- It’s Amazing Race time once again. When last we saw our five remaining teams, they were arriving at the Boboli Gardens in Florence, Italy. Their Italian stay ended this week as they departed for Mumbai, India, the city formerly known as Bombay. Once again, teams scattered across three different flights on their way to Mumbai, but even arriving three hours apart didn’t matter as all teams clumped up outside a small news stand in downtown Mumbai, waiting for it to open at 6 a.m. so they could get the morning edition of a local paper and scan it for their next clue. Once they got the clue, it was time to decide between two tasks: stringing together 100 flowers to make a ceremonial necklace for a traditional Indian wedding or putting up a six-panel Bollywood movie poster on the wall of a city underpass. In the process, we got plenty more b*tching and “I hate you” tenderness from Nate and Jen, the dating couple who are becoming increasingly annoying week by week with their constant fighting and then once they realize they’ve survived a leg of the race, they’re lovey dovey. They fought while searching the newspaper for the clue, they fought during the flower necklace challenge and both were every bit as detestable as they’ve been at any point in the race. Becoming equally unbearable is Ron, the father in the father/daughter team of Ron and Cristina, because Ron is an overbearing, know-it-all jerk who constantly bosses around and degrades his daughter during every challenge and then says he wants to become a better father. He and Cristina elected for the poster challenge and floundered badly, getting passed up by my favorite 69-year-old, Don, and his grandson Nicolas. The flower challenge proved no challenge for mellow stoners and my other fave team, TK and Rachel, and they breezed through the challenge and the following challenge of delivering tanks of propane to two addresses in the city and finished first for this leg of the race. The battle for last came between Nate and Jen and the Goth
duo of Kynt and Vyxsin, who overcame the new Speed Bump challenge set up for teams who finish last in a non-elimination leg of the race, and got back into the race. To be fair, the Speed Bump was a pretty lame “challenge,” as it involved doing a short yoga routine, but oh well. Kynt and Vyxsin caught up with Nate and Jen and actually passed them, but they missed a chance to complete the comeback when they U-turned (which makes the U-turned team go back and do an extra challenge) the wrong team, picking Nic and Don, who were already past that point and thus not able to be U-turned, instead of Nate and Jen, who were right on Kynt and Vyxsin’s heels. That mistake sealed the fate of the Goths, who struggled with the propane delivery and ended a leg in last place for the second consecutive week. This time they were eliminated, which sucks since they were one of the cooler teams on this edition of the race. But for the remaining four teams, it’s on to Japan, where at least part of next week’s show will be. One non-elimination leg remains, so maybe it’ll happen next week. But until then…….
- It’s hard to come down hard on a 6-year-old for much of anything, but let me give it a shot. I, more than anyone, appreciate an effort to circumvent the rules and connive your way into getting what you want by any means necessary, but the unnamed girl from Texas who decided that the best way to win a contest that gave the winner four tickets to a Hannah Montana concert was cheating by writing an essay saying her father was a soldier in Iraq….come on, are you freaking kidding me? Kids may not have the same sense of right and wrong that adults do, but I guarantee you this girl knew what she was doing was wrong. The girl initially won the contest but had her prize ripped by chain store Club Libby Lu when the truth was discovered. The tiny cheater had won four tickets to the show, a makeover that included a blonde Hannah Montana wig and airfare to the Jan. 9 show in Albany, N.Y. Good that you learn this lesson now, kid: If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying, and it’s only cheating if you get caught. You got caught, so you’re clearly not a good cheater and now you can move on to something bigger and better. Best that you learn early on that you’re not good at cheating and lying, that way you can find other means to get ahead in life. Best wishes on that, kid, and congrats to the real winner who the prize was given to once it was taken from the cheater.
- It never ceases to be heartwarming to see the family members of a deceased love one brawl, quarrel and do battle over the estate of that departed loved one. Nothing brings a warm, tingly feeling like people showing little or no concern or distress at having lost a person they purportedly love and go straight to brawling with each other over who gets what chunk of their inheritance. That sort of attitude screams “True love!” like nothing else I know. My heart is truly blessed when five children of the late James Brown argue that the will of their late father should be invalidated because his former advisors used “undue influence” to convince him to create charitable trusts that the advisors would profit from, that according to court documents filed in South Carolina this past week. Now I suppose if you go around the country knocking up women you barely know to the point that weeks after your death, scores of DNA tests have to be conducted on people claiming to be your children, you invite some of these problems, but even so.....I think this has more to do with these five children of Brown being largely left out of the financial portion of the will. These selfish a-holes are pissed because they’re greedy and care only about money, so they’re going to court to get theirs. Kudos on the family unity and respecting the wishes of your deceased father, you money-grubbing jerks. Here’s hoping each of you gets exactly what you deserve – nothing. It was his money and therefore he had the right to do what he wanted with it, so accept it and stop looking so petty and classless by suing for your piece of the pie.
- I’ve never been to a Hooters restaurant, so I really can’t judge the validity of the outrage from this next individual. That being said, I can say with relative certainty that this man’s reaction based on that outrage was just a bit over the top. The unidentified man was upset with his tab at a Hooters in Nashville and his reaction was, you guessed it, to fire several shots off into the restaurant, leaving a manager and another patron in critical condition. Now I think we’ve all been somewhere and when it comes time to pay the bill, the amount seems high. Maybe you ordered something different than what you thought you ordered, maybe the place raised its prices since your last visit….or in this case, maybe you got really drunk and spent more time staring at the ample chest of your waitress and staring at her bright orange booty shorts than you did paying attention to how much money you were spending. Regardless, when you are informed of what you owe and you don’t like what you hear, squeezing off a few rounds is not an option. Besides, who needs to strap to go to Hooters anyhow? Do you really need a gun there? What, are you afraid that someone might try to steal a couple of your hot wings and you might need your 9mm to fend them off? To be fair, this a-hole didn’t shoot a 9mm. No, once he refused to pay his bill and was asked to leave, he went outside and shot from his .40-caliber handgun. Nice move, idiot. The police are still looking for the man, but based on the intelligence quotient of his crime, he shouldn’t be too hard to track down.
- I’ve heard of bureaucratic delays and red tape slowing things down and making life difficult, but this is flat-out ridiculous. Chinese government officials have informed residents of Hong Kong that they will have to wait at least another decade to select a new leader via democratic elections and that the wait to directly elect their own Legislature will be at least 12 years coming. The prospect of elections in 2007 was initially raised by the Basic Law, a mini-constitution that was imposed on Hong Kong by China after Britain returned the city to Chinese rule in 1997. At that time, Hong Kong’s residents believed that come 2007, they would be able to elect their own leaders under the principle of one person, one vote. Instead, the Communists running China decided back in 2004 that they would postpone the universal suffrage for Hong Kong until at least 2012, and now they’ve begun the process needed to push that date back another five years. Because the current regime in China will be gone by the time 2017 rolls around, this decision would conveniently leave the challenge of how to handle Hong Kong. Color me suspicious, but I don’t think they ever have any intention of allowing Hong Kong’s citizens to elect their own political leaders, lest they actually have any freedom and get out from under the tyrannical thumb of communism. Way to go, Commies, denying people their freedoms five years at a time, you all still suck….
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