Snake

Survivor: Season 22 Episode 1

What if Rob and Russell weren’t the two former players who were allowed back?  What if it were two random former players that haven’t been back for a second, let alone fourth, time yet?  What if it were two former players that were voted off first in their seasons and were seeking redemption?  What if instead of any former players, it were Mitch Hedberg and the stunningly handsome Ed Harris who got off that second helicopter?  What if heaven could send me back the 30 seconds that I lost to the first “Survivor What If?” ad thing.  Fortunately, Her Sweetness and I watched the first 20 minutes of American Idol in order to let Survivor get enough ahead on the dvr that we could zip through the commercials.  Quite the fortuitous decision by us given that there were at least 2 more “What If” ad things that we were able to skip through.  We get it CBS, there’s a new gimmick this season that you don’t think we’re smart enough to grasp, stop cramming it down our throats, we’re former federal agents, we’re smart.

FEDS!

I’d soil myself if I had to sit on the edge of that helicopter while it nose dove.  Since it’s the first episode, let’s discuss a few rules that everyone should know in order to make it through the first vote.  Do at least some work around camp.  Don’t lead.  Talk way less than you want to, but don’t be creepy.  Smile.  If you’re lucky enough to find an immunity idol, tell absolutely no one, you just met these people.  Don’t attempt to make a game changing move when the game hasn’t even had time to breathe yet.  If you’re thinking about making a game changing move, assume that everyone in the tribe has figured it out, then plan accordingly.  That will probably make you nice and paranoid, but at least it’ll pass the time.  Wear pants and a long sleeved shirt.

There’s so much to digest from the first episode, so I’ll try to hit on as many of them as I can, as efficiently as I can:

• Tools!  Tools?  What the f#%k?  Why are these people given tools… in a box?  Did you see how many nails there were in that tool box?  If this is only about product placement, that’s lame.  And if there is no tool box on Redemption Island, that’s the dreaded Double Lame.
• If I were forming a band, Red Neck Man Sweater would be up for discussion as the name of said band.
• Why is Phillip not a Federal Agent any more?
• Every time someone talks with him, they should call it a briefing.
• My theory is that Phillip has not watched very much Survivor before.
• That took a lot of brass for Kristina to not play the idol.  I would have.  I wouldn’t have given it to Massachusetts Bob, (NEVER GIVE UP AN IDOL!), but I probably would have played it just to be safe.
• Why didn’t Kristina vote for Francesca?  Or Francesca for Kristina?  Voting for Phillip was a wasted vote at that point.
• The older white guy is named Steve Wright.  Apparently he played for the Cowboys in the 80’s.  I would have preferred Steven Wright the comedian.
• Blonde dreadlocks man played in the NFL too.  I wonder if they know each other.
• Seemed like the shots of animals and bugs were extra neat-o last night.
• This Redemption Island gimmick means there will be combined reward/immunity challenges again.  Not a fan.

Time to pick a winner.  Since there are 18 people to choose from and some of them weren’t shown speaking last night, I took to the CBS website to read some contestant bios so I can make a super informed guess on who the winner will be.  One thing I’ll say is that based on their bios, just about all of the contestants think they’ll win because they can spot liars.  If Phillip hangs around, they might not have to worry about using that skill.

She didn’t say or do all that much last night, but I’m going with Sarita.  Reading her bio, I learned what sagacious means, and I also learned what a yurt is.  Her hippie parents built and lived in one (image search it).  For that, she gets my vote.  Andrea is my second choice for reasons that I’ll explain if she seems like a better decision down the road.

Survivor Freeze Frame of the Week:  Will not be seen this week.  I don’t have my camera at my disposal.  And my throat is dry, but it’s being treated.

Country and Western

What am I doing?  I’ve been listening to Country and Western music for a month and not writing about it.  I have plenty to say.  First, there ARE things that I like, and there are a handful of songs that will make it onto my ipod when I start listening to it again.

"It's three o'clock and he hasn't showered yeeeeeeeeeeeet!

