There was a question raised last week about the stunt twins possibly not reading the clue or instructions properly and taking two sets of barrels in the find the elephant in the hay task. Maybe this was payback as well from last week?
Skipper Too - But last week they (stupidly) did twice the work - There was no benefit.
I will say that Mark and Mike went way down in my estimation with the hiding of the pumps and the racial stereotyping.
StG
Team Stunt Brothers seem to have a penchant for making precisely the wrong choices. Choosing the wrong Detour, going left instead of right, giving up and turning back before reaching the destination, messing with the other teams’ equipment. I’m surprised they’ve come this far without incurring more penalties or getting eliminated.
What did they say? I must have missed it with all the Cara and Jamie screaming going on.
That was me. I’m not certain that was a foul, and even if it was it turned out not to have any effect.
I hope this episode wasn’t meant as payback for the last one, though. If the penalty doesn’t come on the same leg as the infraction, it’s pointless. There’s a prize for first place, but the real goal of these legs is not to be last. There will probably be a bunching point at the beginning of the next leg, so the result of this penalty will be essentially erased. If they’d served a penalty on the previous leg, they’d be gone.
The stupid “ching-chong-chow” type of pseudo-Chinese.
I dont know which one is which, but there were a couple of comments made by either Cara or Jamie that made me hope that they will not end up winning the million dollars…
I even thought her friend cringed when she was sharing her wisdom with us.
[off topic]
Michigan State? I see your location is Detroit, so I’m guessing…
FWIW my son is a State grad, so I’m rooting for them to pull an upset.
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I can’t recall which one either, but in my mind I agree that she’s displayed far more cultural insensitivity than all the other teams combined, including the stunt guys’ light-hearted rickshaw joking.
I doubt it. I mean, they did do exactly what the task required, they just did more stuff (peddling an additional cycle) besides. I don’t think you could penalize them for doing additional stuff, so long as it’s not explicitly prohibited.
Got it in one. Go State!
You could argue that they doubled their chances of finding an elephant medallion, though.
No, they actually made their chances worse. If there are 9 barrels, with 1 elephant, you have a 1/9 chance of guessing the correct barrel first. If you’re wrong, you have a 1/8 chance on the next one, etc. And at the worst case, you’ll have to search 9 barrels.
If you have 18 barrels with 2 elephants, you still have that 1/9 chance on the first one. If you’re wrong though, it’s 2/17 on the next one, which is a lower probability than 1/8. And at the worst case, if you’re really unlucky, you’ll have to search 17 barrels to find the elephant.
By doubling the number of possibilities and wins, without doubling the number of workers, they made things worse for themselves.
Ah, see…my complete inability to understand probability theory is why I occasionally play the lottery…
I don’t think you could, because they had twice as many barrels to look through, so the nominal amount of time it should take to find a medallion would be unchanged (on preview: or actually worse! About 4-1/2 expected in one case v. 5 in the other. Huh.). Except they had to unload two bike’s worth of barrels, so if anything the time taken would be longer.
Even so, I would think it’s unfair to penalize teams for doing things that they haven’t been told are prohibited.
(Discussion point: I assume from team reactions during the wood-stacking task that, once they chose a wood pile, they had to stick with that pile, and weren’t allowed to choose another one if [for example] they knocked over the “example” pile. This makes sense, because there were probably only enough piles for one per team. So, I think, there could have legitimately been a prohibition against taking more than one bike, as there were likely only one bike per team. Since Mark & Mike didn’t incur a penalty, I infer there was no such prohibition–perhaps because taking two bikes would have been more work, while switching wood piles would be less work, so who in their right mind would take two bikes? So I wonder what would have happened if all the teams picked the bike Detour and the last team had no bike to peddle?)
At first we thought the Tweedles would get a penalty for switching “drivers” of the cart, because that seemed to be what the rules said. But in retrospect they probably decided against it because of the heat.
That was what I was thinking when I originally asked the question. If each team was only supposed to take one bike (and I don’t remember the exact wording of the task), the Amazing Producers probably only had that many bikes set up. If there’s a penalty for hiding some piece of optional equipment (a tire pump), I would think there’d be one for taking something completely necessary. No one else chose that task, though; maybe the Producers thought “no harm, no foul”.
You’re better off searching nine barrels instead of eighteen. In the best case, your chances of picking the right barrel are the same. In every other case, nine is better because you can eliminate the bad barrels faster. Two people can search nine barrels faster than eighteen. Another case where misreading the clue hurt them.
At least, I think that’s right.
Except that the Tweedles explicitly stated during the episode that they were doing so with the intention of slowing down the other teams. You can’t get any more cut and dried.
Did the clue actually say that there would be pumps? Phil said there would be, but when the stuntmen got there, it seemed like they didn’t know about them. “Oh look, there’s pumps here to blow up the tire.”
I seem to recall a stark lack of drunken locals laughing at racers in this leg. Last leg, the locals weren’t drunk.
Bumping the thread because Mike & Mel will be on NPR’s Fresh Air tomorrow, talking not only about their experience on TAR but also about the shock therapy Mel went through when he was younger as part of a fundamentalist gay-aversion “treatment”.