Let's start right off with the flying pink elephant in the Big Brother House: Voldedork's imaginary wife.
But first, I must redub him. Last week I named Ronnie Voldedork. It turns out that Ronnie is a gigantic Star Wars geek, while showing no sign of Harry Potter fandom. Why love a current franchise when you can slavishly devote yourself to a film that came out before you were born? When he got the key to the HOH room, he actually called himself "Emperor Palpatine." It was so pathetic, I was embarrassed for him. He's on national TV, for Heaven's sake. So I am changing his name to Emperor Palpatwit.
Now, back to Virgin-for-Life Emperor Palpatwit's "wife." His CBS online bio says he's married. He speaks of his "wife." When we went into his HOH room (preceded by his shrieking like a tween girl spoting Robert Pattinson in the mall), he even had a photo of his kitty Molly with a girl he's passing off as his wife. I believe he has the cat.
If you've ever seen the comedy masterpiece Waiting for Guffman, (and if you haven't, stop reading this, go rent it, watch it, and then come back. You'll thank me.), you may remember that Christopher Guest's sweet, gentle queenish character Corky St.Clair maintains a fiction throughout the film that he has a wife, although no one, including himself, ever sets eyes on her.
If you've been watching the Torchwood miniseries on BBC America this week (and you should be. It's the best thing on TV this summer), you will have encountered the character of Clement MacDonald, who can smell when a person is lying, can smell the truth, can smell aliens, can even smell that Gwen is pregnant, and so forth. Bring Clem to Studio City and give him a good whiff of Emperor Palpatwit, and he'd say, "[sniff] ... Virgin ... [sniff] ... forever ... [sniff] ... liar... [sniff] ... hopeless dork ... [sniff] ... coward ... [sniff] ... embarrassment to his parents ... [sniff] ... Star Wars geek ... [sniff] ... no friends ... [sniff] ... no wife... [sniff] ... no life ... [sniff] ... desperately needs to grow up ... [sniff] ... but never will."
I'm afraid Mrs. Palpatwit is really just another Mrs. Corky St. Clair. I'm sorry, but a website bio and some photoshopped pictures do not convince me that Clem is wrong. No woman is that desperate, and even Helen Keller wasn't that blind. Besides, Emperor Palpatwit keeps telling us he has a wife, and so far, everything else he has said to anyone in the house has been a lie. Palpatwit's life is playing computer games. I'm afraid Mrs. Palpatwit is merely a virtual wife. She's probably a Sim.
Emperor Palpatwit is a man's man. You can tell by his girlish squeals, his delight over getting the Legally Blond the Musical CD in his HOH swag (I saw Legally Blond the Musical, and it's dreadful, and is the only show on Broadway with an all-tween girl audience every performance. Really. No male has ever seen it, not even the men in it. No guy is gay enough to sit through that show, except Emperor Palpatwit.), and his dancing about shrieking, nearly exploding with ecstasy over receiving, and I quote: "A bubble wand! A bubble wand!!!" I keep expecting Kevin to tell him, "Palpatwit, you're an embarrassment to gay people, and you're straight." Bruno is butcher.
Emperor Palpatwit sold around the house this week a plan to backdoor Russell, although my reading of Russell is that he'd be the one doing the "backdooring," as he is clearly a top. He discussed it with everyone but Russell himself. Russell seemed to be helping him with it, by exploding at Lydia (no small liar herself) for no reason whatever, pissing off most of the houseguests.
Russell is identified onscreen as a "Mixed Martial Arts Fighter." Mixed-Up Martial Arts Fighter would be more accurate. In any event, he's actually a real estate broker. (He's also a facial hair doodler, having had a beard for part of the week, then a Fu Manchu mustache, and I've learned that, after the HOH competition that ended this week's eviction show, he became clean shaven again. I wonder if his fancy follicle cropping extends into his pants.)
As Russell is the best-looking guy in the house, I want him to stay right where he is. Also, since he's borderline psychotic (and I'm not sure which side of that border he's on, either), keeping him in the house reduces the chances of my running into him on a sidewalk just as one of his 'roid rages hits. So I was not on board with the plan to backdoor Russell, and neither, it seems, was Emperor Palpatwit, who, not to put too fine a point on it, chickened out when it came time to put Russell up. It was cowardice, pure and simple. Emperor Palpatwit was afraid of Russell going off on him if he got nominated. (Which, as we will see, turned out to be dripping with irony.) As Palpatwit might say to the son his imaginary wife will never give him, "Luke, you don't know the power of the scaredy-cat side of the Force!"
In my first Big Brother recap, I went over my first impressions of everyone in the house. Now, two weeks in, I have a better handle on them. I've dealt above with Russell and Palpatwit. Here are the others.
Casey: Actually married to a real woman. Not really a bad guy, even if he voted to keep the racist surfer Braden last week. I'm finding him someone I could actually stand to be around, although not when he's smoking. Anyone who can't stand Chima can't be all bad.
The Breasts called Laura: While they are not utterly vacuous, they are lousy strategists, which is why they were evicted this week.
Chima: Very self-centered, full-of-herself, imperious, obnoxious diva, with all the charm of Joseph Stalin, but not the wit.
Natalie: Still a wild card. I'm not loving her, but she hasn't actually done anything to make me truly despise her yet. Likes to stir the pot.
Michele: Also has a real-life marriage to an actual spouse, though she has admitted (on the feeds, not on CBS) to being bisexual. Let's hope her hubby only watches the broadcasts. Likable and smart, she's still flying under the radar. Palpatwit tried to get his treachery in last week's vote blamed on her, but failed. She called out Jordan (again, off the air) for her use of the word "fag," which, as a part-time lesbian, she finds offensive.
