You injured yourself playing Skee-ball?? (points at rockle and laughs).
Sorry. Hope you’re feeling better.
hee hee
Rockle, the last leg of the race was the shortest leg. If you watch it again, the first swimmers went all the way to the farthest float, the next swimmer to the second farthest, and so on. Both tribes used the same strategy, which was to send their strongest swimmers on the first (and longest) leg, and their weakest swimmers (Rebecca for Raro and Sundra for Aitu) on the last leg (to the nearest float).
Sorry. My online connection crashed last night.
Technologically restored, here are:
The imitation RICH RANKINGS:
FORGOT TO FILE A 1040- I guess you couldn’t outwit everyone!
Rebecca: I tried to tell you you needed to be doing more.
Jenny: Go ahead and convince everybody it’s okay to break up the alliance. What are the chances that’ll bit you in the ass?
EATING BEEF JERKY- You’re still playing, but you’re praying for a tribe scramble!
Nate: There’s the Rainbow Coalition. There’s the Aryan Brotherhood. And there’s you. Next week you’ll be everybody’s best friend. But after that you’re a fifth wheel.
WHO SAID ANYTHING ABOUT A MERGE?- Middle of the pack players, the lotta ya!
Candice and Adam: You two have made yourself into a single big target.
HEY! LOOK AT HIS MOHAWK-You might make the merge, but you’re grimacing from the jury row!
Jonathan: Apparently his Magic Hawkeye Mojo is protecting him.
Sundra: You might gat carried to final four. But you need to break something loose to get past that.
LOOKING FOR A BIG TOM TO ENGLISH DICTIONARY- Big Tom has spent more combined days on the show than anyone. But he didn’t quite grab the brass ring.
Parvati: Worst case scenario - last surviving Whitey. Best case scenario - the jurors are angrier at other people
Becky: Still riding a strong alliance. Next week will show how far that alliance is going.
ARE YOU A RAT OR A SNAKE?- Reserved for a MAXIMUM of two players. You have to be in the driver’s seat for this spot.
Ozzy: Heading in the merge where your individual strength will be a huge asset.
Yul: Next week will be the hurdle. If you get past that, you’ve probably got the million.
Oh. Well, then, I’m stupid. Although, if you didn’t figure that out from my admission that I injured myself playing Skee-Ball, then … I don’t know what. Seriously, though, I had it backward in my mind, I guess. I thought it was the other way around. This way makes much more sense. Disregard.
And by the way: I was playing Skee-Ball at Chuck E. Cheese. Everything there is designed for people under age 12. It was a very low alley. Even I had to bend over, and I’m only 4’ 11½". (And also? I got absolutely smoked by a 7-year-old with a lazy eye. The bad back is the least of my problems, obviously.)
I once sprained my wrist putting on pantyhose. I feel your stupid pain.
So, do we want to place bets on when the merge happens? It could be right at the beginning of next week’s episode, but from Jonathan’s bitching, I doubt it. I’m thinking it’ll wait another week. Of course, I’d be perfectly fine if they waited until there were only five or six players left before the merge. With 10 people on the jury, there’s really no saying what’s going to happen. Stupid Burnett and his make-me-keep-watching tricks.
Great episode. I, too, am a bit skeptical that the “message in the bottle” would’ve been the same no matter who had won. Not that there’s anything wrong with that-- I have no problem with the producers tweaking things as they go to make it more interesting.
Nate’s gotta feel like the odd man out now, so he better hope for a merge. But I want Jonathan voted off. I’d like to see Nate/Adam + Candace/Parvati *vs *Yul/Ozzy + Sundra/Becky.
It has to be about the immunity idol.
My pain is NOT stupid! It’s serious! It hurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrts! I’m telling my mom on you!
I believe that the Big Top Secret Plan is about the Immunity Idol. In fact, I bet they make a deal to take each other to the Final Two, no matter what, which is yet another on Burnett’s make-Draelin-keep-watching tricks. But it’s a good one. One of the best, even.
rockle, glad to hear you’re preoccupied with non-work at work, instead of that other stuff that happens up there. 
I love love loved this episode, especially the vote-off of Jenny. The lack of strategy amongst the Raroons is staggering. They all expected the note to say “merge time!” Yet they vote off the weakest player, who would ostensibly be little threat in the individual phase of the game? Am I missing something here? Instead they let Candace and Butthead Adam start the Canoodling Alliance and screw up their original five-person situation. Dumb dumb dumb.
When the smartest person on your tribe might be Parvati, it’s time to call it a game and go home.
Spoiler about when the merge will happen:
I was checking my DVR to make sure it will get next week’s episode and the description that popped up said “The tribes merge.” Doesn’t say anything about whether it happens before or after Tribal Council, but it looks like it will happen sometime during this next episode.
Jenny made the second stupidest move in this series (the stupidest still involves Jonathan, his feet, and a matt). I think she was just feeling arrogant that the Raros had such a superiority in numbers they could afford to throw away a member and would still beat the Aitus after a merge. So she decided Jonathan was “safe” to leave around and vote out later and decided to pick off Rebecca instead.
Which was stupid on so many levels. If she was expected a merge, it was time to build up the solidarity of the alliance not diminish it. If she felt (correctly) that Adam was wavering in his allegiance, she needed Rebecca’s counterweight against his possible defection. If she thought they were going to be moving to individual challenges, she should have been getting rid of the strongest competitors not the weakest.
