The List is Life

Let me be perfectly honest. If what you are after is mindless entertainment, Bunim/Murray is what you are looking for. Then again, I probably didn’t have to tell you that. Between The Real World, Road Rules,and The Simple Life, Bunim/Murray has taken the “if we put idiots on the screen, somebody will watch” motif pretty far. I have sort of given up on most of the Real World, sort of tune into Road Rules, but theReal World/Road Rules Challenge is still where it’s at baby. The Challenge is stripped of all of the ridiculous assumption that participants are anything other than attention seeking camera whores. And most of them are sluts to boot.Some may say that I made that mention of sluts because I knew that Theo and Tonya were featured in the opening sequence, or that Tonya was a Playboy Cyber Girl of the Month for December. (Nice photographs, but sort of scary to look at in their entireity. SFW sample). I assure you it was all complete coincidence. Anyway, Theo and Tonya are contemplating some things about the game, but mainly are just trying to pass the time as they smoke a cigarette. I guess there is some sort of rule that you must blur out cigarettes on TV, because MTV blurred out the pack Theo was fidgeting with (looked like Parliament Lights, but I can’t tell). Maybe you can’t show people smoking, but you sure can show them the cigarette butts that were left over from the activity. What is that you say, they don’t actually blur out the cigarette, only the box? That makes much more sense. Bunim/Murray doesn’t care about preventing the promotion of cigarettes to youngsters, they just don’t want to piss of any advertisers.

I feel vindicated, because after several weeks of complaining about Eric and his stupid jump rope, we finally get to see what his teammates and opponents think of his accessory. Not surprisingly, almost everybody on the show thinks it is stupid. Unfortunately, I think this segment was supposed to be a campy bit, and not a full-hearted attempt at mocking Eric and his stupid jump rope. Everybody tried to play it off that they have no clue about the mysticism of the jump rope or why he carries it around, but I am sure he tells everybody who asks, and many who don’t, the real reason he carries it around. He stars in his very own jump rope exercise video, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was produced by somebody in connection with MTV. That is how these things work in this town.

The dilemma on the girls team is still trying to figure out how in the hell they are going to pull off a win. Coral is stilly mystified and “can’t pinpoint the problem”, but assures us that once they hit rock bottom, they will be ready to pick themselves up and really kick ass. This begs the question as to what exactly is “rock bottom”? Was it the four game losing streak you put up to start the show? Or perhaps it was the four game losing streak you put up after winning your first challenge. Or maybe it was when Steven mocked all of them for sucking, and quite frankly they had to deal with the truth that they did suck. If Coral is looking for something that is the source of the problem, she should think about looking at Veronica, who took one look at the challenge and determined that the girls had absolutely no chance. Wow Veronica, did you come up with that one on your own? Couldn’t you have said that every week and been wrong once?

So what was this daunting challenge? I am going to try and explain it to you in less time than it took Jonny Mosely. The name of the challenge was “Pop Culture Bike Jump”, which got Coral excited because pop culture is stereotypically stronger for women, especially if the producers slanted questions for the women, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Basically, there were three bike ramps of varying heights. A contestant could choose to go down a ramp(which was actually part of a half pipe), and they would score one, two, or three points, depending on the height of the ramp. The “jump” was completed when the contestant got both bike wheels in the air on the other side of the pipe.

Complicated? Not really, although Eric made sure to remind us that we would only get one point for the ramp marked “1″, two points for the ramp marked “2″, and you can probably get the rest yourself. Now, before making a jump, a contestant could choose to answer a pop culture question. Get the question right, and you could jump off any ramp height and be awarded six points, fail the question, and you wouldn’t get a chance to do the ramp at all, thereby ruining you chances at ANY points. You see, you had to choose between the risk and the reward between each scenario. Surely a grueling scenario for sure.

Despite another challenge with no sign of a reason why there should be a team leader, the girls chose Tina, Arissa, and Sophia, which I guess meant they were trying to get rid of some of the minorities on their team. The guys picked Brad, Theo, and Frank, or as I like to call them, Boring, Crazy, and More Boring.

