I almost forgot that Big Brother 8 debuted last night. The show is one of my guilty pleasures. Even more than Survivor you get to see scheming and plotting vicariously. The twist this year is that there are three pairs of nemeses: a gay couple whose split was acrimonious, two young women who were grade school rivals, and a father and daughter who haven’t spoken for two years. The other eight people in the house are “standalones.” One member of each rivalry was sequestered in the HoH room and allowed to spy on the other eleven until the twist was announced. Then the eleven were told what the twist was and given some time to speculate. Two of the three guessed correctly that they were involved and who the other person was—only the female school rival didn’t. The most interesting relationship to explore will be the father/daughter dynamic, I think. He is heavily tattooed and looks like an ex-rocker; she’s pretty and blonde and hasn’t responded to her father’s repeated attempts to contact her—or so the story goes so far. The gay ex-couple are just bitchy. The two women’s issues seem trivial by comparison to the others, though.
I was going to tune into the old reliable Law and Order reruns after BB8 ended, but I stumbled across Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader for the first time, so I decided to watch. Like most game shows of its ilk, it stretches the contest out to ridiculous proportions, and I can only imagine how long the contest took in real time. Eleven simple questions took an hour when the whole thing could have been compressed to 15 minutes. Still, it was fun watching the interaction between him and his fiancee as the stakes increased. He made the right decision to opt out at half a million, even though it turned out he knew the answer. The show has a fiendish rule—he could back out at any point along the way if he wasn’t confident he knew the answer…except at the end. If he asked to see the question, he had to answer it.
I finished the first round of revisions on the new short story this morning. I turned a 5600-word first draft into a 4500-word second draft without significantly altering the story. Now that it’s down to a more manageable length, I’m going to have at it with the red pen this weekend.
