vousviou

I am bumming that I just found out this was on and I've had to catch up. Is it just me, or has this been a really good season? It feels like there are a lot of well-designed challenges, good locations, good balance between teams, and competitors who are mostly taking this seriously but still finding enjoyment along the way. I'm also glad that the amount of teams working together has been pretty minimal and reasonable in context. For example, the two Franklin teams briefly collaborated to get to the picture challenge, but after that each team worked on their own. I'm struck by how Team Pink seems to have a perfect sense of which detour to pick and who does the roadblock. And I loved the way they flat out gaslit AL in this episode when she was trying to figure out who voted against them, saying basically you can find out when you watch the show. I have a lot of doubts they'll last, though. If I had to guess a winner, I'd pick the Franklin brothers. I think this episode showed they have the strength to handle the brick challenge and the attention to detail for the printing. But I think most of the teams have a strong chance of sneaking past.

The all star race a few years ago that ended in Detroit had a hard final challenge -- teams had to assemble a drum kit while bands were blasting The White Stripes all around them. It took everyone multiple tries, and the noise made it really hard to concentrate. Leo and Jamal were basically toast at that point, but both of the other two teams struggled with that final challenge before it was decided.

That's correct -- the teams get interviewed for a much longer time and that gets edited way down according to whatever narrative the show is trying to present to viewers. Also, the teams get asked questions like "how hard physically was it today? Was your knee/ankle/shoulder bothering you?" People can always refuse to answer questions and try to steer things a particular way, but in general I think they try to be accommodating to what the producers want. They can't necessarily know what the show will end up focusing on. A lot of times I don't think the producers know until the show is over and they want to choose some major themes according to how things shake out.

Brooke Mike deserved to go, felt sorry for Liz Good catch, right, Brooke. It really would have been something if Liz's team U-Turned itself.

Strongly endorse. It's sort of nice that everyone is so pleasant this season (though I like having villains to root against) but the race is a competition. I want to see teams competing against each other, even if they do it with a smile. I'd love to see a scenario in which two teams are friendly and want to share information but they just can't. In Season 29 Liz was having one of her regular crying fits when she couldn't make a ladle, and was saved when multiple racers helped her. She went on to win it all. During her breakdown she even promised not to U Turn Mike and Liz when Mike helped her. When the chance came later to U Turn someone, she went ahead and broke her promise, and Mike and Liz were eliminated as a result.

I've been trying to put my finger on why I've liked this season, and I think the closest I can come is that it feels authentic. I realize there's always something artificial about the show -- we only see a fraction of what's going on editing plays a big part, etc. But it feels like every team is taking things seriously, avoiding drama, not mugging for the camera, but also genuinely appreciating the experience. I can feel engaged in the race for what it is, and that's a big positive.

I'm a little surprised Expedia doesn't have a mascot or stronger hook for brand identity, since that has traditionally been a big part of the travel and hospitality industry. Maybe it's a holdover from Expedia's time as a Microsoft product and Bill Gates' robotic, featureless personality. I'm 99% sure they needed to dropkick the ball, since rugby has a rule that the ball must touch the ground just prior to a scoring kick. Serious players can score by kicking while it's still in contact with the ground, but it's easier for beginners to get some air under the ball and kick on the bounce. Regular punting is part of the game, but you can't score with a punt. Drop kicks are part of the rules in US football too, but they are almost never used. Wikipedia lists just a few cases in the NFL in recent years.

I agree it could have been a bit harder, but overall I was OK with it. When I learned at first it was a rapelling task I feared it was another simple one where everyone lines up and goes down one by one with zero chance to scramble the order. There are too many bungie jumping style challenges which are just a waste of screen time. And of course the brothers made an unexpected dumb mistake, although it didn't hurt them in the end.

Agreed, the self-navigation this episode was crazy. Everyone getting lost, turning around, following the wrong teams - it was a mess. That's really been the reason for the placement shake-ups more than the challenges. I'm glad it was challenging for the racers, but I would have loved to have seen an onscreen map at some point showing everyone's route. It was especially mystifying to me while watching how the brothers zoomed into first.

