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Increasing thruput

Is Amanda Kimmel the most tragically flawed Survivor player? She spent 78 days in China and Mironesia without ever getting voted off, but no million dollar prize. She has the strongest social game of any player I can think of, but can’t communicate the worthiness of that skill to the jury. The players who voted for Parvati really thought that Amanda was lucky and had no idea how she got there. I’m not sure she knew how she got there either, but she wasn’t lucky.

For the past few seasons I’ve bought into a Survivor pool and I picked Amanda in Survivor: China.  Her main flaw seemed to not knowing when to oust Todd at the right time, but she also made a terrible case for why she should win.  In Micronesia she had to work much harder to stay, but was always able to repair her alliances after they were broken.  She also was the first person ever to properly use the hidden immunity idol and that allowed her to coast into the final four.

Going into the final she decided to take Parvati over Cerie, presumably because Parvati would be less sympathetic to the jury, but Amanda never used the final tribal council to highlight any of the reasons why Parvati shouldn’t get the million.  Eliza even handed the roadmap for Amanda in one of the earliest questions.  She told Parvati that she respected Parvati’s game, but didn’t understand why she also did plenty of mean and arrogant things that didn’t affect the game one way or another.  If Amanda had used that angle I think she would have turned Eliza’s vote making it 4-4 instead of 5-3.

 I’m not done writing on this topic, so I’ll probably add some more later.

I never log into Friendster anymore, but I got a message from my friend Carol who has been living abroad for a while. I logged in only to find it was a message from one of those random dating site spammers. These are the messages that say things like, “hey, I saw your profile and wanted to show you my pics…” but are actually just automated programs that are trying to lure you to other sites. They’re really annoying, but I came up with a good name for them: Hobots.

Also, Carol the Hobot wears crazy pants.

This blog posts photos where someone swapped the Dad’s head with the baby’s head… with awesome results.

Last night was the Cigar Box Guitar Music Festival at the Auction House. Jerry Thompson’s Color of Skies blew the hoo de doo off the place as well as great performances by Timothy, One String Willie, and Shane Spear. Awesome time!

Here’s One String Willie from his show at Luloo’s last year.

I figured I’d give some more shout outs to my blogroll members with halfway decent updating procedures….

James is has a review of a recent Constantines show, but you’ll definitely want to check out the Les Savy Fav review below it.

700Level is getting pumped for the upcoming Phillies / Diamondbacks series

If Acoustic Ross can update his blog once and a while, there is hope for us all. He has some new songs posted on myspace and a link to a cat playing a theremin. I think he has some gigs coming up, but he lives in Tulsa.

Dan Rubin’s BLINQ has moved to a new location. Glad I checked!

Kelly is still rocking out the posts on her new blog and I love this one about her math bee confession. Here’s a pic of me and her at Jake’s wedding.

Kristin is busy tuning up her deathtrap.

John Shaughnessy posted lyrics to an old song he’s embarrassed about now. If I started doing that I would have time for nothing else. He also posted a video of a new song he wrote.

Also I found this picture of John on myspace

I also really liked this versions of the Gummi Bears theme by Into It / Over It

And I know everyone secretly has wondered to themselves, “What would it sound like if Stacy Brown sang the Mr Belvedere theme?” Well we are in luck (She’s hiding behind the piano).

See the rest here.

I played at the Auction House a few weeks ago at their themed Thursday event. The theme was TV Show theme songs and someone put me up on YouTube!