It's not a game,it's TV (c) 2005, CBS

I have enjoyed Survivor over the years. At first, I was uninterested and Lori watched the first episode alone on the couch. I would come in and out of the room doing other stuff while the episode was on. She spent the entire next episode answering questions like "Who's that again?" "So what happened last week?"

She still regularly has to answer questions like "Who's that again?" and "Who got voted off last week?" (or worse "last night?") because I'm too lazy to keep track of all those people. Poor girl now also has to answer questions like "Who got eliminated last week?" and "Who's still in the race?" as well.

Anyhow, last night we witnessed the most awesomely bad attempt to dictate this round of Survivor by Jeff Probst and Co. Now I've always thought Jeff Probst was a weenie from when he was back on BackChat. Me and Kevin would write in daily pestering them to get reruns of Dukes of Hazard back when FX was just a re-run house. And he'd regularly read the requests on air and mock them. He was snarky and a dork. Leaving his wife and then later hooking up with a lame duck Survivor contestant did none to help me retrack my opinion that he was a weenie in khaki.

But I've gotten the sense this season that it's been edited to make us really root for Stephanie. She's worked hard on a suck of a team to the point that she was the last one standing after they kept going to tribal council week after week after week. And even last night with team challenges, she ended up on the losing team, but again, according to the editing, only barely losing. One's gotta start wondering if maybe she's the curse.

Well, anyhow, it's not hard to tell she's this year's darling, this year's star. Every chance they get, they show her making some face in response to someone else's comments.

And at last night's tribal council, the show runners pulled off something pretty amazing. I wanted to give Mark Burnett all the credit, but Lori pointed out that it's Jeff who did all the heavy lifting. Basically, they knew going into tribal council that Stephanie would be going home this week. So in the least sly, most obvious why, they engineered it so that Janu would quit the game, thus sparing Stephanie for another week.

In the preview of next week's episode, it looks like a cameraman has pointed out to the women that there were four of them and only three guys.