I'm wearing running tights now, having just goten back from a run, so I can't judge what women do. I will say as far as the race, though, I have wonder about the lack of pockets. It seems like for practical reasons you really want pants with pockets. There are so many times where challenges involve little pieces you want to secure, or there are maps you want to keep handy, or a compass to stow -- and a fanny pack just doesn't seem like it's a substitute.

One feature I liked was how the quality of the job done on the last challenge affected how fast you could get to the finish, and I'd really like to see variations on that more often. I think the straight sprint tends to be pretty dull, and it would be good to add in a bit more skill factor.

My guess is it's a crew member's phone, and there's a procedure for family to get in touch in case of something important. I'd be interested if anyone knows more, but I would expect they'd rather not have a team drop out at the last minute because someone's sister was due to give birth and they wanted to know how things were going.

I finally caught up on this season, having forgotten it wasn't a midseason show. I was very glad in this episode there was no sign of the team up from Florence. I really hate alliances -- they're a bad strategy in this show -- and I can write it off as hopefully a one time thing on a really gruelling day. I wonder if the producers explained what the pitfalls are, or if these teams just are more savvy. They seem less needy than some of the previous seasons, which in my opinion seems to fuel that kind of thinking. The couple of teams this season which had a needy member also seemed to be balanced by a more focused person. As other people have noted, the challenge design was very basic this episode. I realize logistics and other factors sometimes come into play, but I do think this would have been a good opportunity to maybe pare back the time on metal detectors and show some more interactions between teams, such as on the train. It would have helped to clarify some of the personalities, who may be more interesting than we've seen. I caught up this season on the cbs.com website. Has anyone else found it to be much more user friendly than in the past? It used to be just miserable for watching previous episodes, but after years it finally seems pretty seamless.

Could be. The good news is, we don't really have to worry about it! It looked like it was a fairly irregular construction, and in the defense of people guessing odd numbers, some old buildings are asymetrical. It's not completely irrational to suspect the answer was an odd number if everything was a blur 3/4 of the way. I'm not sure why Penn's prescription glasses weren't good enough for him to see that amount of detail, though. I assume getting an up to date pair is the kind of thing you'd have on your check list before the starting line, but maybe there wasn't much time this season to get ready?

I was very pleased that the foley challenge and the tennis racket challenge were both designed in ways which all teams had at least several failures. More than a few finales had puzzles which were too simple, such as lining up flags in a certain order. For that matter, I appreciated the setup of the column counting challenge, which could be solved by brute force guessing, but as Penn showed, there was a price to pay for guessing wrong.

If not the first, at least the first one since the single numbered seasons. If I recall correctly, Season 25 had a finale with self driving and the wrestlers were eliminated mid leg when they got lost, paving the way for Amy and Maya to win.

I thought the saints test was really interesting. The depiction of the saints at the church followed extremely old traditions. First, no portraits or sculpture survived of how the early saints looked, so artists needed a fixed set of unique attributes to identify them, especially at a time when many people couldn't read a caption. Second, the Orthodox Church went through a long period of banning all depictions of sacred people, and when the iconoclasm relented, the Orthodox settled on a strict set of rules for depicting them that further defined how Nicholas or Irene would appear. What the racers weren't just memorizing images, like the underwater fish ID in Corsica. They were essentially taking part in a method going back to the 9th Century. The icons were designed to be identified by people without writing, and with specific visual clues that related to specific elements in their lives -- Christopher as a stooping giant carrying a child on his back, for example.

I try to keep reminding myself of this. Also, teams can say 10 minutes of nice things sandwiching 10 seconds of criticism and the editing may just include the criticism for the sake of drama. I try not to get too hung up on what look likes might be driven by production.

