Pardon the Interruption

Sorry for not posting much recently, but I took a few days off to handle some things around the house and it didn’t leave much time for writing.  That mission was accomplished, so now I’m back and the posts should flow again soon.  Subjects to be addressed will include:

1. An overdue weight loss update
2. Changing doctors
3. My mysterious foot injury
4. Buying cars
5. Why “Jon & Kate Plus 8” is a colossal waste of time
6. God and Politics
7. Scams
8. Homeowners associations
9. The hideous turn taken by the Kansas City Royals
10. ….and so much more!!!

Stay tuned.

Sony, Sony, Sony

In 2005, we made the mistake of spending over $2,000 on a Sony Wega rear-projection LCD television.  My wife and I thought, at the time, that Sony was a brand we could trust, one known for quality, and therefore it was justified to spend the additional money over some competitors’ models.

Big mistake.

In case you aren’t aware (like we weren’t), Sony has been experiencing problems with the rear-projection LCD televisions for quite some time.  So much so, in fact, that they don’t manufacture them anymore and have been forced to admit that their designs caused the interiors of these TVs to overheat, sometimes charring the plastic casings, sometimes warping the access door to the internal workings, sometimes frying the workings themselves.  They have already been the subject of multiple class-action lawsuits as a result, and have had to extend their manufacturer warranty to fix many of the problems.

One of the problems they have is with the “optical block“.  I won’t try to explain the technicalities of what this apparatus does, suffice it to say that when it’s been over-heated inside one of Sony’s rear-projection LCD televisions, it can cause little blue dots and/or a blue cloud to appear on screen, among other possible problems that eventually make the television unwatchable.  This is an expensive problem to fix, as it requires replacing the optical block entirely, a $1,000 or more repair, and does nothing to fix the problem that caused the original optical block to fry out in the first place.  After spending the $1,000+ to fix it, you can expect the exact same problem to occur in another 2-4 years.

Sony, while recognizing that their own design flaw causes this problem, did NOT recall the televisions.  They also did NOT inform everyone who purchased one that they were entitled to a free repair.  What they did was quietly announce on their customer service website that they had settled a class action suit related to warped access doors due to overheating, and had also extended the manufacturer’s warranty on the optical block until the end of 2008 on certain televisions.  For a couple of models they even extended the warranty to June 30, 2009, but unfortunately our model was not included.  If you were a consumer who found this announcement on your own in time to take advantage of it, then you were in luck.  If you’re one of the people who didn’t have the problem arise until after the extended warranty had expired, or didn’t find the announcement until then, then you were most definitely out of luck, because Sony has decided that they will no longer cover this repair.

That’s right, a $1,000+ repair due to a known design defect on a $2,000 television that is barely four years old is NOT covered by Sony.  A group of customers who could afford to lay out over $2,000 on a television have been told by Sony to go pound sand, essentially, which strikes me as one of the dumber marketing moves they could have made.

Sony’s only concession to this situation is to advise customers who call about the problem that if they go find a different Sony television to buy as a replacement, they can call Sony first and get a quote on a reduced price.  In other words, in exchange for laying out over $2,000 for a TV in 2005, you get to lay out “only”  another $1,200 in 2009 to replace it, instead of laying out $1,500.  Gee, thanks.

That price reduction is a guess on my part, because when I called Sony on this issue, the customer service person refused to give me an estimated amount of the discount.  “Each situation is different”, she said.  Okay, true enough I suppose, but she also refused to give me even a ballpark guess of the kind of price reduction I could expect.  I believe my exact question was something like, “I understand, but before I spend my time researching Sony TVs to replace the Sony TV that just burned up on me, I’d like to know if it’s worth the effort.  Can you give me a ballpark reduction?  Will it be closer to 10% or closer to 50%?  I realize whatever you tell me isn’t a quote or a promise.”  No luck.  She had clearly been told not to give the customers any indication of what to expect.  The customer has to find a TV they would like, then call back a different number, cite their case number, and they can then expect a return call in two to three business days quoting them a price.