Jennifer Nettles’ voice is one of them.  If she could follow me around and narrate my day, just for one day, that happiness would more than make up for the Dolphins not having a good quarterback for the last 15 years.

Second, the first 1:37 of “Portland, Oregon” by Loretta Lynn.  As I type this, I’m listening to a version  that she did with Jack White.  I typed in Jack Black there by mistake, and deleted it, but I wouldn’t mind seeing Jack Black and Loretta Lynn rock out.
I think I started liking “Me and My Gang” by Rascal Flatts.  Or maybe  I like parts of it, maybe it’s that voice box thing in the beginning that brings out the subconscious Jersey/Bon Jovi/T-Shirt Time blood in me.  They mention  Oregon in the lyrics too.  What the hell’s happening in Oregon?

Trace Adkins seems cool, but is he really cool?  I wonder what he eats and drinks.  He should try and push the Adkins Diet on us whatever it is.

I miss listening to my music, though.  It’s testing my discipline, but I haven’t listened to anything non-country by choice.  Bars have other music playing,  so I have no choice but to listen to it when drinking with the public.  I also get music relief from movies as well.  Her Sweetness put on this clip from A Knight’s Tale, which I had never seen.  I don’t know what the hell is going on in that movie, but I thank it for the Bowie break.

On a different note, Survivor starts on Wednesday.  I’m going to try and post reviews here on Thursdays, but I just took a job with odd hours so I won’t get to see most episodes until Thursday afternoon.  So you’ll have to be patient.

Fantasy poop.

This may be my final fantasy update of the season as I have no teams with anything to play for.  When we last spoke, Roll Over needed a small miracle to make the playoffs.  We had to win our game against the first place team, then have the 4th place team lose to a 4-9 team.  The 4-9 team started off with a zero from the Titans’ defense against the Colts on Thursday night, that didn’t bode well.  With his opponent starting Aaron Rodgers against the Lions, all seemed lost.  Then Rodgers got hurt early and I let a little slice of hope creep in….dummy.  The 4-9 team had picked up Lance Moore earlier in the week, but in this league, if you pick someone up they aren’t automatically placed in your starting lineup.  So this guy had a vacant spot in his lineup as the 4:00 games approached.  He had Lance Moore and Vincent Jackson to choose from, so I figured he was just waiting to see if Jackson was active.  4:15 came and went and he didn’t make any changes.  That was that.  His opponent had DeSean Jackson going on Sunday night to throw the last shovelfuls of dirt on our grave.  We won our game by 52 points, by the way, and are the overall points leader by more than 70 points.

What went wrong with this team?  Long story short, we were a victim of the schedule.  We were one of the top three scoring teams most weeks, but just happened to play someone that scored more that week.  In weeks 12 and 13, when all we needed was one win, we lost by a combined 1.74 points.  I blame Chris Johnson’s two week crapfest, and Andre Johnson’s ejection for this.  That’s that.

As for Space Mountain, ugggh.  As predicted Matt Prater got hurt, leaving us with no kicker, because we have no drop/add moves left.  This week, Kyle Orton got benched, or is he hurt too?  Honestly, I stopped looking.

I think there’s a chance we can finish in 4th and make some money, but I don’t care enough to do the math, because there’s a tie involved.  Ryan Mathews apparently had a good game finally.  Suck it, Ryan Mathews, suck it all day long.

What looks like our only bright spot, will surely lead to some frustration.  We actually have a lot of decent players to pick from when thinking about our two keepers next season.  Michael Vick, Mathews?, maybe Felix Jones, Brandon Marshall, Sidney Rice, Vincent Jackson, and Michael Crabtree.  Some of these guys will be on different teams, or have new quarterbacks, or new coaches, so a lot needs to happen.  First we need to find out when they’ll be playing football again.

There you go.  At least I’m sleeping much better than I was in August.