Cheese making usually involves some kind of acid to start the curdling process, and I strongly suspect something went wrong with Ryan and Dusty adding the milk that was the problem -- I wouldn't be surprised if it was sour milk full of lactic acid, and they just forgot to add it. I wasn't a fan of Sheri and Akbar but I sort of wish this was an a non-elimination leg just to stretch out their role as the obvious sacrificial lambs. The show is going to get a lot more serious at this point and less touristy. I'm not in a rush to get there this time around. I wish there was more time devoted to behind the scenes. This season, to be honest, the competition is going ro be a bit limited, and given the circumstances, this would be an interesting time to see the racers in less guarded moments. I like this bunch, and seeing them all decompressing and talking about what they've been going throuh could have been really interesting. I've been wanting to feel snarky, but I can't, even to Akbar and team Youtube. Compared to last season with the endless maneuvering for the alliance and bickering over who was really nice enough, they all seem glad to just be there. At any rate, I hope they push the puzzles in coming episodes. In terms of Covid there's nothing problematic for producers about a good old TAR puzzle involving putting together a 100 piece goat herder costume and then walking backwards and blindfolded through a medieval courtyard full of mud to recite a memorized 500 word poem in ancient Croatian to a surly elderly judge.

One thing I thought was interesting was Ryan and Dusty thinking through from the beginning that trying to manhandle everything up the stairs at once was not going to work. They even told Sheri and Akbar not to bother. They're clearly the most physically fit duo, but they seemed smart about not being meatheads.

The thing is, if you read first person accounts from the 19th Century, there are both incredibly stoic accounts but also extremely hyperbolically emotional ones. There were some people -- Scandanavian immigrants for example -- who were extremely taciturn. But there were also people who would literally go on for hours in ways which we simply wouldn't recognize today, talking about bosom bonds they felt with people they had only met that very day. When you read the Lincoln-Douglas debates from the 1850s you get a flavor for it -- and Illinois was barely settled land back then. For some of the people it was taken as a matter of course that you would swing back and forth between grim determination, philosophical analysis, and gnashing and wailing, all within the course of an hour. Many people (not all, to be sure) loved performative talking -- it was one of the few forms of entertainment sometimes. I think it's fair to ask whether Penn isn't actually all that far from the kind of patent medicine salesmen who used to sell Dr. Longbottom's Patented Tonic Elixir to Colorado silver prospectors in the 1880s.

To be honest, if I ever found myself picked at random to be on the show out of the blue, I'd forget about training to run up stairs or carry a 75 pound sack of potatoes while memorizing songs in Italian. I'd ask friends to drive me and my teammate somewhere blindfolded in a strange city with nothing but a map, drop us off at random and give us a navigation challenge.

At the Division 1 level it's awfully rare to find any women basketball players who are out of shape, regardless of position. Men either, for that matter. What is very common is knee injuries for women. A common stat is roughly 4 times as many ACL tears for female as male players, with this article putting the risk of a tear at 5% per year. You can extrapolate what that might mean for someone who plays from middle school through college. https://sanantoniosportsmedicine.com/female-acl-injuries-epidemic/ ACL tears have a strong connection to arthritis later in life, in addition to often resulting in permanent loss of at least some function after recovery from surgery. And that's not counting all of the other chronic injuries that hit serious basketball players female or male -- foot problems, back pain, concussions, degenerated hips.... Basketball isn't as brutal as football, but it can take a big toll. As far as knowing about any injuries, the season Amy and Maya won it was clear something was off with Amy, but it was only revealed in an off camera interview after the last episode that Amy had two stress fractures in her pelvis and was being treated with pain killers all the way around the world. I don't think there's a good reason to believe by default we would know if Sheri has some underlying health issue that affects her fitness, and I'm not sure it's fair to assume (not saying it's you, just that it's out there) that she just wasn't taking this seriously.

I think a lack of fitness is clear but I also wonder if more is going on, possibly even contributing to the fitness issue. She was a former Division 1 college basketball player, and while I've known former athletes who have gone seriously out of shape, the only top level ones I've known who move so tentatively even from a resting state are ones who have had major injuries -- blown out knees, bad discs, etc. I'm sure she never played at the level of Sheryl Swopes or Diana Taurasi, but even benchwarmers for minor Div 1 level teams are very good athletes. To my eye there is something more than just fitness, time and having kids at work.

I wonder if there isn't some physical issue for one or both which means they really shouldn't be racing -- bad knees, back, or something else. They seem to be struggling more than even some of the less fit teams I've seen, to point where it feels like even being on their feet for a while is a problem, let alone running for five minutes. It seems more than just not being in shape.