The basketball semifinals are on Saturday and the Final is on Monday night. There must be something else going on.
Country Music Awards.
I dimly recall, in an earlier season, a team at the airport or on a train or something explicitly commenting on how being alone made them nervous, because all the other teams might have figured out a better mode of transportation, but how would you know?
This might be corollary to Rule Number Three (or is it Two?), already violated this season by Brad and Victoria, which goes something like, “don’t pursue a risky strategy that might either put you in first place or last place, because the penalty for coming in last is more severe than the reward for coming in first is good.” I think, in this case, Mel & Mike underestimated what the risks were in the course they were following (by assuming they were right and everyone else was wrong).
Thanks! I guess I do this mostly for my own amusement, but it’s still nice to be appreciated, 'specially when the Assessment tends to run into TLDR territory. And it does take some effort to try to analyze where each and every team is headed.
Ah. I was too lazy to look up what was conflicting (even though my alma mater is in the Final Four).
I have a technical question about this show…
It looks like each team has at least 1 cameraman following them around. What happens when they get on a plane? There have been times when there were only 2 seats left on the flight (at least in coach), so obviously the camera man can’t go with the team. Is there another team of cameramen waiting at the destination? Does the cameraman just get to fly first class?
What was the “challenge” once at the zoo?!?!?! Sit (beside a trained tiger), lie down (while a trained elephant does some stuff), then pick up a photo.
WTF…!!! Is the unspoken challenge that you might very well get eaten by a tiger or crushed by an elephant? Seriuosly?
They usually pretend the cameramen don’t exist, so if they say there are two seats left and they get on the flight, that probably means there were three seats left, but they only mention two.
It’s a task that takes a certain amount of time, which doesn’t necessarily have to be challenging. Part of it is just finding and experiencing new things. Plus you never know, one of the racers might have been deathly terrified of tigers or something. I’d imagine it’s more difficult to find and set up interesting challenges in some cities than others.
I was just looking at the Phuket.com tourist site. They’ve got kayaking, rock climbing, Thai cooking classes. Making them take a quick cooking class and prepare an authentic Thai meal might have been interesting.
Usually, it’s unspoken on the show that they need two seats for the team and two for the crew. When we see them say that there are only two seats left and the team gets on, that really means there were four seats left, otherwise they wouldn’t get on the plane. From what I understand, keeping the crew with you every step of the way is a requirement even to the point where, if your camera man needs to stop to use the restroom or grab a snack, you have no choice but to sit and wait for them.
Read my post #10 in this thread. Apparently there is a gorilla at the beach, so the cab driver wasn’t totally OC.
Yeah, there’s a big difference between the picture of the statue and Rock City. M&M wouldn’t have known that, but I think they wasted too much time taking the cabbie’s word for it once they got to Patong beach and cabbie clearly didn’t know where the gorilla was, but pedestrians did. I guess after 14 seasons of TAR, the moment my cabbie starts looking confused and not taking me directly to a place he knows for sure, I’m finding someone who does seem sure. It’s easy to armchair quarterback of course.
Can we talk about the Stunt Brothers and their apparent total disregard for the region they’re currently racing in? How do two people who are almost double minorities themselves end up so culturally insensitive that they can run through the streets of Thailand wearing traditional garb (the conical hat) and practically screaming the worst pseudo-Chinese “joke” fakery ever heard? I’m just so glad that Tammy and Victor weren’t close enough to them at that point to hear it.
I can’t believe anyone jokingly, or seriously, rhymed “Phuket” with “bucket”. I guess all the Racers are more mature than me.
I’d guess that this is one of the few times they had a very explicit pronunciation key. 
Don’t forget the sound man. Each team has two people following them.
Regarding the “followed the taxi” penalty - Was there any specific instructions saying that following someone wasn’t allowed? That’s tried-and true race strategy.
I’m of two minds about the “messing with another’team’s equipment” penalty. If’they’d let the air out of the tires, that would definitely be tampering. Loading stuff up in a visible box when the clue says it’s right there hardly seems like tampering. But it was dickish. And the asian-parody was definitely off-putting.
StG
I consider The Amazing Rule #1 to be: This is a fucking RACE! It is a series of elimination stages; if you come in last in a stage, you’re fucked.
(To fill next week’s gap, we can discuss The Amazing Rules and The Mildly Spectacular Guidelines.)
Tammy and Victor read out loud that you couldn’t hire somebody and follow them and they made their taxi driver draw them a map when he wanted to lead them.
I think the penalty was the right thing. They deliberately messed with the pumps to make it harder for the other teams, and it worked. The others didn’t notice the pumps and went out on flat tires.
On the other hand if the teams leaving had read their clue (I think there’s a rule about that 
) then they would have realized they needed pumps and spotted them immediately. It’s not like he buried them, he just stuck them in an open box which happened to be sitting in the middle of everything.
Two other teams (Margie & Luke and…Cara & Jaime?) explicitly verbally discarded the idea of following someone, because it wasn’t allowed. I assume the prohibition was somewhere in the fine print part of the clue that usually isn’t repeated on air.
I guess I’d prefer a zero-tolerence policy when defining “tampering,” to
a) prevent rules-lawering on exactly where the cutoff is between “tampering” and “not tampering,” (i.e., “I left 51% of the air pump visible in the box this week and got a penalty, but last week you let team X hide the pails in the water trough with only 49% exposed, and didn’t give them a penalty…”), and
b) I’d rather see teams figure out how to complete tasks faster, not how to make other teams complete tasks slower.
However, it’s possible the producers have some sliding scale of penalties, and doing something even more dickish like letting ir out of the tires would have earned a two-hour penalty or something.
Has any other team ever gotten a penalty for “interference” of some kind? I can remember penalties for incorrectly following clues, but not for screwing with other teams. (And, food for thought: if the penalty for hiding the pumps was valid, in that it slowed other teams down, shouldn’t the teams who chose that Detour get a time credit?
You cannnot let them mess with the setup, otherwise what’s to keep someone from hiding some important piece of equipment. I am sure the rules specifically state that you cannot mess with the setup of a task.