Downhill Disgracers.

“The Lord Alps those who Alp themselves.” - Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff, Horsefeathers (1932).

Okay, let’s get the nice stuff out of the way first, so it doesn’t get in the way of the snark later on. Lawon provided the big emotional moment this week, and for once it was a rare (for this show) positive moment. Although Lawon’s coming out was about as surprising as learning that Amy Winehouse was dead, still his story of his grandma’s acceptance of him was genuinely touching. Good for Granny. (Lawon’s grandmother already knew he was gay before Lawon told her. Well of course she did. She’d met him.) Granny told him to go out and be the best black gay man he could be, borrowing slightly from Herb Gardner’s A Thousand Clowns. This is good advice for Lawon. If it is, perhaps, setting his sites a little low, at least it is achievable.

And it’s nice for Lawon to contribute something to the show, since his contributions so far have been primarily limited to occasionally shouting at us or at some player he’s trying to align with: “I am ready to start playin' this game!” Then he does nothing else until the next time, a week or ten days later, when he next announces his readiness to commence playin' this game, should any one have a game of this going anywhere with an open chair for him. He means it. He is ready to play! Somebody might even align with him, were not the others busy playin' this game.

Normally, the most-positive emotion I can summon for Voldebitch is loathing, but I have to admit I felt for her, during her week-long, Sherman’s-March-to-the-Sea, rampage of destruction as HOH, when Lawon came and yelled at her that he was ready to start playin' this game, along with other random, meaningless phrases. Poor Boobiac couldn’t even manage the effort of pretending to be listening to his content-free babbling.

I did no Big Brother columns last week because, quite frankly, Voldebitch returning to the HOH room was simply too depressing and repetitive to linger over. I was bored. Having her back on the show this year is bad enough, but having her as HOH for two of the first three weeks was dispiriting, and I took no pleasure in watching the likeable virgin (in so far as it is possible to like a virgin. I realize it’s not a choice; he was born a virgin, but damn it! There’s a great cure. No one needs to go on living with the shame of virginity anymore, unless they’re both extremely ugly and really broke.), young Dom, get home-schooled and kicked off of Big Brother, by making two bonehead mistakes.

1. Throwing the POV competition. Never, never, never, never throw a POV competition when you are on the block. A promise that you’re safe can be a lie (and if it’s made by She Who Can Not Be Endured, it has to be a lie.), but a POV charm around your neck means you are safe this week.

2. Trusting Leatherface. Trying to raise an army too soon, Dom blabbed to Leatherface, and she ran right off and tattled every word to Boobiac & Bookie, who went ballistic to learn that Dom might be considering trying to win the game for himself, rather than for them, at some future point in the season. And the idiot kid never tried to figure out who had betrayed him. Even in the pointless house meeting Bookie demanded to call Dom out for doing what everyone there should be doing, plotting the downfall of Bookie & Boobiac, the question “Who told you?” was never even asked. Leatherface just sat there playing innocent and shocked, and no one suspected her because she’s a Mom.

It’s his home-schooling. Never having had recesses and lunch periods and PE classes with other kids growing up, he was unaware of how actual people interact in real life, when competing for big money. Look at how startled he is, emerging from the Big Brother House, to see all those people waiting for him. We all grew up in classes of 35 or 40 students, some more, some less, but Dom’s classes were he and Mom. The best thing about going to school was that Mom was not there.

Secondly, having grown up under a domineering mother who ruthlessly controlled everything he was ever allowed to learn, he has been brainwashed into blindly trusting all “Moms,” not knowing that Moms you can trust farther than you can spit are rarer than unicorns. So Dom trusted Leatherface, who stabbed him in the back and betrayed him to the Vets, as she has systematically betrayed and decimated her Newbie “allies” since Week One. Voldebitch called Cassi “a snake.” Well there is a snake in the house all right, and I dubber her Leatherface.