Early on the girls decided that they were just going to jump without answering the pop culture questions, which is stupid because if they are supposed to be better at pop-culture, try using it to your advantage. The pop culture questions were not that hard, but the guys had some trouble early on when Dan couldn’t name Anna Nicole Smith’s dog. Shane saved them, however, when they asked to name Madonna’s kid (Ironically enough showing solidarity with his “Where is Rachel” t-shirt) Asking that question to a gay man is like asking somebody in Hollywood to show you the nearest adult bookstore. You are going to get the answer before you finish the question. Other interesting questions they used were to name what Kelis’ milkshakes brings. The guys got that one right, and so the girls naturally had to do their little rendition of the song.[Correction, the boys got the question wrong. Obvously the girls got it right, therefore they did a dance. Hat tip - Blip] Why do girls love that song so much?

Eventually, the game came down to Brad and Arissa. The question they received was the first woman killed off in the “Scream” movie series, which Brad missed, and Arissa answered correctly. Since the girls were up by three at that point (mainly from guys missing their questions), if Arissa completed the jump, they were assured of winning the challenge. Uh oh! Isn’t Arissa scared of heights? What is going to happen?!?! If you think my concern sounds a little fake, you are absolutely correct. Did you notice how the girls were making it harder on themselves? Whenever the guys answered a pop culture question, they used the first ramp. Whenever the girls answered it correctly, they would use the third and highest ramp. That’s dumb but didn’t matter in the end. Not one person who had attempted the bike jump had failed to complete it to satisfaction, and though she did have some trouble keeping one of her feet on the pedal, Arissa completed the jump and the girls won. And to make it better, they did so even though Eric had started praying to his false idol jump rope for the girls to lose, even if it meant injury. Quality guy, that Eric Nies. For their reward, they received some iJoy massage chairs from Sharper Image, and a chance to create a huge controversy with their votes.

The guys deliberations were barely worth anything. They picked Frank in about two seconds, which was good, because that meant that there was going to be more time to show us the crazy girls and all of their antics. Tonya was back with Theo again, worrying about her chances at winning. They were both concerned, Tonya about being voted off, and Theo with the difficulty of sneaking glances at Tonya’s boobs but still seeming interested enough in her that she would sleep with him when they got drunk later. It turns out that Ibis was making a list, and Tonya hates lists because they focus on what people have done wrong. Oh, I get it, you don’t want to weed out people that screwed up in challenges.

When confronting Ibis about the list, Ibis said that she made it for Tina. Tonya was concerned that the whole group didn’t get a chance to make the list, which I guess makes sense because you aren’t supposed to give control of voting your teammate out of the game to just three people. You can’t leave it up to some sort of “inner circle to decide”. Well, actually you are, but Ibis told Tonya that she was sure the inner circcle would look at a lot of things and not just the list. That statement lasted all of about 5 minutes, as we cut to the women’s inner circle talking about all of the points on the list, and eventually decied between Tonya and Veronica.

On elimination hill, I think Mosely was coming down off of some shrooms because he started to elongate some of his vowel sounds. I thought of a great idea for the next Challenge, by the way. Have the eliminations handled America’s Next Top Model style, with Jonny Mosely as Tyra, and three or four celebrity (ie former Bunim/Murray cast members) judges would deliberate and vote off who they thought sucked the most. Instead of pictures, Jonny Mosely could hand out vodka bottles to the people who would stay. And I’ve got a million more where that came from.

So, Frank was eliminated, and the girls finally decided on Veronica, who must now resume her life(like so many others voted off) back in Los Angeles. Oh the horror. But that wasn’t the end of things. Tonya called a team meeting to talk about the list. You see, the list was bad, but Tonya wanted to make it fair and go to a…uh, point system, which is different from the list, which wasn’t based on any sort of points, but just some arbitrary way of looking at how people messed up. But it looked similar to a list and Tonya wanted to make sure there was no confusion. Coral came out and told Tonya to stop tripping, but the girls decided not to ever talk about the list again, and didn’t want one used. So, after getting what she wants, Tonya bad mouths her teammates and says she is going to kick more ass and doesn’t care what her teammates do at all.

You can obviously see why Coral has no clue what is wrong with the girls team, they just care about each other so much.