So, in short, Sony has known quality problems with some of their televisions and also has proven customer service problems in handling the people who bought those televisions.  That really only leaves price as a selling point, yet they also refuse to give a general price indication to those same customers unless they do their own research and call back,  And since Sony is regularly priced significantly higher than its competitors anyway, it’s dubious at best to expect them to reduce their price enough to make it worth the customer’s effort.

We went looking for another television this weekend.  Since we didn’t find anything that knocked our socks off enough to make an immediate purchase, we noted a couple of Sony model numbers.  I’m going to call them in today and see what kind of discount they offer, then I’ll post an update here with the facts and figures.  It’s highly unlikely that we’ll buy another Sony after the problem that we just encountered, but maybe they’ll surprise me an offer a $1,500 television for $300 and free shipping.  That would be an offer we couldn’t refuse.

Otherwise, I think it’s safe to say we’ve bought our last Sony for the foreseeable future.

The Amazing Race – Season Finale

Okay, I’m waaaayyyyy late in posting this, but that fact alone should tell you a lot about how well I liked the season finale of The Amazing Race.  It was everything I expected, which wasn’t much.

The three remaining teams all flew on the same plane to Maui, where they were immediately tasked with taking a cab to a certain beach.  On the way, they were required to change into Race-provided swimwear, so I’m sure a few drivers in Maui were treated to an eyeful of something unexpected as the contestants changed clothes in their respective cabs.  Once they arrived, each team had to prepare a pig for a traditional luau, then carry the pig to the fire pit.  Each pig was strapped to a pole and appeared to be pretty heavy, but only one team, Margie and Luke, were smart enough or strong enough to carry the pig on their shoulders instead of dangling at the end of their arms. 

They quickly passed the other two teams and got their pig in proper luau position, grabbed the next clue and left.

True to form, Jaime spent virtually the entire pig-carrying portion of the event yelling at her partner, Cara.  She’s been a true delight this season, regardless of how good she looks in a bikini.  And yes, as expected, she does have a lower-back tattoo.

Shocker.

The next stage of the race involved hopping on a jet ski and racing to a series of 100 buoys, three of which held their next clue.  Margie and Luke kept their lead, arriving first for that challenge and finishing it first as well.  They were followed by Jaime and Cara, who made up a lot of time in the water and passed Victor and Tammy.  Apparently, while she’s pretty much a shrew of a person, Jaime is one hell of a jet ski driver.

The clue each team retrieved directed them to take their cabs to a place where hundreds of surf boards were stacked.  They were each required to dig through the pile and find the eleven boards that each depicted a different scene from the previous legs of the race, then put those boards in sequential order.  Luke performed this part for their team, and he flew through the task.  He had the first nine boards in the proper order before the next team even arrived.  He got stuck on the last two, however, and was still working when Victor and Tammy arrived.

They were next because Jaime and Cara got stuck with a terrible cab driver again, who initially took them to the wrong place, allowing Tammy and Victor to pass them.  At one point, Jaime borrowed the driver’s cell phone to call the police and get directions, and did so by dialing 911.  Keep in mind that Jaime is, famously, a “former police officer”, which means she should know that 911 is reserved for emergency situations.  To her credit, she did tell the dispatcher that it was not an emergency situation, but that doesn’t stop it from being a really bad idea.  Had the dispatcher sent out a unit to cite her for improper use of an emergency line, it would have been both justified and hilarious.

Anyway, Victor started really tearing through the board-sorting exercise.  He quickly found the right boards and threw them to one side, carrying them together to the stand where they were sorted instead of running them one-by-one.  As he did this, Luke grew more and more frustrated, clearly just guessing with random surf boards eventually.  Needless to say, Victor finished first, and they tore our of there toward the finish line.

Jaime and Cara, having finally arrived, actually made up a lot of ground in this phase.  Jaime had ten of the eleven boards in place, but couldn’t come up with the final one until the two remaining teams agreed to cooperate.  Luke flipped his boards around so Jaime could see which one she was missing, and she found her last missing board.  Then she flipped hers around so Luke could see which ones he was missing.  In essence, Luke’s decision to show his boards first meant that he and Margie would be chasing two teams instead of one.  It virtually guaranteed that they wouldn’t win, because it was highly unlikely that both teams ahead of them would suffer some kind of taxi problem on the way to the finish line.  Nice show by him, in my opinion.

