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With Chima out, emotions on high on ‘Brother’
Lydia’s hysterical overreactions make house even a less pleasant place
I'd like to start out by thanking the Big Brother house. I went on vacation for two weeks, and they patiently waited for me to return to go utterly insane. God bless you, crazy bastards. God bless you.
When I returned and found out that Jessie had been bounced, courtesy of the Coup d'Etat, I thought I'd missed the big moment of the game, but little did I know that his eviction was just a necessary set-up for the excitement to come. It was as if his eviction was just the pin-setter coming down before the strike. Sunday's show began with Jordan stating that she was utterly shocked by Jeff's move, but to be fair, Jordan is shocked when the sun comes up every morning: she just never sees it comin'. Jessie was gracious enough to tell Jeff that it was a good move, a sentiment none of his surviving pinhead allies would allow.
A quick last note on Jessie because I didn't have a chance to say it last week: Try as he may, that guy just can't muster a personality. Whenever he talks, he sounds like he's just been rousted out of another of his epic naps. Is carrying around his massive arms that exhausting? He keeps referring to himself as an "entertainer," but it's pretty hard to entertain when you're in a permanent state of REM sleep.
Okay, back to this week. One of my favorite parts in every season of Big Brother is the inevitable moment when a team once in power is suddenly marginalized, and they become so bitter that they start demonizing the other side as "evil", and proclaim themselves "good." And this year we got it right on schedule, with Natalie weeping, "The ugly and the bad get rewarded in this game, and the good just seem to go down in burning flames even when they do everything right." You can think of a lot of epithets to call Jeff and Jordan – all synonyms for "dumb" – but ugly and bad? That's like calling a Beanie Baby evil.
Then it was time to sit shiva for Jessie. Oh, the weeping, the rending of garments! It's so hard to pick my favorite Lydia encomium to the Napping Wonder. Was it, "He didn't get in my head, he got in my heart"? Or was it, "He had such a good spirit, such a present soul"? No, it would have to be, "And you know he prayed for us all the time, do you know that?" Uh, Lydia, just because he had his eyes closed didn't mean he was praying. That had to be one of the most deliciously stupid moments I've ever seen on this show: It put the BB6 grieving for Cappy to shame. It also gave me my first good feelings toward Kevin, thanks to his commentary on just how stupid his allies were being: "They act like he was hit by a Mack truck…Please girls, the guy was an idiot." Now there's a eulogy!
The bad feelings lasted into the Have/Have Not competition, as Chima snorted, "Don't talk to me" to Russell as he walked by. One note about this challenge–I suspect that whoever is in charge of developing the BB competitions got a really good deal on slides and goop. So many challenges seem to begin with people sliding into some colorful glop before getting to the real task at hand; the slide is arbitrary. I'm surprised they don't have a mini slide down into a Jell-O kiddie pool up by the chess board. The producers love slides nearly as much as they love their giant rain machine: perhaps the rain machine came free if you bought 50 slides and 800 gallons of all-purpose ick.
And now two more quick digressions:
1) I did not need the introduction to Lydia's unicorn, Dae Yum Yum. Does she think that cooing baby talk to a stuffed animal makes her look adorable? In light of her erratic, hair-trigger behavior, it makes her look more like a serial killer who takes orders from a fuzzy toy on which victims to off.
2) Are any of you paying one dollar to vote on which bad food the Have Nots have to eat? Come on, fess up. In my mind, if people are spending even one dollar to weigh in on how the houseguests should eat jalapenos and horses---, the recession hasn't gone far enough.
Okay, back to strategy. Natalie lobbied HOH Michelle to remember all the bad things Russell did and put him up, but instead she put up Natalie and Chima. I'm not sure why everyone hates Michelle so much. Feedwatchers might be able to shed light on this, but I think her biggest crime is being self-conscious around the cameras. She's actually a smart player, but she looks like she doesn't know what she's doing only because she seems a little nervous all the time. It makes her seem shiftier than she is. If she made the exact same strategic moves, but with supreme confidence, we'd all be hailing her as another Kaysar.
This all brings us to Tuesday: Chima day! It was a week of records—just as Usain Bolt was setting new track records, Chima was raising the bar of sore loserdom. She wanted to go home, purely because her alliance was no longer in charge. The show carefully laid out its case for kicking her out, founded on a continuing pattern of belligerence. But the capper came when she refused to put on her microphone, and then, when fetched it by Kevin, threw it into the hot tub. That was bad, but I was more annoyed by Natalie and Lydia later attempting to claim that she had just dropped the mic. Dropped it ten yards? And they realize they're on camera all the time, right? Who are you gonna believe, producers: Lydia, or your lying videotape?
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