Episode 1.6

I’m wondering if I should stop posting random stuff before the actual important part of the blog post. I have the feeling that I should, but I don’t think that I ever will. I don’t know what people think about it since most people don’t read this blog. It’s a shame, really, but it doesn’t matter that much. I believe it was Queen that once said, in the greatest rock song ever written, “nothing really matters, anyone can see, nothing really matters, nothing really matters, nothing really matters to me.” Well, stuff does matter, but this blog is probably unimportant. Or is it? I think that this blog may be important enough that I would want to have a successor to it should anything ever happen to me and I’m unable to continue it. People might notice if my blog just suddenly stopped being updated at all. In fact, this blog post that I’m writing may not end up being posted at all! But the point of the matter is that, if you have a Survivor blog or you know someone with a great Survivor blog, then be sure to post the link to it in the comments for the blog here. It would be nice to know that someone else could continue this blog for me, even though they obviously aren’t the same person that I am.

Well, once again I rolled the right number for the blog and once again I don’t watch the show until later. On 6-20-2014, I rolled the number four again. Well, actually, I rolled the number six, but I can’t use that number at the moment since I have only one tape left and it has something for someone else to watch on it. So I rolled again and got the number one. That number means to watch Charmed, which I had already rolled and watched earlier in the day. Now, with some TV shows, I don’t watch them more than once in a single day unless I exempt them from the rule. Survivor is exempt from the rule I call the same day rule, but I have yet to roll it twice in a single day. As you might have guessed, the next number I rolled was a four which meant that I could watch Survivor. But since I was going to eat a snack with it that would make my hand messy, I decided to save the roll for later and just find something to watch on TV. Of course, I will have to decide which show to watch which will probably lead to me rolling yet another show as I figure it out.

Now, I’m right-handed, but when I eat food that doesn’t involve silverware, I typically use my left hand. This would definitely cause a mess on the keyboard (but only if I’m stupid) because the majority of typing is done with your left hand. I’ve already done this before where I used only one hand to type and ate a snack while watching and blogging about Survivor. I didn’t like it. Now I could wind up doing it again, but I’d rather not have the quality of this blog suffer. (That sentence is probably ironic since it would imply that this blog has quality.) An interesting thing about me is that I can use a fork with my left hand. I’m pretty sure that most left-handed people can use a fork with their right hand. If a food involves the use of both a fork and knife, you typically use your dominate hand for the knife and the cutting while your other hand keeps part of the food still. But if you use silverware, you probably already knew that. I think that most English speaking people use silverware, but if you don’t speak English and somehow have a good way of translating this blog of mine, that’s awesome. Typically, the online translating things that I’ve tried are bad, but I haven’t tried that many anyways. But if you know anyone that uses other languages on www.facebook.com, then you know that their main translating methods suck. Either that or the people who don’t speak English there are bad at speaking their native language, which I don’t think is very likely.

It turns out that I might not have to take a break of this blog for my vacation. Since this blog is written long before it’s posted, then I might have already been on this vacation by the time this is posted. It might not end up effecting Sundays at all. If it does, then I guess you’ll just miss a post randomly. While I am working on blog posts on various Survivor related topics, it might not be until the hiatus between the airing of the twenty-ninth and thirtieth seasons before you see them. They are currently filming the twenty-ninth season and the filming wraps on July 10^th. That means that the thirtieth season probably starts filming around July 25^th since there is typically a two week break between filming the fall and spring seasons. I could be off on that, so I don’t really know. But I do know that I need to work more on my TV blog so I can keep people updated on it. But enough of my ramblings.

Jeff introduces more about the game at the beginning. He is introducing the impending tribe merge. “Will they stick together as a tribe or will it be every man for themselves?” What’s interesting is that one tribe would (mostly) stick together while the other one would be every person for themselves. The confessionals are very different since another contestant can be there while you are giving one. They were so informal. I’m glad they changed that. Jenna talks about (a chicken) pecking the hell out of her which is somewhat ironic when she would later be known for having a sex tape. Speaking of things related to sex, Richard is starting his going around naked phrase since it is part of his game. Rudy joins the now famous Tagi alliance while Richard thinks that he won’t last long anyways. So Rudy, Kelly, Sue, and Richard are all in the alliance that winds up dominating the game. Controversial at the time, it is now a commonplace part of the game. People thought it was cheating, but no one was punished for it so I think that it’s a part of the game allowed to be had. Can you imagine the game without an alliance of any kind?

