8:59 PM Oh. That’s the end of the show. But next week, there’s gonna be a team of ALL KIDS. A bunch of little kids, playing for a million bucks on a special two-hour Minute To Win It!!! Holy guacamole with extra nachos! See you later, I gotta eat dinner.
8:56 PM Not to be churlish, but I find Mark’s monologues vis a vis whether to continue on Minute To Win It a little condescending and exhausting. It feels soap-opera-ish to me, like the producers have fed him talking points. I feel weird all of a sudden. Maybe I’m just hungry. But I’m starting to have this creeping feeling … I do NOT like what’s happening on my television screen right now. “I have so much excitement” –Mark. But guess what? He’s walking away with the $125,000. Good for him; I think he made the right choice. Now he can start a college fund for his kids. Respect.
8:54 PM Is third time the charm with the racket challenge? OH SNAP, Mark nailed the challenge in, like, TWO SECONDS!!! They are going BUCK in the audience right now! That caught Guy Fieri completely by surprise: “This guy has been a warrior … he’s just won $125,000!” Hoo boy, I think Mark is about to walk away with his winnings. Oh wait a minute, now they’re doing something really crazy and unprecedented: They’re gonna show Mark what the next challenge is, before he decides whether to walk away! They’ve never done this before! And the challenge is a fiendish classic: NUT STACKER, remember that one? My we had some fun with it last summer(?).
8:53 PM (Assuming it’s okay to lump in Egypt with the Middle East. Can’t remember if people do that.)
8:52 PM So far, Guy Fieri hasn’t said anything about the protests in Cairo. Is that because the show is taped ahead of time, or do you think Minute To Win It just doesn’t weigh in on Middle Eastern politics, just as a general rule?
8:49 PM All right Mark, it’s time to win this gol-darned challenge or just go home and admit you’re a horrible father. (My prediction: Mark is gonna win a million dollars.)
8:48 PM Another LOL from Guy Fieri: “I feel myself twitching and moving!” (in reference to Mark’s tennis-racket gyrations). Mark fails again! That was his second attempt … and he just couldn’t get that gumball to cooperate. Now Mark is being extremely articulate in his desire to win more money rather than going home empty-handed. He really made his case well … sigh, if only someone in Washington would listen to him, maybe our country wouldn’t be in the shape it’s in, America where did we go wrong? (j/k)
8:47 PM They just showed a crowd reaction shot that featured an Asian guy with a really cool haircut.
8:46 PM Oh by the way, if Mark achieves his goal vis a vis the tennis racket and the gumball, he wins $125,000, which from where I sit is a lot of money.
8:44 PM Mark is struggling with the tennis racket. That little green gumball is just not cooperating. He’s out of time. The klaxon alarm sounds. The crowd heaves a collective sigh. Guy Fieri strokes his goatee with MAXIMUM pensiveness. Now they’re debating whether Mark should have used those extra ten seconds he won during his bonus round.
8:43:30 PM Guy Fieri isn’t wearing sunglasses on the back of his head. Perhaps that’s to reflect our new mood of national sobriety? ANYWAY, now Mark is ready for his next challenge: “What a Racquet.” He has one minute to explain why modern banking, with its reliance on esoteric financial instruments, is essentially a racket. Either that, or he has to put a tennis racket in his crotch and move a gumball with it.
8:43 PM Is it just me, or has every television program ever made in human history been absolutely horrible?
8:42 PM Heh, this Ford Focus ad is such an EPIC fail!!!
8:41 PM Loving that Dunkin’ Donuts is advertising ICE COFFEE right now. Man they must have made WAY too much ice coffee last summer and now they’re trying to get rid of it in the middle of a snow storm LOL EPIC FAIL.
8:40 PM According to this commercial, McDonald’s has a new kind of oatmeal. It has fruits in it.
8:38 PM (Just kidding Guy Fieri didn’t say that.)
8:35 PM Oh, I remember this challenge: Sticker Picker-Upper! You gotta use an egg to pick up some stickers on a pizza pan or something like that. Mark nails it! Level 6 complete! All this talk about levels reminds me of that movie called Inception, did you see it? People were having fights in their dreams. They were trying to find a suitcase with unused dreams in it or something. I think they went to a hotel where gravity didn’t work and they floated around fighting each other. In any event, it was a boring movie in many ways and I can’t believe it got nominated for best picture! (End editorial comment.) Dude, now Mark is getting really emotional about winning the money and what it means to him … he is acknowledging the broader economic context in which he is operating — money is tough for everyone right now, he doesn’t have a college fund for his daughters yet, etc — RADICAL ANALYSIS OF CAPITALISM TAKING PLACE RIGHT NOW ON MINUTE TO WIN IT, you heard it here first!!! Guy Fieri: “Let’s face it, Mark, those capitalist bloodsucking businessmen won’t stop until the working classes are completely decimated.” WTF
8:33 PM Guy Fieri is re-telling Mark’s redemption story. It’s a story about he came on the show last year and flamed out and didn’t win shit and now he’s back because everybody loves him. And now he’s burning up the money ladder, going all the way to the one million dollar prize at the top of the ladder. It’s like when, at the end of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein said something like, “Once you’ve climbed the ladder, just kick that motherfucker out from under you” or something like that. I can’t check the actual quote b/c I’m too busy liveblogging to get up and go to the other side of the room to the bookshelf, which is where I’ve decided to keep all my books..