None of the teams suffered any last-minute mechanical problems, so the final order of finish was the same as the order the finished the last challenge – Victor and Tammy as the winners, Jaime and Cara second, Margie and Luke third.  I must say, I never really warmed up to Victor and Tammy because they struck me as arrogant, but they were clearly the team that was most deserving of the win.  They were the best prepared, they were the most consistent, and they made the fewest mistakes.  A pair of Harvard Law grads really don’t need a million dollars, but I can’t say they didn’t earn it.

And so another season of The Amazing Race has ended, and I’m not sure I’ll come back next year.  Probably I will, because it’s something I can watch with my kids and because I like seeing the different locales and customs.  But there are aspects of the race that need to be improved, in my opinion.  A show like this is heavily dependent upon the personalities of the contestants, and this year they probably just had some bad luck in having some unlikeable groups among the finalists.  Hopefully they’ll have better luck next year, but regardless, they need to ask more of the contestants.  It can’t all be running and taking cabs and performing basic tasks that really shouldn’t be called “challenges”.  Have them skydive.  Have them ride horses.  Have them ski, or go spelunking, or dive on a coral reef.  Anything but laps in a pool, or stacking wood, or dancing, or any of the other mundane “challenges” they were asked to do this year.  Make them work a little bit for the million bucks.

And keep Jaime off the show.

Mom’s Memory

Memory is a funny thing.  Everyone’s brain works in a slightly different way, I’m sure, but I think it’s safe to say that most people tend to remember things differently than they really were.  We all gloss over the ugly stuff and inflate the happy stuff from our earlier days, and create a distorted backward look at the world that’s unique to each of us.

Personally, I think I have a very good memory (which probably makes me no different than anyone else in the world), and yet I recall things from my childhood differently than my siblings or parents do.  I’m sure part of the time I’m remembering correctly and part of the time I’m dead wrong.  My guess is that we all remember things more accurately if we didn’t have an emotional stake in it when it happened.  My personal recollections of the times my brother stole money from my piggy bank are almost certainly skewed by the fact that it pissed me off at the time, while his memory of those moments is probably much more accurate since he didn’t really have any emotional baggage over the whole thing.

A good example of this happened yesterday.  We went to my mother’s house to wish her a Happy Mother’s Day and bring her a gift, and then we sat around and chatted for a while.  If you chat with my mother long enough, she will raise some uncomfortable issue.  She just likes to discuss all sorts of things going on in the world and doesn’t really care much if some of those things are a touch sensitive or inappropriate.  That’s just the way she is.  So, not content to just chat about grandchildren or her upcoming trip to California for a wedding, my mom asked, with no warning at all, if the Minnesota Senate race had finally been decided.

Now, to be clear, talking politics with my mother is always hard, because while she claims to be an independent, she also proudly declares that she’s never voted for a Democrat for president and never will.  She’s about as Republican as any Boston Catholic can be, and while she arrives at those views honestly and intelligently, she’s also somewhat strident about them, which makes things a bit touchy since she’s not prone to making any allowances at all that sometimes a Democrat is actually right or better or whatever.  Since I’m someone who voted Democrat recently, which she knows, a lot of her comments border on the “I’m right, you’re wrong” variety.

I answered her Minnesota question as best I could, telling her that a Minnesota court has decided the election in favor of Al Franken, but Norm Coleman is still protesting that ruling to the Minnesota Supreme Court.  Having known my mother for over 40 years, I knew what was coming next, and she didn’t disappoint.

“You know who’s never received enough credit for accepting questionable election results?  Richard Nixon.  He was robbed in 1960 when the Democrats rigged the results from Chicago, but he accepted them because it was the best thing for the country.”

This is one of my mother’s favorite pet peeves.  She not only despised John Kennedy (and every other Kennedy, for that matter), but she basically idolizes Richard Nixon and takes every opportunity to defend him.  Like I said, she’s not your normal Boston Catholic.

