably the best title I’ve ever used for a term paper:

“What Keeps Me From Dragging You Outside And Beating The Crap Out Of You Right Now?”

Or, if you’re slightly more religious, “Happy Anniversary of the Day When That Jesus Dude Came Back to Life!”

An apple a day keeps the doctor away, though you may need two or three if your aim is a little off.

The episode began with Countess DraculAmber chewing on Tommy’s neck, trying to suck out his hormones and turn him into a mindless sex slave. Given the “connection” he thought they had, it seemed to be working.

DraculAmber, on the other hand, was giving some mixed messages. She told the other beauties that her affections toward him were solely because she was doing whatever it took to stay in the mansion. However, she also admitted in the confessional booth that she liked him. Because he was tall, cute and would eventually get rich and buy everything she wanted. Okay, maybe that’s not such a mixed message.

Does anyone else think it’s sad that most of the beauties don’t have any talents? And they know it? And accept it? Whatever happened to the talent portion of beauty pageants? I guess plain old models only have to stand there and look hot, just like they told us.

Now that the beauties and geeks have to cooperate as a team instead of working individually and tallying the results, the difference in how they operate is frightening. Chris did a lot of the talking at first, but he seemed more like a mediator than a leader for the group. “You talk, now you talk, now you talk.” The girls… they yelled. A lot. All at the same time. No mediators, just a bunch of loud voices (and a few girls who wanted to choke the loud voices out of the others).

Then again, the geeks did work individually in a way. The beauties wanted to develop a single routine for everyone—a routine that no one could agree on. The geeks set up a plan where each guy did what he was good at. It’s kinda hard to disagree with a plan like that: “No, you suck at that! You have to dress up like a school girl and do The Sprinkler!”

Watching the beauties’ talent show gave me some horrible, horrible flashbacks. When Scarlet and I were preparing for our first challenges, we spent a lot of time working on her spelling, geography, etc. Working on our dance routine… not so much. Here was the plan for the three one-minute-long segments:

R&B: move my hips around and smile while she danced in front of me.
Disco: a pair of John Travolta moves (a pair of arm crossovers ala Pulp Fiction, then the Saturday Night Fever step over and over and over…)
Salsa: do random salsa moves until the minute was up.

Then after I discovered that it sucked and I hated doing it, we had to do it a second time for the sake of the cameras.

That being said, when I was on stage, it was a smaller audience, it only lasted for three minutes (twice) and it only had one person on stage who looked thoroughly awkward. This was in a packed theater, the digital clock was counting down from ten minutes and the eight beauties were collectively even less organized than me. The only thing that would have made it worse (or better, depending on your point of view) was if DraculAmber had been forced to stay out there on stage the whole time with everyone else.

“One Buff Geek” doesn’t seem like a geeky quality, but it definitely suits Jason. Hell, he probably could have added to his portion of the talent show by rapping into the mic while squeezing it between his pecs.

I wanna know what Jim’s talent was! The only time he appeared on camera, he was standing there looking awkward—he might as well have been wearing a skirt and doing the Sprinkler.

The geeks won the challenge, so that night, they went to relax in the hot tub. Or at least Joe did. The other guys may have joined him when they caught the scent of non-studying beauties. DraculAmber was pissed off at Leticia during the staircase ceremony for manipulating the geeks, playing around with them in the hot tub, but at least she had the decency to manipulate all of them together instead of trying to turn one person into a mindless sex slave. (Why she didn’t whine about Tiffany being in the hot tub as well, I haven’t the slightest idea.)

“Okay, according to page 76 of Robert’s Rules of Order, we need to make a motion to amend the amendment of the last motion before hearing motions about whether chocolate or vanilla is better. We have a motion, do I hear a second? All in favor? All opposed? Motion is carried, so it looks like… we like strawberry. Shit.”

By the end of the night, there were three groups of people. Geeks, beauties who studied and beauties who manipulated geeks. If that doesn’t say something about how well the social experiment is going this season, I don’t know what does.

Want to know how well DraculAmber got along with everyone else? And by “everyone else”, I mean everyone else (except for Tommy, but I cut him a little slack because of his transformation into a mindless sex slave). I submit my evidence from Episode 2 to the court:

1. She openly admitted to manipulating Tommy to stay in the mansion and sounded quite proud of it.
2. She was just as bull-headed as the other beauties when talking (yelling) about the talent show and was the first to bail on the meeting and start drinking.
3. She refused to accept the proper pronunciation of “genre”. (Damn French people need to learn to speak English…)
4. Her hypocritical whining about Leticia manipulating the geeks.
5. When she wouldn’t shut up during the stair ceremony, Joe forgot about his pledge from the last episode to help her stay and got into a yelling match with her (and Joe doesn’t seem like a guy who would break his word on a whim).
6. She didn’t bother listening to the rule about whoever buzzes in first gets to answer the question.
7. Her heart hurts? She has one? Wow…
8. Her attitude speaks for itself. Hell, she even admitted during her exit interview that she’s a bitch. DraculAmber is a beauty on the outside (according to the producers) and that’s about it.

Praise God for Joe sticking up for himself and the geeks’ decision! Chris tried to be subtle before and suggest that her ranting and raving was part of the reason why she got tapped, but that little girl seems like the type who needs a slap in the face to get her attention. If only someone had done that while they were explaining the rules in the elimination room… or any other time, for that matter.

As a final note, I’d like to say that I hope John E. can appreciate how effective this season’s dynamic has been after the first two episodes.

I’m using this space to turn rss2 feed entries into stuff I can copy and paste into a Word file. Ignore whatever you might read here—it’s really, really old.
_____________________________________________________