Gervase said his memorably dumb and sexist comment that girls are the stupidest thing in the world next to cows. The cow comment would become important later in the episode, even though the wrong person was voted out because of it. The tribes then prepared for their reward challenge. They got food before the challenge. The reward is what I believe to be the first challenge held at night. I find the premise to be strange and didn’t really understand the rules. As usual, this is probably not the type of challenge that you’d see anymore. Richard grabbed a duplicate item which gave Pagong the win. After the challenge, Gervase thought that the member of Pagong would be the final six. Actually, only one of them would make the final six. They talk about trying to vote off Tagi one by one, not realizing their own impending fate. The women of Pagong were really annoyed by Joel. This is used to explain why he gets voted out in the episode. He’ll become the first contestant to be voted out right before the merge.

Some army people (which army?) were preparing for the challenge and got the tribes ready for it. This is the first challenge where the tribe that has a numbers disadvantage still had to sit a member out. This is also the last tribal challenge of the season. This seems like the most intense type of challenge at the time they did it. The last part of the challenge reminds me of the plank maze that you can find and try to solve at www.puzzles.com. ([WARNING! GOING OFF ON A TANGENT.] I’m not sure if that link is right or if the information is still there. But, I found another link that definitely has the puzzle that I’m looking for to show you. What’s interesting is how much the previously mentioned puzzle website has changed, if it is even the one that I remember going to in the past. They had lots of great games there that you could do on the computer. I could search for some of them to see if they exist elsewhere. There’s a game there called threesome, [yes, that’s the game’s name and no, it had nothing to do with sex] that I can’t look up online for obvious reasons. But, you should be able to do the plank mazes at the link provided so you can understand what exactly I’m talking about. http://www.clickmazes.com/planks/ixplanks.htm [I hope that the link works for you since it may not work for everyone.]) In the end, it was Tagi that closely won the challenge and wound up sealing their fate as a great tribe in post merge history. Instead of having the idol be transferred at the challenge, it was at an island that Tagi had to retrieve.

So Pagong lost some of their chicken to a wild animal. Ultimately, this doesn’t matter that much in the game. People talk about the vote being between either Jenna or Joel. This tribal council would be the only time Greg would vote with the majority, unless you count his vote as a jury member. Gervase sticks with Joel and they both vote for Jenna. Greg, Jenna, Colleen, and Gretchen are the ones who vote for Joel. Since I’m pretty sure that Greg and Jenna had a rivalry, it is interesting that he doesn’t try to do a tie, but he probably didn’t know that others would be voting with him so he stuck with a majority that he knew would get him success in voting someone out.

On the next Survivor, the two tribes merge into one tribe and people get used to the new way of playing the game. I can’t really tell what Joel was saying that he isn’t, but people think he is. But, I should get to that topic right now. This episode marks the first time that women would vote in a group, although alliances of all women didn’t work for quite a while in this show’s other seasons.

Joel may not have been that stand out of a contestant, but that was probably due to him not lasting that long in the game. I’m not really sure if he’d ever return to the game or not. He might, but I don’t think that he will. So I’ll give him a 31% chance of returning to the game. He probably could return to the game again. Maybe I should give him a higher chance. But, for now, I don’t think that he’ll play again, even though he has better chances than a lot of other people.

Total confessional counts: Joel- 12, Sean- 15, Colleen- 14, Richard- 23, Gervase- 24, Jenna- 17, Sue- 18, Kelly- 16, Rudy- 17, Greg- 16, Gretchen- 19.

New confessionals this episode: Gretchen- 5, Joel- 4, Sean- 1, Colleen- 4, Richard- 3, Gervase- 4, Jenna- 4, Sue- 2, Kelly- 2, Rudy- 2, Greg- 1.

So, by the end of this episode, everyone has more than ten confessionals and Gervase has momentarily surpassed Richard with the most confessionals of the season. We’ll see if that winds up staying or not. It has been a while since every contestant typically got at least one confessional in each episode. Maybe that is more common than I think. Regardless, it would be nice if they kept doing stuff like that nowadays. For now, this is Adam Decker, signing off.