Survivor: Day of Reckonin’

For the first 10 minutes of last night’s episode there was a winter storm warning scrolling across the bottom of the screen.  This is the first such warning since Her Sweetness and I moved to Charlotte in July and a winter storm in Charlotte is apparently just cold rain.  Schools are delayed.  I’ll be honest, I don’t think I’ll feel like a local any time soon, but by the end of the episode a little Carolina pride blossomed inside of me like a little baby bit of okra.  With about 15 minutes left in the episode, I thought, “Boy, Chase’d better not show his face in my Carolina neighborhood.  Liar.  Backstabber.  Flipper!”

I’ve seen every episode of Survivor and very few moments have captivated me as much as last night when Jane just wanted to make sure that her alliance was still strong.  This is a game built on lying and Jane thought she was in an honest to goodness alliance of honest people, except Sash.  When she asked them if they still had an alliance of four or if that had changed, typically contestants would just lie to appease her and surprise her at Tribal Council.  But you see, Holly can’t lie, Chase can’t lie, and Sash is smart enough not to get the blood on his hands.  Holly is smart enough to know that if you’re not talking, you’re not lying, so let Chase do all the talking.  He’s stupid, he’s young, let him stammer.  And stammer he did.   Twice this episode, Holly and Sash shut up while Chase made an ass out of himself.  At Tribal Council, Probst even said during one of the silences, “The game is being played right now.”

Back to Jane’s moment, watching the rage flick on behind her eyes when she realized she was out was as gripping as reality television can get unless someone passes out face down into a roaring campfire.  Then Sash drove the dagger home.  Survivor was nice enough to even toll a bell at the moment the camera cut to Jane.  Good times.  By the way does Jane look a little like Susan Sarandon to anyone else?

The first question that came to my mind was why wouldn’t Fabio and Dan form a quick alliance with Jane and vote out Holly.  Easy, they both have a better chance to win immunity two more times than they do of beating Jane against a jury, so why bring her?  Actually Dan has no chance to win anything, this is more about Fabio.  Seriously, are there two people that deserve to win less than Dan?  No, of the five people left, I would rank them: Sash, Holly, Fabio, Dan, Chase in terms of deserving to win.  Chase is last because he has dumbed his way through this whole game.  At least Dan knows he has no chance.  If it’s up to me, I take Dan and Chase to the finals and I’d be a lock to win.  I guess I’m rooting for Fabio, though.  I’m not sure why.

• I guess there won’t be an auction this season.  I’m bummed.
• Who do you think is going to rebuild the fire?  I remember Fabio getting the smoke in his eyes earlier this season, but can he build a fire?
• Chase has really gotten his share of life lessons this season.
• Probably some uncomfortable moments when Jane met Marty after being eliminated.  Marty threw the target on Jane’s back weeks ago and it stayed there until last night.  If Marty hadn’t said anything, I doubt that anyone this season would have been smart enough to see the threat Jane was.
• If my Dad came on to the show to participate in a challenge, I would kiss him that much only to make him uncomfortable on television.  Quite frankly, I was a little uncomfortable watching that.
• “What?  I didn’t know Fabio was that smart?”  He really rocked that puzzle.
• Anyone miss Purple Kelly?
• Holly’s husband seemed Super South Dakota Fired Up to be there.

Survivor Freeze Frame of the Week: I’ve got a few for you this week.

The Bell tolls for thee:

Hey, ummm, I think I’d….yeah, I’d like you to stop that:

There’s no way both of them know what that word means:

Quick Fantasy Update

Roll Over lost by 1.7 points last week, it was a killer loss.  That means we’ve lost our last 2 games by a combined 1.74 points.  We are now two games out of third and 1 game out of the fourth and final playoff spot.  We are 5-7 and there are 4 teams tied at 6-6 for the last playoff spot.  We need to win our next 2 games and get a lot of help, but we will win the tie-breaker if we get there, because we have the most total points in the league.  So hopes are slim, especially after last week.  We started off well with Tom Brady on Thanksgiving, but then Andre Johnson got ejected for beating up Cortland Finnegan, and Chris Johnson got .5 points.  .5 points.  .5 points.  We lost by 1.7, that’s 17 more yards from Chris Johnson and we would have been in good shape.   Sad.

