Author: Shawn

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S2, Episode 7: Never Eat Shredded Wheat

In case you’re confused about the heading, go around a compass clockwise and the capital letters correspond with the directions. Hey, it seemed just as cool as “The sun rises Early in the East” and “P-A-cific is the order of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans” when I was little.

Fare thee well, Ankur and Jennipher. I’d say “We barely knew thee,” but… come to think of it, we barely knew thee. Given how many weeks you spent in front of all those cameras, you didn’t spend much time on our TV screens. The same goes for everyone else, of course, but since you’re the couple who left this episode, “We barely knew thee.”

After seeing all the ways Ankur has played with his facial hair, I give the Fu-Manchu mustache top honors.

Josh takes a stand: “I’m nobody’s bitch. I’ll go down there when I’m ready. … Okay, I’m ready.”

I thought having everyone making a tape to give their partner a “good-bye gift” was a really cool idea. I remember watching Season 1 on TV and gaining a lot of insight about what happened with everyone else during the course of the show. (The people watching all the camera feeds knew a helluva lot more than I did.) I also thought it was pretty funny how some of the guys were running around, looking for multiple locations to record parts of their goodbyes and make them a more visually appealing production. Geeks…

I’m not sure how many of you have ever looked at the Internet Movie Database, but it’s got credits for about a gajillion movies and TV shows in there. (If you look up Beauty and the Geek, you’ll find me! And if you look up me, you’ll find Beauty and the Geek!) I’m not sure if Season 2 is listed yet, but given his appearances on camera during the challenge, I wonder if Ankur and Jennipher’s driver will get credit as an extra… Gotta give the girl props, though—she didn’t quit. It may have taken many, many, many hours, but they found all the stores and got back home alive.

It looks like Cher is finally softening up. Naturally, this may have started happening much earlier, but that’s the joy of reality TV—the editors can show clips in whatever order they want to make things more interesting. If you don’t think so, go back through all the tapes and compare how people’s clothing changes between interviews versus between episodes. Regardless, she seems to gained some knowledge during the course of the show and that’s what this “social experiment” is all about.

As a final note, I busted out laughing at how Ankur determined what color the diamond was: “The question came up, so it’s not clear… it’s probably a girly, romantic color… pink.”

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Strange but True

In 1931, a Missouri district attorney offered a few ideas about the appropriate punishment for a man he was prosecuting:

“[He] ought to be shot through the mouth of a red-hot cannon, through a barbed wire fence, and into the jaws of hell before being kicked in the seat of the pants by a Missouri mule and thrown into a manure pile to rot.”

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Man, that looks like it hurts…

I’d like to take a moment to thank The Powers That Be for making me a sturdy person.

I was playing soccer this afternoon and collided with someone. More specifically, my kneecap collided with his. You could hear the *CRACK* from across the field (at least I assume so—given that I was involved in the accident, I only know it was loud). He fell to the turf. I stayed upright, watching the guy hold his knee and roll around in pain. He needed help getting off the field. I stood around and waited for the game to start up again.

I’m not that big—about 195 pounds—but I’ve yet to run into or get kicked by someone on a soccer field and not jump right back up again. Conversely, I’ve left several opposing players on the ground who… well, they didn’t get right back up again. And I’m not even a thug anymore. I’m trying to develop a little finesse, learning how to maneuver and dribble the ball around people instead of barreling into them. If you flash back about a decade, I didn’t bother with that crap—I played defense and I could rumble with the best of them.

My favorite memory happened when I was about 16. We were playing in a tournament against the host team. They had a forward who… let’s just say he didn’t appreciate the art of defensive thuggery. As I kept pressuring him, he got more and more pissed off. It eventually came to a head when our arms got linked together at the elbow. Instead of letting go and running towards the ball, he tried pulling through my arm. Well, that was just plain silly—I kept my arm locked and pulled back. Neither of us let go and after a few more tugs, he spun around and punched me in the throat.

Why is that my favorite memory? A couple reasons:

  1. That was the first time I was directly responsible for someone getting a red card and thus kicked out of a game.
  2. It was one of my best acting gigs ever. After he hit me, I stumbled backwards, grabbed my throat and bent over at the waist (that way, no one could see me smiling as the linesman went to tell the center referee what happened).
  3. The final score was 1-1, but we played them again for the championship. Because of the red card, he had to sit out and watch from the sidelines as we won 3-1.

That doesn’t make me a bad person, does it? Enjoying the fact that I took advantage of his frustration? I mean, just because I was bumping him around doesn’t mean he’s allowed to take a swing at me. Think about Star Wars—Greedo and Han Solo are facing off outside the bar, talking smack until Greedo whips out his gun and shoots first. Then the ref runs up and gives him a red card. Okay, maybe it didn’t happen quite like that, but give a man a degree of poetic license here!

But the reason I mention it is because I’m becoming a little less “hands-on” while playing soccer now, trying to dance around Greedo and keeping the gun in its holster. It’s worked to a degree—I haven’t been punched in the throat in over ten years—but sometimes people don’t appreciate the effort I’m making. Sometimes they play really aggressively and someone’s going to get victimized. When that happens… sometimes you gotta cap ‘em. Pun intended.