(By the way, amusing as it was for She Who Can Not Be Endured to lose a challenge by misspelling “moisturizer,” the female equivalent of “technotronics,” still, if there was one woman in the house I would expect to misspell “moisturizer,” it would be Leatherface, as she clearly hasn’t allowed any to touch her in decades. Boris Karloff’s skin was more baby’s-butt-soft in the opening reel of The Mummy than Leatherface’s.)

Dom is like Altaira, the character played by Ann Francis in Forbidden Planet. Altaira is 20 years old, and not only is she a home-schooled virgin, but her father, The Mad Scientist Professor Morbius, who "unintentionally" mass-murdered all the rest of their rocketship crew/colleagues, is the only other human being she has ever seen. She knows “all that stuff about biology,” but has no idea what a kiss is, or why an all-male crew that’s been out in deep space for a year all act like jackasses around her. (The gay ship’s cook, played by Earl Holliman, is so horny, he gets Robby the Robot drunk and takes advantage of him, or vice versa.) That’s our Dom, home-schooled on another planet. “‘Kiss’? What means this strange word ‘kiss’?” But his mother is mad Dr. Morbius, who has sent her Id Monster, in the form of Leatherface, to expel her son and force him to come back home to Mommy’s rigid control.

Hmmm. Who else in the House this summer reminds one of a character in Forbidden Planet?

Ah well, back to the Big Brother House.

Okay, we had a straight-forward endurance challenge on skis, and the athletic showing by the men was pathetic. Bookie loves to point out that in The Bookie & Boobiac Show, Voldebitch is their “brains” who wins quiz challenges (“Who does America think is the bigger skank? A, Leatherface or B, Voldebitch?” “B, Julie!” “That’s right, Boobiac.”), while Bookie is their athlete who wins them the physical competitions. Imagine being paired with She Who Can Not Be Endured and she's “The Smart One”! But she lost a “smarts” competition through her misspelling of “moisturizer, and now in this athletic endurance challenge, he, and, in fact, all the men, went out like wimps. Bookie even had the chutzpah to mock Kalia for doing better than he did, from the losing sidelines, making that crack about her “muffin” keeping her up there. Well her muffin beat the hell out of your sixpack, Bookie.

The best thing about Adam getting stuck wearing the elf suit is that for a week, there is no danger of seeing him shirtless.

Voldebitch seems actually to think that yelling stuff like “Hang on” will influence who will win the challenge. Maybe she’s right. Both Bookie and Homophobic Asshole are stupid enough that they might have needed reminding to hang on.

Lawon screamed at us that he is a competitor. It’s good that he did yell that as, how else would we know? From the way he loses challenge after challenge after challenge?

After Lawon allowed himself to fall off the skis (No women had fallen yet), he had to yell at us: “Why? I want to win something at the Big Brother!” Well, then stop losing. Lawon, competing is more than just announcing you are ready to compete; it also involves actually competing. You always forget to do that part. In any event, you won just what your lame performance deserved, a week of slop.

Edsel is glad, after three weeks of Golden Key sidelining, to be playing. She is ready to compete: “I definitely want to win this HOH, and prove to the Veterans that I’m here to compete and keep them safe.” Cute, dear. How did that winning-the-challenge work out for you? What did it prove? And why do you want to prove to the Veterans you’re their mind slave? You should be plotting to get rid of them so you can win. Did you forget how the game is played?

Bookie went down third. Still no women down yet. Lame, lame, lame. And then down goes Homophobic Asshole, another “athlete. All the men are down, all of the women are still up. Disgraceful, men.


Daniele, on whom, mere hours before, Voldebitch & Bookie had declared war, won HOH in a walk, and suddenly the week developed a chance to become interesting again.