Sadly, her facts in this particular case aren’t right.  I knew that immediately because I was a U.S. History and Political Science double major, and I basically couldn’t graduate from college without learning all about the 1960 presidential election.  In reality:

• While there almost certainly was widespread voter fraud in Chicago that favored Kennedy, there was also widespread voter fraud in the other districts in Illinois, only in Nixon’s favor, not Kennedy’s.
• Nixon’s campaign DID dispute the election results, not only in Illinois but in ten other states, too, and the only outcome was to move Hawaii from Nixon’s column to Kennedy’s after a recount.
• Even if Illinois had been declared for Nixon after a finding of fraud in the voting, it wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the election at all.  Kennedy won the electoral college by a count of 303 to 219, so shifting the 27 votes from Illinois to Nixon’s column would have only made the margin 276 to 246, and Kennedy still would have surpassed the 269 electoral college votes needed to win the overall election.
• The election was so close and “stealable” for Kennedy largely because of a string of campaign blunders by Nixon.  He insisted on campaigning in every state, no matter how small and no matter how locked up they already were, and consequently didn’t spend nearly as much time in the large, up-for-grabs population centers as Kennedy.  He failed to understand the impact of television and completely botched his first debate appearance.  He pandered to African-Americans by vowing to appoint a black person to his cabinet, but then couldn’t say who he would appoint or what post he’d put them in, and also failed to take any action or make any statement when Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested during a protest, while Kennedy actively tried to get him released, resulting in massive support for Kennedy from African-American voters.  On top of all that, Nixon’s boss, President Eisenhower, torpedoed Nixon’s reputation when he answered a question about important contributions Nixon had made by saying “If you give me a week, I might think of one“, a comment so damning that the Democrats made a campaign commercial out of it.

Needless to say, mom’s recollection of the events of 1960 aren’t all that close to reality.  She was disappointed that Nixon lost and Kennedy won, she’s been disappointed with the historical treatment Nixon has received, and now she’s looking back at that time and those events and selectively remembering only the parts of the story that she wants.  It’s perfectly understandable.  For me, having not lived through that time, and having been forced to regurgitate the actual facts during my coursework, my views on that particular topic aren’t skewed.

So, with all of this knowledge at my fingertips, did I point out to my mother that her fond remembrance of Richard Nixon’s valiant, selfless act of patriotism is, shall we say, misplaced?  No, I didn’t .

All I did was smile and say, “Happy Mother’s Day, Mom”.

The Amazing Race – Week 11

Note to the producers of The Amazing Race: Watching angry, bitter, bigoted people search vainly for a cab in a foreign country is NOT entertaining television, no matter how good looking they are.  Watching their frustration level rise as they hunt for any English speaker who can give them directions also isn’t entertaining.

And yet, that’s precisely what we got from The Amazing Race last night.  Yet again, the contestants weren’t taxed too terribly.  They were still in Beijing, continuing the cliffhanger leg of the race from last week, and were asked to do nothing more than find a Travelocity gnome, choose between putting on opera makeup and taking several food orders in Mandarin, then eating some local delicacies that included larvae and scorpions before finding their way to the finish line at the Olympic stadium.  Sure, eating things Americans normally wouldn’t eat is always amusing, but it’s not the most challenging thing in the world.  For the most part, we got large doses of the teams wandering the streets of Beijing in search of the next clue, or a cab, or directions, or whatever.  Not what I’d call riveting television.

This week did feature the continued implosion of Jen, who just about ruined her team’s chances in last week’s episode, and did the same this week.  She took an eternity eating the various fried critters, needing a lot of water to swallow each bite, and though she finished ahead of Cara, who wolfed down her portions in record time, she allowed a pretty large gap to be drastically closed.  Cara and Jaime were hot on their heals for the third and final spot in next week’s finale when they reached the Olympic stadium, yet Jen, full to the brim on all that water, stopped to pee in a port-a-potty, which was all the window the redheads needed to pass them.  That’s right, an apparently healthy young woman, a collegiate athlete not too long ago, couldn’t hold her bladder and essentially took a tinkle break that potentially cost her team a million dollars.  I’m thinking that’s probably a first.

