Lou Pickney's Online Commentary
Big Brother 6
Monday
July 4, 2005
Happy Independence Day to all of you in the United States (and to all Americans abroad reading this as well). What a great holiday: a day to celebrate our nation's freedom and pride in a positive, happy way. 229 years and counting...
Today the 14 people going on the CBS show Big Brother 6 are scheduled to enter the house. You might recall that I wrote on here some time back that I encouraged my bro Matt to apply to be on the show. Well, he sent in his application, and he ended up being selected as a semi-finalist for the show. He wasn't allowed to even talk about it until today, and he wasn't able tell me much about the process (due to all sorts of documents that CBS apparently made him sign that he couldn't discuss), but from all indications they really liked him. Unfortunately he didn't make the cut to be a finalist, which is too bad, since he has both "the look" that the show would want as well as the brains to outsmart people to win the $500K. But he said that the BB6 casting people went way out of their way to be nice to him, even after he had been eliminated as a possible contestant.
|  | Matt predicts a Kaysar win in CBS' Big Brother 6.
|
As it is, the cast has 6 guys and 8 women, which seems strange, but there's probably going to be some Survivor-esque twist where two people get knocked out right away. But if there were only 6 guy spots available, that's pretty slim pickings to begin with. I hope Matt will try again next year, but it's ultimately up to him. He applied only because I asked him to, and I wouldn't impose on him to keep doing it (plus if work has him busy by next year, this might've been his only shot).
For what it's worth, Matt's snap decision prediction pick to win, based strictly on the pics and bios, is Kaysar. Though that might be because we were joking about him actually being Keyser Soze from The Usual Suspects (one of the 10 best movies of the 1990s). As Verbal Kint said in that movie, "You think you can catch Keyser Soze?" And this: "Well, I believe in God, and the only thing that scares me is Keyser Soze." I joked that Kobayashi helped Kaysar get on the show. Matt then boldly predicted that Kaysar would win Big Brother 6. The houseguests had best remember the words of Kobayashi: "Mr. Soze rarely works with the same people for very long, and they never know who they're working for. One cannot be betrayed if one has no people."
You know, the more I think about this, the more the parallels are striking. More from Verbal Kint: "Who is Keyser Soze? He is supposed to be Turkish... [T]o hear Kobayashi tell it, anybody could have worked for Soze. You never knew. That was his power." The only one that might figure this out is Maggie, who listed The Usual Suspects as her favorite film on her CBS bio. Something tells me Kaysar will take care of her quickly. Otherwise, using one last line from Verbal: "Just like that, poof, he's gone."
|  | "Stick Legs" Glenn Hubbard
|
I also mentioned to Matt that I've expanded the family tree section on here to show both our lineage on the Pickney (Pequigney) side and on the Blaylock side of the family (which includes information on the Burgess relatives, i.e. my Granddady Blaylock's Grandmother's side). I told him that there were some cool names in there, like King Hiram Burgess. Imagine being named King. That would rule. Everybody would have to call you King. And if they called you Queen or something, you could punch them right in the snotbox (to steal a phrase from the brilliant Jim Breuer) to put them back in their place. Stupid peasants.
While going through the names, I pointed out that our great(x4)-grandfather was named Hubbard Blaylock. Matt immediately asked: was that "Stick Legs" Glenn Hubbard? That lead to us talking about the memorable trip that we made to Louisville in the summer of 1986 where we bought some Topps baseball cards, which happened to be the first time we had ever bought cards. Well, maybe not so much the trip, but at least the cards we discussed. Matt was five at the time, and I was eight, but still we were pretty creative for our ages. Anyway, we went through the cards assigning nicknames for the players. Two that stuck were "Stick Legs" Glenn Hubbard and, the best one, "Surprise Guy" Dan Petry. As you can see by the pictures on the cards, the names were pretty fitting. And it ended up spurring on about a five year run of big-time card collecting for me. Good times, good memories.
|  | "Surprise Guy" Dan Petry
|
I went ahead and put links up to my two newest websites: DigitalTVHome.com and CreditCardShock.com. The Credit Card Shock URL was too long to list on the left side on here, so I had to abbreviate it as CC Shock. Some people might think that's some sort of MLS Soccer team, or perhaps a page about Clear Channel (I'm not that stupid), but it's about credit cards. Both pages have quite a bit of work to get them up to where I want them to be as far as a minimum standard goes, but by listing them on here now, it'll help them to be indexed in Google (and MSN and Yahoo! and the other search engines) sooner.
Sometimes there's a delicate balance to it all. The idea that Dustin Gremmels had about being a TV distributor didn't work out, but I figure if there's ever a way to make money via Amazon.com , it's through big-ticket items. As of this writing I have all of one listing up there, but like I mentioned, it's a brand new page.
I've talked on here before about how I suffer from headaches from time to time. Bad headaches, the type that can be incapacitating. Imitrex does the job for getting rid of them, but for nine pills I have to pay $25, not to mention what insurance picks up on the back-end. Not exactly a bargain, but when you're in pain, it's a price well worth paying. Last Thursday at work I had one of those headaches come on, and since I don't keep a portable pharmacy in my car, I didn't have my Imitrex with me. Sherri, who works for DigiQuest, had me try some of her Bayer "for tension and stress headaches". And... it ended up working like a charm. I bought some last night at Wal-Mart, and I was surprised to see that the special formula was simply aspirin and caffeine. But whatever the case, it did the trick, and that's all I cared about. I imagine there will be some headaches that will no-sell the Bayer like the late 80s Road Warriors, but that's where the Imitrex comes in handy. Plus, for $4.15 or whatever it was for 50 caplets, the Bayer was much more reasonably priced than what I pay for Imitrex. And bottom line, if it makes the headaches go away, it works for me.
|