In TUFFKL, as predicted here, Vincent Jackson got hurt on the first series and didn’t get us a point.  We lost by 11 points, we played Reggie Bush instead of Felix Jones and Sidney Rice got 3 points.  We’re 6-7, 4 games out of first with 4 to go.  This team feels like the Black Knight, minus the confidence.  The only thing keeping me interested is to try and guess who will get hurt next.  Reggie Bush seems obvious, but Johnny Knox would be the least convenient.  Actually, Matt Prater would be the least convenient as we already have Mike Nugent on IR, and can’t make any more drop/adds.

Survivor: We don’t get that hour back.

I’m giving this recap a half-assed effort in honor of the job that the casting department did this season.  I’m annoyed by the whole episode last night, I hope this isn’t a sign of this show slowing down, but between two people quitting and watching people watch a movie, there aren’t many positives to say about this episode.  Maybe it’s because last week was a recap, but I was expecting more.  Much like Holly who just wants a hot dog, this episode left me hungry.

You know what?  I’m not even going to type any more paragraphs.  Here….bullets:

• I appreciate that Jeff Probst gets genuinely angry when people quit.  He sits in the same rain as the contestants at Tribal Council and he seems like a fan of the game.  I don’t know what his accommodations are like off-camera, there’s probably at least a roof, but I feel like he cares.  This matters to me.
• When is the last time that there wasn’t a solid alliance this late in the game?
• I look forward to whatever buffoonery Chase has in store for his newly acquired immunity idol.
• The reward challenge looked pretty difficult, which is disappointing considering the reward was candy and jalapenos.  I would have taken all of the peanut M&M’s.
• Why was Alina crying?
• I would have like to see Marty’s pre-jury hair battle that rain.

No more bullets, consider this blog smuffed.

Except for the Survivor Freeze Frame of the Week. Since the show has stopped bringing it strong these last few weeks, I’m going to bring it hard.  Consider it broughten:

This is just funny:

And this is what it feels like when you don’t get your hot dog:

 

Fantasy Update

Down goes the optimism!  Down goes the optimism!  That didn’t take long.  I thought that Michael Vick’s 61-point performance last week may have been a small reward for all of the injuries we’ve dealt with.  It may have been just that, a small reward, because we certainly paid for it this week.  We suffered a 55 point loss this week, (another whooping at the hands of my Father) and of course we have to deal with another injury.  Brandon Marshall pulled his hammy on Thursday night leaving us an extra three days to wallow.  We started Johnny Knox in the Thursday night game as well, and if you’re getting 19 points combined from two receivers, you’re in for a tough week.  Add to that a 2 from Brandon Jacobs, a 3 from Michael Crabtree, and a 2 from Matt Prater, well, that’s 7 points from three more players.  Now we sit 3 games out of first with 6 to go.  Doable, sure, but there’s no room for error, or more injuries.

We have used up all of our drop/add moves for the year.  In TUFFKL we get 10 moves all season, but a maximum of one each week until the 10 run out.  We used our last one on Vincent Jackson last week,

Remember this giant omen from Panthers camp?

and if there was ever a candidate for the next guy to get injured, it’s the receiver who runs deep routes often, but hasn’t played a game all year.  Did I mention DeAngelo Williams got put on IR?  So now we have to carry his dead weight and we can’t even keep him next year.

Our starting line-up, except for our running backs, looks pretty dangerous on paper.  Vick, Felix Jones, Reggie Bush or Brandon Jacobs, and three out of Sidney Rice, Vincent Jackson, Michael Crabtree, Brandon Marshall, and Johnny Knox.  That would be a hell of a Madden team, even a decent fantasy team last year, but this year it’s just dreadful.