Victor and Tammy, clearly at an advantage with their language skills and smart enough to U-Turn Kisha and Jen when they had the opportunity, finished first by a wide margin, followed by Luke and Margie.  They will join the redheads next week in Hawaii for a three-team race for a million bucks.

In our house, we’re desperately rooting for the redheads to lose.  Cara, who seems like a nice enough person, isn’t the problem.  The problem is Jaime, who is proving herself to be quite possibly the most bigoted, nasty hag in the history of reality television.  She has been uniformly hateful to every non-American she has encountered so far, doing her best to ruin the world’s impression of Americans even more than it already is.  Next week she’ll actually be in the United States, dealing with actual Americans, yet the previews showed her reaming out yet another cab driver anyway.  She’ll bounce around the beach in a green bikini and raise the ratings (among other things), but she’s revealed herself to be a hateful person, and everyone here hopes she’s humiliated next week.

The Amazing Race – Week 10

Clearly, I’ve had the time to post a few things since the latest episode of The Amazing Race aired, yet I’m just now getting around to writing about it, and I think that tells you pretty much all you need to know.  This show just hasn’t done it for me this season, at least not for the last several weeks, and that’s pretty disappointing considering the hopes I had for it.

The root of the problem, I think, is that I don’t like anyone on this show.  Margie and Luke are too whiny and sensitive.  Kisha and, particularly, Jen are mean and even a bit racist.  There was a moment in this week’s episode when they complained about the various Chinese people they’d encounter who didn’t understand English.  “They all just give you this blank look”, according to Jen, as if they can do anything else when you speak a foreign language to them in their own country.  Cara and, particularly, Jaime are no better.  Jaime even pulled that old racist standby, “They all look alike”, when describing the taxi drivers this week.  Victor and Tammy have evolved into being somewhat palatable, but I still have a bad vibe from them from the early episodes of the show.

This week did nothing to help that, and continued the trend of terrifically boring challenges.  They flew to Beijing, took a cab to a foot massage place where on person from each team had to endure an apparently excruciating foot rub, then take a cab to a swimming complex where they had to either perform a synchronized dive or swim a couple of laps in an Olympic-size pool.  Big deal.  The obstacle course at The Battle of the Network Stars was more challenging than what these people have been asked to do with a million bucks on the line.

There were two wrinkles worth noting.  First, Jen just about had a nervous breakdown when faced with the two pool-related challenges.  Apparently she’s deathly afraid of water, so even though life preservers were provided, she panicked.  She and Kisha first thought they’d do the diving challenge, but Jen chickened out before a single dive.  So they went to the pool to swim the laps, but after seeing Kisha swim her first laps, Jen chickened out again.  Back they went to the diving boards.  This time Jen was able to make a couple of dives, but it became clear very quickly that they were never going to be able to do it in sync, so they went back to do the laps yet again.  In between all of these steps, Jen was crying and moaning about wanting to go home.  Basically, she was a basket case.  Sadly, since she’s been such a hag the last couple of episodes, no one in our house had any pity for her at all.

The other wrinkle involved the ending.  For the first time all season, Cara and Jaime managed to get to the finish line first, only to find out that this leg of the race wasn’t over.  Phil handed them a new clue envelope and told them the race was still on, basically shattering their spirits if the looks on their faces were any indication.  So we have a cliffhanger episode to be continued next week.  I hated those when I was a kid watching Fonzie jump over trash cans on “Happy Days” and I hate them now.

Next week we’ll get to see the finish, presumably still in Beijing, and shortly thereafter this season, mercifully, will come to an end.

Side Rant:

While this episode was airing, there were some thunderstorms in the general vicinity of Kansas City, so we had the little radar map graphic on the screen the whole time.  No big deal.  Unfortunately, the local CBS affiliate has a lead meteorologist named Katie Horner who is renowned in these parts as an erstwhile doomsday prophet who loves nothing more than to interrupt programming so she can tell everyone what the little radar graphic means, only blown up to fill the whole screen with her smiling mug.  She particularly likes to do this on weekends when she is not on duty, so she can race to the station in tight jeans and a cute little ballcap and go on the air in melodramatic fashion.