They should have targeted Jonathan. Adam and maybe Parvati might have balked at voting out Candice but they probably would have gone along with voting out Jonathan. Then if the white players had decided to ally, it would have been no worse than a 3-3 tie.
Jenny’s move was stupid and probably would have lost the game for her anyway. The only surprise was that it turned on her as fast as it did.
Didn’t see Rebecca’s. But Jenny’s struck me as: ‘If I thought I might be voted off, I would have tried harder.’
I thought the message in the bottle was going to say, ‘The person with the most votes will stay. The person with the second most votes will leave.’ That would have been evil.
Evil, and awesome. And the way things are going this season? I hold out hope that it still might happen. Could be a reward or summat.
Great episode, great season. Don’t feel too bad, rockle, as I thought the same thing about the swimming legs. Even so, why didn’t Parvati swim the longest leg? She’s a friggin’ fish.
I wanna see Ozzie and Parvati swim in a head-to-head race in the worst way. They both haul ass; I think she’s got the better form, while he seems like a tree-dwelling sea creature. Is there any physical challenge that guy can’t do?
Hmmm, Tom the fireman, Terry the fighter pilot, and Ozzie going through a season’s worth of individual challenges; who wins the most? Right now my money would probably go on Ozzie, but he has to win basically every single immunity challenge from here on out, since both Tom and Terry did just that.
Right now I’m rooting most for Parvati. (Over Ozzie in the final two.) Note that I missed the episode where she spent all her fan currency playing up the hottie angle, so I have nothing to hold against her.
Ozzy isn’t doing really well in the opposed challenges–if he’s fighting somebody, he gets beaten pretty easily. So long as it’s just a race or an obstacle course, he rules. Remember the pontoon fights from the season with Tom and Ian? Ozzy would get totally blown off the pontoon in that kind of fight.
I don’t know – in the “Kicking and Screaming” challenge (very briefly recapped here) Ozzy put up a pretty good fight against Adam and Brad – the only “true strength” challenge he didn’t do well in was “Never Tear Us Apart,” with the pairs and the weights, when his partner was Flicka. And since Flicka was the one whose hand slipped, it’s hard to put all the blame for that one on Ozzy. (BTW: Ian never did the “Sumo at Sea” challenge, probably because everyone on the Ulong tribe, including Stephenie’s hair, weighed more and had a lower center of gravity than he did. He was cute, but I swear to Og, he weighs less than my laptop.)
In all honesty – and on some level it pains me to say this, but I must – in a head-to-head competition against Ian, Ozzy might smoke him. Then again, maybe not; it’s really hard to say. Ian can do endurance, swimming, and puzzle challenges, but he never had to do anything that was really pure strength, because he had the luxury of being on a large tribe, with Tom and Gregg and Coby to carry the weight. Ozzy can’t sit anything out, so we’ve seen him do a little bit of everything, with mixed but mostly positive results. Plus, I’m pretty sure that Ozzy isn’t going to get the Space Madness on Day 38 and end up throwing away $1 mil for a Corvette (although, that was a HOTT car).
Not that you asked, but Ian is still my favorite. I wouldn’t kick Ozzy out of bed for eating crackers, but Ian was so much more geeky and goofy, and I totally lurve that stuff. (I believe that on another board someone said “I have no defense against that demographic.”) Ozzy is much more of a bad-ass, which is fine in its own way, but it’s not me. If they ever did All Stars again, and they had both these guys on at the same time, my head would explode from bliss. Seriously.
Even if Ozzy could win every individual challenge, he might not make it very far. Survivor often has individual challenges that screw the toughest contestants. For example, let’s all shoot at a target and when someone gets a hit, they get to choose a colored clay pot to smash. Each survivor has three clay pots and when your last clay pot is smashed, you are out.
The least threatening usually dominate those types of challenges.
Well, if Ozzy wins every individual challenge, that wouldn’t be much of a problem, would it? 
Historically, the “pecking order” challenges are usually for Reward, not Immunity. I can’t find a cite but I remember reading an interview with a challenge producer or someone somewhere, and he said that was deliberate: individual immunity should be won or lost by the individual’s effort or screwups, and not someone else’s whim. Well, except for Burnett’s, I guess.
As a related aside: Why did CBS get rid of the Challenge Trackers on the various Survivor sites? Those are very helpful when you’re trying to argue a point on a message board. What a bunch of thoughtless creeps, taking away my cites! (I kid, I kid -they took away my easy cites.)
I said the same thing to Mrs. Know–especially when Jonathan brought up the question, “Will the bottle be opened after the votes are cast or after they’re read ?”
And let me be the (probably) lone dissenting voice regarding Candice’s mutiny. OK, maybe sending her to exile the first time was justified, but twice was just being petty. Candice mutinied so she could be back together with Adam. Maybe not a good strategic move, but certainly not something to hold that long of a grudge over. Now Jonathan, on the other hand, jumped in at the last minute because of the number advantage (IMHO). If anyone deserved to go to exile the second time, it was him.
Of course, Jonathan should have been voted out last night! The Caucs really tipped their hand with the vote-out of Jenny and essentially made themselves the biggest target in the game. Nate will most certainly cast his lot with the Aitus after the merge; the vote-out order will probably be Jonathan, Candice, Adam, and Parvati (barring immunity wins, of course).
How does one download the episode. I missed it. Thanks in advance.
You mean a record of what the challenges were and who won? I get my details from Wikipedia, along with things like voting records and who gets exiled.