Survivor eliminates another yahoo
Dude, I’m tellin’ ya………………….
This week’s episode of Survivor finally saw the weaker tribe win a challenge and send the dominant tribe to tribal council for the first time. In the end, they voted off lazy Yasmine over the cute law student Monica.
Which put me to thinking……..how do so many of these women on Survivor look so good after (allegedly) roughing it in the bush for 10 days? Yes, I’m a man (i.e. an often thoughtless, crude, pig). But I think I can speak for most of the guys here {right now most of the guys reading this are thinking, “Oh shit”} when I say that there a lot of very cute women on the show this season. These girls have (allegedly) been deprived of food, water, decent sleep, and just about all of the creature comforts that make them beautiful in real life. I hate to say it, but after ten days of sleeping in a shack in Samoa, half of this season’s women look better than many of the pretty girls I know here at home.
Don’t get me wrong—-the women I know here at home are beautiful and intelligent and mostly out of my league. I have to travel a few towns over to get a date these days because the women close to me are too good for me. They don’t have to say it……I know it. They’re incredible.
But there just seems to be NO WAY these women they put on the show can stay so clean and attractive after the first few days. Even the guys look somewhat sanitary. I know that if I or my buddies were on the show, we’d be the most grotesque people out there. After the first night, we’d have “bed-head” hair that would never look proper the rest of the way. My eyes would be red with dark bags under them from the lack of sleep. I’d look like a zombie after 4 or 5 days. These comely contestants look like they’re ready to shoot a cover of People’s 50 Most Beautiful People.
I’ve always read and heard that a handful of every season’s contestants are actually wanna-be actresses and models. I read that on the season where ex-NFL quarterback Gary Hogeboom was on the show, at least four of the other contestants were “hired” pretty people. Just last week, I read an interview with the ousted player Ben from this season. One of the questions was, “How many times did you apply for Survivor before getting the call”?
His reply was that he has never applied to be on Survivor and that he was approached as he was walking along the beach one day. I’ve read many other similar stories of how people were “approached” and most of them are the female contestants. People like me and my buddy who have sent in tapes and filled out the questionnaire are kidding ourselves to some degree. Like every other reality show, a great deal of Survivor is fake and scripted. I’ve read how they have a person lugging water back from the tribe’s drinking water source numerous times to “get the right shot”. The person is struggling to carry a 40 lb. container that they have filled and producers have them keep going back down the beach to re-shoot their approach (back to camp) from several different angles.
I’ve also read how tribal council takes 2-3 hours to actually shoot. They take the votes and look at them in advance before they reveal them to the tribe so that they can line them up in the most suspenseful way possible. If one person gets the great majority of votes, then it’s easy, obviously. But isn’t it funny how when two people are sharing the vote, somehow Probst always pulls out the ballots so that the two people have an equal number and then the decisive vote sends one of them packing?
Anyway, let’s take a closer look at this week’s episode.
They had a challenge where the participants showed up and nobody else was there. No Probst. Seemingly no instructions. Just a wooden chest and a small wooden cage of live chickens. After a few minutes, Russell’s team figured they would grab the chickens and (I’m thinking) just leave the challenge. They did snare a few of the birds while the other team opened up the wooden chest. It turned out that there were instructions in the chest for the players to compete in a game of bocce ball.
This is where the dickhead in me comes out again. I would’ve just taken the chickens and left. Hey——Probst wasn’t around to issue rules and instructions. What if the other team said to each other, “Well they’re taking the chickens, but I don’t think we’re supposed to be messing around with these things. I’m sure Probst will show up any minute and tell us what to do.”
What if the other team just stood there and never opened up the wooden chest with the instructions? I don’t see how the producers or Probst could penalize the one team for taking the chickens and leaving. They showed up for a challenge……there was no authority from the show present…….there was a food source just sitting there…….take the birds and get the hell out of there! Don’t even wait for instructions. If the producers are dumb enough to put the players in that situation and leave the door open for a “snatch-and-grab”………
But the other team did open the wooden chest and found the instructions for the challenge. So I have no problem with how it actually played out.
It was yet another win for the stronger tribe and now they had 3 chickens for eggs and later on…meat. That is, they had 3 chickens until they put the self-described “country girl” Shambo in charge of the flock. Now they’re down to 2 after one of the birds escaped.
When the tribe finally lost an immunity challenge and had to vote a person off, it looked like Shambo’s fumble and her semi-isolation from most of the tribe would be her downfall. But it turned out that Monica’s weak performance in the challenge and Jasmine’s general laziness around camp out-trumped Shambo’s error. They ended up voting off Jasmine.
Which was entirely OK by me because I can stand to ogle cutie-pie Monica for a couple of more weeks. Along with the rest of the hired actresses and models on the show.