She does all of this whether there are genuine severe weather threats to the immediate viewing area or not, and she did so again on this night.  Right after the cliffhanger was announced, the show was interrupted so Lady Doom could tell us all about a thunderstorm that was already past Kansas City and moving northeast into Iowa, where Kansas City stations aren’t even received.  The storm resulted in no tornadoes, no real damages and no injuries of any kind, but it did stop us from seeing previews of next week’s episode.  I’m all in favor of safety, but if you cry wolf enough times, I’m ultimately going to stop listening.  There’s a reason why a website is dedicated to getting Katie Horner fired.

Strange Announcers

Every year, we lay out the money for the MLB Extra Innings Package on our cable system so I can get my Red Sox fix.  The way that works, they generally show only the home team’s broadcast, so we regularly have no option but to listen to the other team’s announcing team when the Red Sox are on the road.

Last night, we got the Indians broadcast from some outfit called “STO”, short for SportsTime Ohio.  As always, the experience was an odd mix of fascinating and annoying.  It’s fascinating to see the commercials from a town you’ve never lived in, and to hear about that team’s local fan promotions, and the announcers’ regular gimmicks that you’ve never heard, and an out-of-town perspective on your favorite team, and so on.   For example, the Fan Cam in Cleveland is sponsored by something called “All Care Dental and Dentures“, an organization that hasn’t made it’s way into Kansas yet.

At the same time, it’s also a frustrating experience because you miss the normal rhythm of the announcers you’re used to hearing, and because the other teams’ guys never know as much about your team as you’d like them to know, and they screw up your guys’ names from time to time.  Part of the reason I like watching or listening to baseball is for the lull factor, that constant background noise as I go about other activities, and when it’s not the usual, comfortable noise you’re used to, it can throw you off.  When the announcers say something you know is wrong, it grates on you.  For instance, the Indians’ guys said the Red Sox were sporting names on the back of their uniforms for the first time this year, while is simply not true.  They’ve had names on the backs of their road jerseys for a couple of decades now, and have never had them on their home uniforms.  That stuff bugs me.

Plus, most announcing teams are incredible homers.  Their team always got the bad call, their team is always tough and gritty and hustling, their team is always virtuous and good and loves children and rainbows an puppy dogs.  All of that is great, but a little honesty is also refreshing.  Don’t tell me about the games solely from the perspective of the home team, and certainly don’t stick with that position when the video tells me something else.  I’m not blind.

A perfect example of this happened last night.  There was a questionable strike call late in last night’s game, a high strike called against one of the Cleveland hitters.  The fans started booing and the announcers started the “gosh, that was a generous call” routine, which is certainly understandable.  Then they showed the replay.  The Indians’ broadcast includes a handy strike zone graphic whenever they show a pitch on replay, and in this case their own graphic clearly showed the pitch was a strike, just as the umpire said it was.  Hey, it was borderline, so I’ve got no problem with them seeing it in the Indians’ favor at first.  The problem is that even after the replay, the announcers stuck with the story that it was a bad call, as if all the viewers at home didn’t just see their own graphic say it was a good call.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just such a creature of habit that this kind of thing bothers me more than most people.  But to me, watching a ballgame with unfamiliar announcers is kind of like sleeping in a strange bed.  It serves it’s purpose, but you toss and turn a lot until you get used to it.

The Amazing Race – Week 9

Well, at least something interesting happened this week.  That is, presuming you find cat fights interesting.

In terms of the demands made on the contestants, this week’s episode from Guilin, China was just as boring the last several weeks have been.  Here were the strenuous activities they all faced:

1. Take a cab to the airport in Bangkok.
2. Fly to Guilin, China.
3. Take a cab to a hair salon, find clue.
4. Take a cab to the river, find next clue.
5. Ride a boat into the middle of the river and have trained birds fish for you.
6. Get back in your cab and go to a local park.
7. Choose to either draw Chinese characters or learn some dance steps.
8. Run to the finish line.

