I wasn’t surprised that no one took the other choice – I was asking about why Phil didn’t give the pros and cons. Doesn’t he always? Or only when not all the teams do the other task?
(Me, I’d’ve been tempted to do the puzzle oriented task as much faster – they had to fill a whole bunch of bags of sand.)
Yeah, but you like your puzzles, it was the guys, they were offered the option to blow shit up. I can’t think of any guys who would turn that down. CCYMan got it in one, turn over a card or blow shit up, almost every guy would blow shit up.
Testosterone – that’s some goofy shit.
Right. I’m pretty puzzle-oriented (crosswords, acrostics, Sudoku, NPL member, MIT Mystery Hunt, etc; although not so much cryptograms), and when my wife asked which one I’d do, I’m like, “are you kidding? I’d go blow shit up!”
(Although, from a completely rational point of view: The blow-shit-up option had a very well-defined task which you could reach with a certain amount of effort. The crypto task carried the risk that you’d get stuck spinning your wheels trying to solve the problem. If I were one of the leading teams, I’d’ve done the blow-shit-up option. If I was one of the trailing teams, I’d’ve done the crypto option.)
Did I hear wrong or did one of the gay brothers say that they and the Globetrotters were the only all male teams left? It was in the first half of the show. Also, I’m not so sure that Mega isn’t the physically stronger member of that team. i actually understand her freakouts. She takes a minute, loses it, then gets back to work. Not the most pleasant attitude but effective in racing. The fact that she could play the joke on Cheyne showed that she hadn’t completely lost it. I also liked that Cheyne tossed her the gloves. Nobody else was wearing them and that hay had to ahve been brutal. Finally give a little props to Miss America for ringing the gnome. I’m pretty sure her husband tried first. BTW-wasn’t she the one who was afraid of heights? Now it’s her husband? I’m confused.
I think it was Brian who was afraid of heights. She’s afraid of water, I think.
How often has it happened that no team tried one of the two tasks?
I’m female, and I like word puzzles, but given the choice, I’d wanna blow shit up! 
So it’s not just a male thing, everyone wants to blow shit up!
there was a pretty butchered edit. I thought he was saying “alpha-male”, which technically* is correct.
*Heh–although not in this case–in a three way knock-down, drag-out fight between the brothers and the gts and Pinky & the brain, my money’s on The brain.
Happens about once. It’s not that uncommon, especially since about season seven when they started making it “a choice between two tasks: one with pros (and which looks great on TV) and one with cons (which’ll be boring viewing so we’ll make it totally unappealing and if you’re dumb enough to choose it, you get what you deserve)”.
According to this blog post by Tiffany after last week’s episode ran, they didn’t technically quit the race, even though that was the language filmed. But rather took the penalty for not completely the Detour which was 24 hours. Since it was an elimination leg they were gone anyway.
Based on that same blog post I assume the penalty would be 24 hours, which would be crippling even with a non-elimination leg.
Never mind. Just watched this interview with Tiffany and Maria (interesting background detail on some of the rules).
Failing a Detour is 24 hours. Failing a Road Block is 4. So the "just skip it strategy was somewhat on the table (though they must have known they were within 3 hours of each other on the airplane so that would be quite a gamble for any of the first teams reaching the hay bale.
Ok, I"m coming in late, so I’m just going to mention my favorite part of this episode: Gary and Matt sounding like the Swedish Chef trying to find their way out of town.
“Make a turn on Orgenjorgenson!”
Heh! At the end of that segment, I more or less shouted “Bork! Bork! Bork!” at supervenusfreak and his sister…
ETA: “Organjorgensen” would be pretty funny, actually…
Sweetie suggested we do the runes, I told him hell no I wanted to blow shit up! (If we’d been contestants of course.)
I was glad to see that this was a non-elimination round. It seemed awfully unfair to me to put a team through that much physical labor combined with such an element of luck and have the result be elimination. To my mind if elimination is at stake, then the outcome should depend more on teamwork/skill/brains than dumb luck.
After Phil mentioned the two options, my wife immediately said “oh, we’d totally be blowing stuff up!”
And I got a kick out of how quickly Meaghayn (or whatever) went from the verge of meltdown/freakouts-ville to “ha ha, I’m gonna fuck with Scheayne a little” with the haybale flag.
My favorite part was when she fell down on her way to fuck with him.
I’m a bad person. I really, really am.
And my brain said “Do the runes, you’re awesome at cryptograms.” The rest of me said “BOOM!!!” Absolutely no contest. I suppose it has nothing to do with testosterone.
From a purely objective standpoint “fill bags with dirt” is almost always a better task than “solve a puzzle.” From a purely subjective standpoint, “I wanna be a Mythbuster!”