As Edsel was making excuses to us in The Diary Room about why she fell out instead of showing she was here to compete and keep the Veterans safe, she explained that her pain was “more in my shoulder, right here” as she pointed at the inside of her elbow, on the far side of her bicep from her shoulder. I had to rerun it three times, because I could not believe she was pointing to the inside of her elbow as she told us it was her shoulder, but that is what she did. I wonder what she would point to if I asked her to point to her ass.

Admittedly, there was not much suspense for me, as I’d checked the feeds Thursday night to see who won.

When it was down to just Leatherface, Queen Kalia, and Dani, the Vets (and Edsel) all began cheering on Leatherface. Oops. She’s your spy, nimrods. Queen Kalia, even has she struggled to keep her muffin on her pole (Ask Bookie. I don’t know what it means), realized that the cheering for Leatherface meant they knew she was their creature. Finally someone suspected the demon lurking beneath the rawhide countenance. Leatherface tried to pass it off as Voldebitch and Edsel just wanting her to see a photo of the child she is on TV teaching bad Situational Ethics to. Oh puh-leaze. Voldebitch doesn’t give a rat’s ass in Hell whether Leatherface ever lay peepers on her Hellspawn again or not. She cheers only for those she feels certain will not put her on the block. Even Queen Kalia isn’t stupid enough to miss that. Dom would buy it, except he’s already bought it.

She Who Can Not Be Endured told us at length how she would have won this HOH competition if she hadn’t been unfairly prevented from playing just because of the dumb old rules of the game.

Homophobic Asshole: “In the end, I lost.” Actually, he lost in the middle.

“Two classless people up there,” said Leatherface to Bookie and Voldebitch, the two least-classy people in the house, and possibly on earth. For that matter, Leatherface’s class is looking more and more like Trailer Trash.

Queen Kalia accurately described Voldebitch’s post-loss moods as “The Victim Pity Party of the Year.” Kalia tried making a pleasant, friendly comment to her (why bother?), and as if She Who Can Not Be Endured’s poor sportsmanship rudeness wasn’t bad enough, Bookie throws lit matches on the oil with idiot gratuitous insults like “Forget it. She’s not worth it.” Not worth what? Accepting an olive branch? Way to diffuse the tension., Mr. Chivalry.

Voldebitch: “I haven’t done anything to deserve this.” She Who Can Not Be Endured is the least self-aware human on earth. In the old MGM historical melodrama Rasputin and the Empress, my old beaux and drinking buddy John Barrymore has this exchange with Czar Nicholas:

John Barrymore, referring to the investigation of an assassination that just occured: "A number of suspects have been arrested." (Note, he only said "suspects," not "the killers".)

Czar Nicholas: "Shoot them! All of them!"

John: "Without a trial? ... Your highness, another wholesale execution..."

Czar Nick: "You have your orders."

Okay, but then, exactly four minutes later...

Czarina Alexandria: "What have we done to these people of yours, Nicky, that they should hate us so?"

That’s Voldebitch: “What have we done to these people of ours, Bookie, that they should hate us so?”

Voldebitch actually thinks that when people pretend to want to see her HOH room, they mean it, and aren’t just faking it because no one can actually stand being in a room with her. Boobiac, no one ever wants to see a competitor’s HOH room. You are not Party Central to anyone but the voices in your head.

Homophobic Asshole was being a lame, wimpy wuss, pouting over how Dani hurt his wittle feewings. Oh stuff a sock in it, H.A. You think being nominated two weeks running didn’t hurt Adam’s feelings? (I’m almost 87% certain that Adam has human feelings, or something very like them.) His main complaint was that Dani was not nominating him this week, but what if some day, someone does? Suck it up, wuss, or try actually winning the HOH competition.

I did enjoy seeing Voldebitch fall on her face while jogging as obnoxiously (“Look at me!” her route screamed) as she could. I’m amazed her overinflated crash bags didn’t bounce her right back to her feet.

Dani nominated Bookie and Voldebitch. I know which one I want to go home, but I’ll be okay if he goes home instead.

I’m bored. Cheers darlings.