Gosh, how did they all manage to survive that ordeal?

At least we had some melodrama this week.  While running for the first clue box, Luke and Jen collided.  Luke got there first and it looked like Jen ran into him, but then Luke threw a Bill Laimbeer-esque high elbow that nearly smacked Jen in the chops, leading her to call him a “bitch”.  (Man, there’s few things in life funnier than hearing someone call a man a bitch.)  Personally, I thought each of them overreacted.  They bumped going for the clue box, big deal.  Luke didn’t need to throw a chicken wing, and Jen didn’t need to get nasty.  But hey, by the time all of this happened, they’d both been racing around the world for a couple of weeks (in real time, anyway), so I’m thinking they were far more cranky than they would be under normal circumstances.

Anyway, that should have been the end of it, but Margie spent the next cab ride letting Luke know what Jen said, and that fired him up.  When they got to the next clue box, Jen beat him to it and this time he ran up her back and damn near knocked her and the box over.  Verbal sparring ensued between all four players from those two teams, with vows of revenge, hurt feelings, nasty looks, the whole works.  It was just like 8th-grade study hall, including the maturity levels on display.

Those two teams plus Victor and Tammy essentially finished in a dead heat, but Kisha and Jen reached the check-in point a few steps ahead and were declared the winners.  Host Phil made the mistake of noting the tension between the teams and that’s when all hell broke loose.  Margie and Luke complained about Jen calling a deaf person a bitch.  (Sorry, I don’t get that one.  What does his deafness have to do with it?  Equality for people with physical challenges means being treated the same way other people are treated, and I get the sense that Luke isn’t the first person Jen has called a bitch in her life.)  Jen explained why she did it.   Luke starting signing furiously and Margie threw a class A conniption when she saw Kisha smiling and assumed she was laughing at her son.  Luke stormed off, but not before he signed “bitch” at Kisha or Jen, couldn’t tell which, which begs the question of why it’s not okay to call a deaf person a bitch but it is okay to call a hearing person a bitch.  Poor Tammy and Victor (never thought I’d type those words) had to stand literally in the middle of the argument with embarrassed looks on their faces.

What a freaking mess.  I guess it’s better than watching the boring challenges without any fireworks between the teams.  Still, everyone involved came off like a childish boob.

We’re down to four teams now because the midget stuntmen couldn’t overcome their mistakes of the past couple of weeks and finished last again.  Farewell, Michael and Mark.

Next week:  I don’t think they said where the teams would be, but they did show Jen break down in tears because there’s a swimming challenge and she’s afraid of water.  I’m sure Luke was standing off camera all the while, laughing his ass off.

The Friday Five

Five thoughts that have been rolling around in my head this week:

One

The GEICO commercials that feature a pile of money with eyeballs whose sole purpose appears to be to silently mock anyone who spent too much money on insurance, are, in my humble opinion, the stupidest advertisements ever aired on television.  I’ll amend that to “national television”, because I’m sure some small-time local pizza parlor or auto dealership or carpet installer has cooked up something dumber at some point, but I don’t recall any national corporation airing such nonsensical, un-funny crapola ever before.  To be clear, this does not make these ads the most annoying commercials ever.  That title was claimed, hands-down, by the ones from FreeCreditReport.com.

Two

Unfortunately, there are still a lot of sick bastards in the world.

Three

Thankfully, some of the sick bastards in this world cross the wrong people.  Unless you’re just an avowed pacifist in any and all circumstances, I don’t know how anyone couldn’t be immensely impressed with the skill of the Navy snipers who eliminated three pirates with three simultaneous headshots on targets on a bobbing boat in choppy seas.  I don’t know how much more clear a message could be sent that it doesn’t pay to cross a country that has highly trained special ops teams.

Four

I’m getting a little tired of intellectual dishonesty.  I’m an independent voter who has voted for both Republicans and Democrats in my life.  I don’t follow any party dogma, and I make up my own mind about which candidate will be best for me, my family and my community or country.  There are a lot of people like me in this country, and pretty much every national candidate knows that they can’t win an election without winning the segment of voters to which I belong.   It’s a given.

