Static Zombie

Cocky snot? Not Johnny Fairplay :)

Jon is kind of like New York Rob (from Survivor 5? 6?) for me. He doesn't have a chance, and I don't want him to win... but I don't want him to go just yet, either. He may be a "bad" player, but he's amazingly *entertaining*. Plus, he clearly pisses Probst off (did you see him shooting daggers at Jon during the cannonball challenge?).

Yeah, the gamer in me is against him, but the TV viewer in me LOVES him.

And, damn, once again Mark Burnett proves he's signed a pact with the devil (that, or he's the luckiest - or savviest - producer in the world). Assuming there is a merge next week, it will, once again, be a 5-5 merge.

You'd almost suspect this game is rigged.

Also, like you, I was thinking the same thing about distributing the weight... but I wouldn't have done it completely evenly. I'd have given them each one hit, then piled it on Rupert 'till he dropped, then gone back to the other two. or maybe done something like this: Rupert, Shawn, Rupert, Girl, Rupert, S, R, G, R, S, R, G...

Yeah, you want them ALL to take weight for as long as possible, but don't underestimate the emotional damage done to Drake when Rupert falls. Or, for that matter, the emotional boost given to Morgan for seeing him fall. Stamina is also in the mind.

Oh, and after seeing all the shows thus far, I'm convinced Osten is actually a practical joke the producers are playing. "How 'bout a big, muscular black guy who's, like, a major wimp and botches every challenge? Hilarious!" In fact, maybe Ashton Kutcher will be next week's surprise twist, announcing how the others all got punk'd.

Didn't Shawn's comment when he was writing down Trish's name at tribal council seem a bit strange. Did he see her as his big threat and now that she is out of the way it's his game? Doesn't make sense. It would have made more sense if it was Rupert. Made me wonder if they borrowed a sound blip from somewhere else and inserted it here to make it more interesting (after all we don't get to see Shawn say the words like we do with everyone else).

Yeah, love the look on Jon's face when the decision came down.

Neal, I agree it was an MB move to get you thinking about a tie.

In terms of weight, JP mentioned a limited amount of weight (600 lbs.?) Do you think the teammates loading on the weight worried that Rupert/Osten could be up there forever if they each had 'only' 200 lbs., so each tried to load up the big man in a Prisoner's Dilemma scenario, fearing if they did not load up the other big man, their big man would get loaded and fall first, leaving lighter folks who would then get all the rest of the weight? I did not watch closely enough to know whether after someone fell they could reuse the weight on someone else, but I assume not.

The R,S,G (Christa?) scenario proposed above would have ended up with R at 300 and the other two at 150. S should have been able to last a long time with 150 (although Osten did not) and Rupert might have been able to outlast Morgan, but for Andrew's amazing stand.

I think I would go to 100-150 on each one at the start and try to hold the final 150 as spirit breakers.

We don't know much about the timing and we also don't know how much the loaders were told about how much they could add when. MB completely plays with time, so assumptions about elasped time are tough to make.

Hmmm... I was thinking this morning that the Morgan strategy of "load up on one person until they drop" was a much better strategy than splitting the weight.

I tend to think that the endurance time a person can stand has a non-linear relationship to the weight level. I don't know this, but it makes intuitive sense to me. I tend to think Rupert could have stood there for a good long time with, say, 140 pounds, but he dropped fairly quickly with 200.

If you think the relationship is non-linear at all, that suggests that it's imperative to get each person to their breaking point as quickly as possible. Thus concentrating the weight on a single person until they crack would be optimal.

Ultimately, the question is whether standing around with some extra weight tires you so that you eventually crumple with less weight than if you'd been loaded up more quickly. My intuition says that you would-- that holding 100 lbs is more tiring than holding 0 lbs, and that if I'm holding 100 lbs for an hour, the next 20 lbs might crack me whereas if you loaded me straight to 120, I might still stand for another 20 or 40 lbs. The key to the challenge was getting the opposition to fall using the smallest amount of weight. I could see an argument that it makes no difference either way, but I can't see how loading each individual until they fall could possibly result in less weight added than spreading out the weight among the 3 evenly. Intuitively, wearing each person down over time would lead to people cracking under less overall weight due to the extended strain of time.

I am not sure it is best to load evenly at the start. In a way, that is helping the strongman by not wearing him down first. Perhaps the right goal is to try to have them all collapse concurrently, so time is working for you, but 100 lbs for Rupert does not equal 100 lbs. for Crista. Giving Rupert the first 150 (knowing that won't break him), then giving each of the other two 100, then going back and giving Rupert 100 more, and then giving the other two 75 more would distribute the weight so they all break at the same time.

Without knowing the intervals, it is hard to come up with a plan. For example, was it one set every 5 minutes or the first 20 sacks at the start, then one pair every 15 minutes?