Kevin: My first impression of Kevin as a bitchy attitude queen has not altered.
Lydia the Tattooed Lady: I liked Lydia at first, but I am so over that! She's a liar, and she's as likely to go off on 'roid rage explosions of senseless fury as Russell is. She blew up at Jordan last week for not crying when Lydia was nominated. Huh? She's also vindictive. I want her gone. I'm now certain Groucho was singing about someone else.
Jessie: At least on the air, Jessie has been keeping a lid on his more egregious idiocy and egostism. As he is now the new HOH, perhaps this week his true ego will come leaking out once more.
Jeff: An insurance salesman from Chicago. Were I only seeing CBS, I'd like Jeff. He's the second-most attractive man in the house (That's right, Jessie, you're number 3), and his illiteracy can be amusing. But on the live feeds, he's been using "fag" also. And while Jordan's use of it isn't intended maliciously -- she's just too ignorant to know that it's offensive - Jeff employs it as an insult. There is no excuse for this, not even in Chicago.
Jordan: My first impression of Jordan was that she was sweet but not very bright. Well, people who use "fag" in their everyday conversation are not sweet. Plus, it turns out that calling her "not-too-bright" is like referring to the nuke dropped on Hiroshima as a "Bic lighter." A vacuum is more intelligent than Jordan. On Tuesday's show we had this exchange:
Jordan: "I don't know how to really tell time on a clock. ... Like if people say, um, 'a quarter to,' I'm always like 'what time is that?'."
Jeff: "So if someone says 'it's like a quarter to eight,' you don't know what time it is?
Jordan: "Nope."
Jeff: "How many quarters are in an hour?"
Jordan: "20?"
Jeff: "How many quarters are in an hour?"
Jordan: "Four?"
Jeff: "Right. And how long are each quarter?"
Jordan: "25?"
Jeff: "No. How many minutes are in an hour?"
Jordan: "60."
Jeff: "Okay, divide that by 4."
Jordan: "Hang on -- four -- 25?"
Jeff: "25? That's a hundred."
Jordan: "Wait. Hang on. Shut up. 4 divided by 60, so one time..."
Jeff: "What's half of 60?"
Jordan: "30."
Jeff: "What's half of 30?"
Jordan: "15."
Jeff: "Okay, how many quarters are in an hour?"
Jordan: "20... Shut up! 45?"
She works nights as a waitress. How does she make change? Tennessee is apparently a third-world country. My cat can tell time better than that. (He knows when it's Dinner Time!) She thinks her stupidity is cute. It's disgusting.
There was a "reward" challenge to pick two houseguests to watch a movie being released this week. Since Columbia isn't paying me for product placement, I shall not mention the movie's title, just that it stars one of my favorite male hunks, and a full-of-herself TV actress I can not stand, and that it got a "C+" in its review in today's issue of Entertainment Weekly. This isn't a reward; it's a punishment. And since Chima won from the women, poor Casey, who was the winning man, got a double punishment, as he finds Chima as insufferable as I do.
In the punishment challenge, Palpatwit came out at one point dressed as Princess Leia in her gold bikini. Yeah, he's married. Imagine Jabba the Hut in Leia's bikini, only more revolting. I missed the end of the challenge, as I had to bolt for the Little Girl's Room to spend a quarter of an hour, that's 45 minutes in Jordan Time, puking.
Laura's Breasts and Jeff were nominated for eviction by Palpatwit. Jeff won Power of Veto, and took himself off. Palpatwit then turned yellow, and betrayed everyone in the house except Russell by going back on his promise to replace Jeff with Russell, and put up Jordan. I was fine with that. I wouldn't miss either Moron Girl or Laura's Breasts. My first week comment that the Populars were "the pretty kids who were popular with themselves. No one else could ever stand the little snots," has turned out to be true. There's only one of them left, after a mere two evictions. Apparently they are The Unpopulars.
But this unleashed a firestorm in the house. Russell found out that Palpatwit was trying to blame him for Palpie's own plotting, and all of Palpatwit's lies and machinations came out, his treacheries were exposed, Russell went ballistic, and the whole house all turned on the Emperor. The Dork Lord of the Sith found that his Jedi mind tricks no longer work, and everyone has joined me in loathing him. I'll bet that, in The Sim Virtual Universe, even the imaginary Mrs. Palpatwit is filing for divorce, or in her case, deletion.
The Emperor spends his "normal" life sitting alone in his room playing video games, avoiding all human contact. Now, in a house in which everyone hates him, Palpatwit's life pattern has recreated itself, as he spent the rest of this week hiding, locked away in the HOH room, not even coming out for meals, because Russell was waiting outside the door to holler abuse at him nonstop every time he stepped outside the room. It was hilarious and lovely.
Laura's Breasts were reluctantly voted out ( a double eviction!) by a household that only wants to evict Palpatwit. He can not win now, because even if he survived to the last two, the jury won't vote him the winner over anyone. He's now reduced to weeping like a little girl in the diary room (Where is Tom Hanks to tell him that "There's no crying in The Sith!"?), and moaning about how much he misses his imaginary wife. She is so welcome to him.
Oh, and a small word of advice to Julie Chenbot, as Edina said to Saffy on Absolutely Fabulous when Saffy was with child, "Be sure to tell people you're pregnant. Otherwise, people will just think you're fat." Wise words.
Jessie won HOH at the end of the show. With emotions running wild, it promises to be an entertaining summer. See you all next week.
Cheers darlings.
To read more of Tallulah Morehead, go to
The Morehead the Merrier.