For this reason, I find the actions of some of the erstwhile leaders of the Republican party baffling.  I dig the fact that your guy lost the election, and you lost an even bigger chunk of Congress, too, and that means you have to look for a way to reconnect with voters.  That’s perfectly understandable, but let me tell you, your current strategy isn’t working for me.

For instance, you’re invoking the Boston Tea Party to complain about higher taxes, despite the fact that the Boston Tea Party was protesting taxation without representation and you guys are both A) represented, and B) not taxed.

Regarding representation, you guys had a voice in choosing the president and Congress.  You have the right to vote.  You just lost.  It happens, get over it.  I haven’t seen this much whining since my cranky niece didn’t get her way on which television station to watch.  She’s six.  And spoiled rotten.

And what I mean by “not taxed” is that you’re not any more taxed than you were under the last administration.  Or the one before that.  In fact, the stimulus package actually CUT your taxes.  You do know that, right?  Essentially, you’re protesting the fact that future taxes might be raised to pay off the stuff that a whole string of administrations – which you helped to elect – bought before collecting the money to pay for it.  Now you have a president who is at least honest enough to tell you that scenario might happen, but you’ve decided to preemptively complain about that possibility rather than acknowledge that the profligate spending habits of this country – individually and collectively – are really what’s to blame here, not the guy who happens to be in the White House when that bill finally comes due.

Sorry, but that position doesn’t resonate with me.  Stop saying nothing more than “we don’t want to pay higher taxes”.  I’ve got news for you…NO ONE wants to pay higher taxes.  Come up with alternatives that makes sense.  You want lower taxes?  Fine.  List the items those taxes pay for that you’d be okay living without.  You want to cut Medicare and Medicaid?  Okay, give me a plan.  You want fewer Social Security payments?  Okay, what’s the plan?  You want less federal spending on a few departments that you think the states should handle, like transportation or education?  Fine with me, but what’s your plan?  Because just saying “cut my taxes” isn’t good enough.  The debt isn’t going anywhere, and if you don’t have a comprehensive list of spending cuts that matches and exceeds your desired tax cuts, then you’re just perpetuating the current situation and leaving the mess for our kids to clean up.  Only by the time they’re old enough to deal with it the situation would be much uglier.

The sad part is that I think all of these guys know this.  They’re not stupid, at least I hope they’re not.  I think what’s happening is they’re already angling to run for president in 2012, and are taking advantage of a lot of unease and unrest to whip up support, despite the fact that their positions are, in my view, intellectually dishonest and make no sense.  Do you REALLY think you can leave taxes stagnant and cut the national debt without also having a comprehensive plan for massive spending cuts?  Do you REALLY want to secede from the United States?  Do you REALLY think President Obama is a socialist or communist?  Or a fascist (which is, by the way, the political opposite of a communist)?   God, I hope not.  Because if you people really believe all of those things then you’re utterly and completely unqualified to be the next president.  If those are your actual beliefs, then you’re clearly, 1) lacking any basic knowledge about economics and/or simple math, 2) fomenting illegal revolution, and 3) blissfully unaware of the difference between socialism/communismand regulated capitalism in a democracy.  And if you DON’T really believe all of this, then you’re just a rabble rouser looking for attention.

I’ve got news for you guys…I won’t vote for anyone who fits either of those profiles.  Ever.  So get another plan if you want my vote in four years.

Five

Dieting is hard.  It’s worthwhile and necessary given the situation I’ve eaten my way into, but it is hard nonetheless.  Unfortunately, sometimes you get yourself into a situation where there are only hard choices to make before things will get better.  I’m facing that situation now and, hopefully, taking responsibility for my actions.  It would be nice if other people (see #4 above) would do the same instead of pointing fingers elsewhere and throwing a giant collective hissy fit.

Ladies & Gentlemen, Ms. Susan Boyle

I must admit, this clip just about made me cry.

Well done, Ms. Boyle.  Well done.