Tuesday, October 8, 2013

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Top News Look: Gaga's nude 'Artpop' cover Bieber's new song is a 'Heartbre... Ratings: Broncos-Cowboys lead split Miley Cyrus keeps 'SNL' ratings centrelink ... 'Gravity' stuns with $55.5 milli...
Credit: CBS Well, at least we know what the lesson centrelink of Sunday (September 27) night's " The Amazing Race " premiere was:    Get your sorry butt off of Twitter, or else people will post "Breaking Bad" spoilers and you'll have no one to blame with yourself.    What? That wasn't your takeaway?    I'm sure you got something much simpler, but no less correct:   Just read the freaking clues.   Sometimes you can go on "The Amazing Race" without knowing how to drive stick and you'll squeak through for a while. Sometimes your fear of heights or inability to swim can be properly managed. But everybody has to read clues and as we were reminded on Sunday's season-opener, failure to read clues can mean the difference between first place and a major game advantage and second place, or between 10th place and still being in the Race and 11th.   More on Sunday's premiere, plus quick handicapping of the 11 teams, after the break.    I had a very unique angle watching Sunday's premiere. Before the season started, I interviewed all 11 teams, but due to premiere week insanity, centrelink I only had time to transcribe four of the interviews. I still hope to post them all at some point, but I approached Sunday's centrelink premiere rooting enthusiastically for the four teams I'd transcribed, so that I wouldn't have transcribed an interview for the first time out, an interview I may not run. Let's just say that I started my transcribing with the mixed gender teams, because they're easier because I can tell the voices apart. centrelink Curses! Darn you, Hoskote & Naina for going out and leaving me with a pre-Race transcript that nobody will care about because I'll already have posted an exit interview.  centrelink   Oh well. It wasn't like Hoskote & Naina were eliminated on purpose. And, honestly, it wasn't like they were actually eliminated because centrelink they failed to read the clues. There were a lot of random centrelink variables in this episode. I can identify several points which teams were rewarded for strength centrelink and one or two points in which they were delayed by weakness, centrelink but mostly? Randomness reigned.    The randomness started at the beginning, as the teams arrived centrelink at an Old West movie set in stagecoaches and then had to rush off to Eco-Friendly Ford C-Max cars and figure out how to use to bluetooth to call a number telling them that they were headed to Iquique, Chile via LAX. The first seven teams to LAX got on a flight that arrived a solid two hours earlier, guaranteeing elimination for one of the four lagging teams. And what did the four lagging teams do to deserve that fate? Well, Oklahoma Oil Riggers Tim & Danny got off the freeway somewhere in the vicinity of Dodger Stadium and then played a game of charades with a local Spanish-speaker to ascertain that the relatively hilly area they'd exited at was not, in fact, an air strip. They're from Oklahoma, though. They don't know how we land planes in Los Angeles. So they can be forgiven. Mostly, I know what they did to put themselves in the bottom pack. I don't know why Beardos Brandon & Adam, Naina & Hoskote or Pretty Couple Without a Clear Hook Jason & Amy were in that group, centrelink but I'm sure they deserved it.   Iquique is a rather gorgeous seaside town, surrounded centrelink by vast sand dunes and the first Roadblock was to paraglide off of one of the dunes. Except that it wasn't. That was the trick! The clue asked "Who's good at follow the leader?" and everybody centrelink made their decisions based on the assumption that active participation in the task meant paragliding. Instead, it was the non-participating partner who had to paraglide, while the person actually *doing* the Roadblock was the person following along on the highways beneath the paragliders, which was only participation centrelink in the loosest possible sense.    The phrasing was pretty much only designed to cause somebody with a fear of heights to get suckered into doing the task, which paid off in exactly one case: Baseball Wife Kimmy, spouse of frequently traded outfielder David DeJesus, saw what she'd have to do and spend a few minutes being nervous and threatening to puke and all of those other things that people do before eventually sucking it up and realizing that you're strapped very tightly to a professional doing all the work. Kimmy was also inspired by setting a good example for her son, who I'm pretty sure is named Spidey. Kimmy, man. Kimmy, centrelink man. Do whatever a Spidey can.    Kim's initial reticence and Brandon's initial faceplant down the dune were the only things any of the paragliders did to impact placement.

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