Amazing

Gretchen helpfully pointed out that when I'm in Wisconsin in a few weeks, I'll get to indulge one of my guilty pleasures: the latest season of The Amazing Race will be premiering. I'm not big on the whole reality TV thing (despite my former bad habit of watching The Real World and Road Rules), but I've really gotten sucked into the Amazing Race in the past. The premise is this: pairs of people (mostly stereotypical: the older couple, the college buddies, the gay couple, the father and son, the couple at a crossroads in their relationship, etc., but with the occasional wild card thrown in, like "Best Friends/Clowns" and "Dating 12 Years/Virgins") race around the world based on sets of clues while performing tasks along the way. Granted, the downside is that ugly Americanism sometimes runs rampant--cutting in line, being loud, yelling at the locals (because if you don't speak the language, of course it helps to just speak louder), whining and complaining, etc. Still, the fun is in getting to see fun and exotic (and sometimes not-so-exotic) destinations, and the interpersonal dynamics are less important than on some other reality shows--the slowest team is dropped, but the other teams don't vote. And sometimes the ugliest Americans end up being humiliated, which is always fun to see (schadenfreude at its finest). Since we like to travel, it's sometimes fun to think about how we would handle certain situations, and it's also fun to speculate which of our friends and family members would be good teammates and which would end up killing each other. (Sometimes I think Gretchen and I could do it, but she always reminds me that I would have stomach issues and she would have to take too many breaks for snacks along the way.)