(Insert negative paragraph about Ryan Mathews here)

As for Her Sweetness’ league, well, I’m an eater.  When I’m eating, I generally eat the worst thing on the plate first to get it out of the way.  Why waste one of my last five forkfulls on peas and interrupt the porterhouse?  My point is that once I found out that the scoring in this league included decimals down to the hundreths, I knew Roll Over would lose a game my just a few hundreths.  I would have liked to have it happen early on when we were losing every week.  Nope, it happened this week against a team that has made one drop/add all year and started Jonathan Stewart (who didn’t play), Steve Smith of the Panthers, and the Panthers defense.  We lost by .04, that’s four yards from anyone.  Andre Johnson got shut down, Connor Barth missed a field goal, and Drew Brees and Marques Colston lit us up.

Roll Over now stands at 5-6, still a game out of third, and still the overall points leader.  I’m not worried, but I’m worried.  I sure wish the trading deadline in this league didn’t pass a month ago.

In other news:

• Are you as excited as I am to see Jake Delhomme get the start against the Panthers?
• If Brad Childress or Wade Phillips get a coaching job in Charlotte next year, I’m moving again.
• That was pretty funny, Richard Seymour.
• 9 episodes in and something almost happened on Dexter.
• Randy Moss must be thrilled.

Survivor: 3 days late recap

Finally, the pot has been stirred.  For some reason it took Marty’s hair getting voted out for people to wake up.  He seemed to be everyone but Dan’s primary target so it doesn’t really make sense for his elimination to stir things up, but there hasn’t been much sense made this season.

Something clicked in Holly’s head, she decided it was time to play, and to the jury went Brenda.  Yes, Brenda who helped two people find hidden immunity idols, practically made them take the idols instead of taking them herself, and then didn’t see it as necessary to lower herself to scrambling.  All she needed to do was swing one person to her side to replace Naonka, but she couldn’t be bothered.  If Chase is one of your strongest allies, you need to rethink things anyway.  What the hell is that guy’s deal?  Did he really just want to get into Brenda’s yellow bikini bottom?  If he had ever managed to get an immunity idol he would have surely given it away and gotten himself voted off.  Will the Carolinas ever forgive him for his dumbassedness?  Will he win?

Seriously, who’s going to win this thing now?  I have no idea.  Now it seems like Sash and Chase are the next two to go, but at this stage everything changes so much week to week.  There are still two immunity idols, assuming they didn’t go up in flames when the tribe fed all of their wooden chests to the fire, so Sash and Naonka should be safe for a few more weeks.  Jane keeps winning challenges and Marty’s words about her being a lock to win if she makes it are still looming.  It seems like there are a few people that have no right to win (Dan, Absent of Mind Kelly, and Chase), but why vote them off before Jane or anyone else who may actually win a challenge?

• Remember that time when I was sledding down the side of a volcano in Guatemala with Naonka?  That was awesome.
• Is Jeff Probst more involved vocally in these challenges than he has been in the past?  Has he ever told another contestant, “Don’t you dare quit on this challenge”?  How about all that gruff he gave the yellow team in the barrel challenge?  “If this were life or death….you’d be dead.”  Good stuff, maybe the producers told him that someone needs to spruce up this season, and then it all came together in one episode.
• The barrel challenge seemed like it was edited down to 2 minutes when it probably took an hour.  I still say cut it down even more and let me see the school yard picking of teams.
• Pizza, brownies, green pop, and…banana bread?  Banana bread is out of place there.
  

  I Google image searched Chocolate Eruption looking for a picture from "Goonies". This came up instead. He's a Bengal.

  How about some molten lava cake?  Or some Chocolate Eruption?  I’m on the side of a freakin’ volcano!  Banana bread?

• Dan was the fifth one out of the immunity challenge.  That will be his best performance all season.  Even if he manages to be one of the last four people there, he still won’t do better than being fifth out of a physical challenge.
• Kelly Blank Head’s 20 years of wisdom allowed her to be the only one to vote for Benry.  Even Chase and Sash voted for Brenda.
• It’s about time for the auction, is it not?
• Marty should wear a hat.

Survivor Freeze Frame of the Week: Because I’m late, you get a bonus freeze frame.  The first is the understatement of the year.  The second is another “That’s what she Said” moment.

