Last Night's Amazing Race

[fauxklore]

I haven't quite decided whether last night's episode has changed my mind about the Globetrotters, who I'd been favoring up to now. I can dismiss the trouble they had with the briefcase as being due to heat and exhaustion, but their chiding of Mika at the water slide was pretty tacky. I'm not convinced it made any difference in her refusal to do the challenge, but I really thought they had more class than that. Canaan complaining about it after his semi-abusive hectoring of her was also out of line, I think.

I couldn't believe how many people didn't know how to row a dinghy. I'm probably biased, having learned to row when I was about 8 years old, but haven't they even seen anybody row?

Megan and Cheyne seem really competent, but I still don't really have a sense of their personalities. They did seem to start bickering a bit (again, stress and heat and all), but they pulled themselves together and figured out what they needed to do with the hookahs. I didn't like how Brian and Erika handled the detour at all. They never thought of borrowing a calculator at the gold place and then Erika let Brian do all the work on assembling the hookahs while she offered bad advice. (On those sorts of tasks, details always matter.)

I also thought the gold challenge was the much easier one. So the fact that only two teams really got it (the gay brothers wouldn't have figured out to divide things if the poker girls hadn't told them to) reflects the continuing poor state of American education. This is maybe a 4th grade math problem, especially with a calculator.

Which brings me to my final comment. A small calculator is infinitely useful when traveling. Along with a flashlight, my solar calculator lives in my camera bag, where it is always handy. I rarely need to do any actual arithmetic, but it makes a great tool for bargaining in markets where you don't speak the language well. You have the merchant type in a number, you type in yours and there you go. (Usually, you get three rounds and the merchant gets four.) I don't remember who I learned that from, but it's one of my best travel tips for the developing world.