To say this blog has laid fallow would be an understatement. And I own that. This new job at Vulture is exhausting. In a good way, mind you, but I find myself having to work so quickly that when I leave at the end of the day I feel like someone’s been chasing me with an ax. In a good way. An ax that has an Amazon gift card taped to the blade.

So I come home, help put the kids to bed, and then think, “Tonight I blog!” and then I realize that I can’t quite muster the mental energy to untie my shoes, so writing is right out. So over the past few months I’ve had countless moments where I’ve ‘thought, “That could be a blog post!” and then I never do it. So tonight, when I have the tiniest amount of motivation, I will try to clear my plate of all the things I’ve considered blogging but didn’t, all in short order. I lay no claims to them being interesting or related or otherwise noteworthy. But it's just something I had to do.

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I suppose it was inevitable that Meghan and Cheyne would win. Cheyne has been programmed to only win. If he came in second place, it would negate his entire reason for being, which is to be an example to the world why you should always be number one. If he came in second, his motherboard would short out, the spark would ignite his hair-gel-shellacked mane, and he would begin spinning in circles, flaring like a roman candle, spouting, "SO PROUD OF MEGHAN…SO PROUD OF MEGHAN…SO PROUD OF MEGHAN…"

But win he did, so he was able to patronizingly say how proud he was of Meghan without his face melting. Every time he says that, the subtext is, "I could win this thing on my own, but I decided, what the hell, I'd let Meghan see if she could match up, and she did better than I thought she would."

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I had to do a lot of introspection before recapping tonight's episode. The idea that someone would find unscrambling the word "FRANZ" so impossible that they would rather take a four-hour penalty than continue to try to finish the job flabbergasts me. And normally (as when teams struggled to unscramble "Chekhov" last season) I would revel in the mockery. And yet, when it happens to Big Easy, I just feel sadness, and very subjective defensiveness.

How to reconcile this? For the Roadblock, teams had to enter a K-Mart Kafkaesque "office" full of empty desks and phones. Five of the phones had someone else on the other side of the line, ominously speaking a letter. Once the teammate had collected the letters to spell FRANZ, they needed to go see an uptight "supervisor," who would give them a long form to fill out, at the end of which they had to unscramble their letters correctly. Meghan tried it first, and after one wrong submission, she was free to go. Fine, I thought, teams are showing progress on the international-literature front.

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