Michael Loves Michael

On Monday afternoon, I sent an email to my Life Associate and Space Mountain co-owner.  The email was sarcastically rooted in optimism.  We were losing our game by 48 points with only one player left, so I did some quick research and found out that the top two performances in the league this year were by Jahvid Best (48 points) and Kenny Britt (49 points).  Jason Hanson had the third highest scoring week.  He’s a kicker, more on kickers later.  As a loyal reader can guess, our one player was the newly acquired Michael Vick.  Just the fact that I’m writing this before 9:00 AM is a hint as to how it turned out.

I hadn’t even planned on watching the game.  Her Sweetness and I made the acquaintance of The First 48 over the weekend.  Long story short, it’s about homicide detectives trying to solve a case in the first forty eight hours after a murder.  I’ve seen it on the guide many times in the past, but I always thought it was a history show about the first 48 states, which wouldn’t interest me.  I was wrong, and I’m glad, it’s a good show.  So I figured we may watch a recorded episode of that before retiring for the evening, but I checked the game just to see what was happening and to verify that the  news of Donovan McNabb’s contract extension was true.  The Eagles were already up 7-0 and had the ball again and only about five minutes had been played.  Then Mike Tirico said that the Eagles had scored an 88-yard touchdown on their first play from scrimmage.  In TUFFKL, scoring 48 points is not impossible, and things like a long touchdown on the first play need to happen.  TUFFKL scoring gives 3 bonus points for every touchdown over 50 yards, so that first touchdown was worth 11 points, that’s a big dent.

Then it just got out of hand.  As you can guess, we won, it wasn’t even close.  Vick scored 61 points, we had the game wrapped up at the beginning of the third quarter, I think I’m in love.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to be on the other side of this.  If I were ahead in a game by 48 points and lost that quickly, I probably wouldn’t sleep until Thursday.  There has to be stories all over the country about fantasy games that were won and lost as a result of Vick’s performance.  What if he had only scored 47 and we lost by one?  Whew.

And to think that I was going to come on here and rant about what a bad week it was in TUFFKL.  Our game was going pretty badly on Sunday.  Everybody on our opponent’s team was scoring and no one on Space Mountain was, except for Kyle Orton who we had on our bench.  Brandon Jacobs and Michael Crabtree both had touchdowns called back, Brandon Marshall had two quarterbacks hurt, then he almost threw an interception himself, and apparently Ted Nugent reads my blog, because Mike Nugent blew out his knee on an onside kick.  But then Felix Jones had a 71-yard touchdown before the lights went out in East Rutherford and we were back in it.  Then came the low point of my Sunday.  We hadn’t started Nugent, instead we went with Matt Prater.  Our opponent started Ryan Succop.  At the end of the first half, Josh McDaniels decided to let Prater attempt a 58 yard field goal.  That’s 9 points for us if he makes it, and -2 if he misses it.  He missed it short and the Chiefs ran it all the way back in to field goal range.  Succop hit a 40-something yard field goal, that’s 6 points for our opponent and a 17 point swing in the game. I was mad.

I still had high hopes heading in to the Sunday night game.  We had the Steelers defense and Vick left against only Tom Brady, and we were down by around 10 points.  Surely that seemed doable.  Tom Brady had other plans, though, and he made the Steelers defense look pretty feminine.

But there is joy in Mudville today, readers.  Space Mountain got a win out of nowhere.  It’s one of those fantasy games that I’ll always remember.

I really drafted this guy once?

It’s up there with watching Rex Grossman throw 4 interceptions against the Cardinals in the “Crown their Asses” game a few years ago.  I was ahead 16 points in that game and Grossman ended up with a -12.

So all is well today.  In Her Sweetness’ work league, Roll Over had 110 points by 3:00 on Sunday.  The game actually got a little close last night, because our opponent had the Eagles defense, but we won by 16.  Our opponent started Steve Smith of the Giants who didn’t play, and he had the points on the bench to beat us.  It was that kind of week I guess.  At 5-5, we are now in a 5-way tie for third place.  We have the tie-breaker right now because we’re the highest scoring team in the league.  So with all that good news, this is where I get nervous and start waiting for the other shoe to drop.