'The Amazing Race' recap: Brazilian Taxed

AJA AND TY These long-distance daters barely got any camera time. The only notes I jotted down about them was that they drove in the carpool lane, and got in the wrong line at the airport. Nobody got shorter shrift than them when it came to airtime.

ANTHONY AND STEPHANIE I stand corrected. I'm not entirely convinced this dating couple is actually on this season. When going over my notes on the show, I saw that I had typed their names in the beginning, but never again. Were they contestants, or the people responsible for humping all the contestants' backpacks to the top of the stairs of the L.A. Coliseum?

MARK AND BILL Comic book nerds, easily recognized as such because Bill actually looks like someone traced The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy. And just in case you didn't understand that the comic fans were filling the nerd slot in this race, their introductory video showed them playing nerd calling cards Guitar Hero and chess. Left on the cutting room floor was footage of them trying on Klingon masks and putting tape on the bridges of their glasses. Nerds! Nerds! Nerds! And sweaty ones, at that. When they dashed damply toward the end of the race, my TV set emitted the dank odor of a mildewy copy of a 1988 Silver Surfer comic crossbred with the scent of congealed Lik-m-Aid.

(A side note on these guys: I've noticed that more and more of the teams have been dressing identically over the past few seasons. And yet there's a definite pattern: Only attractive pairs match. Perhaps it's because best-friend blondes and hot lawyer/publicist fiancés are not immediately linkable or distinguishable in the viewers' eyes; at the beginning, before you really know the teams, you could be forgiven for thinking that, say, the hot lawyer was paired with one of the blondes, and putting them in distinctive garb solves that problem. But the comic book nerds and the frat guys don't need to match: When all 11 teams thunder off the starting line, and you see two doughy guys waddling in the middle, you immediately know they go together. Much like when you see the frat guys, you knew, "See those two guys who look like rejects from a Judd Apatow casting call? I assume they're friends to the end."

As I am friends with Blong to the end. I pray each and every night that the U.S. remains allied with Brazil, because if the Blong trade ever seals up, my taste buds will commit suicide. If I have to eat Blong wannabe Starbursts, I will saw my tongue off and stuff it into an empty Skittles bag and shove it up the ass of the man who invented Sour Patch Kids. BLONG! BLONG! BLONG! BLONG!

ANITA AND ARTHUR After the victories by TK and Rachel, and BJ and Tyler, I extrapolated that hippies had a predisposition for winning this game. I'd like to amend that: Faux hippies have the predisposition. Actual original hippies? Not so much. Tie-dyed beekeepers Anita and Arthur, who look like they keep 14 other types of insects nesting in their hair, just in case the bottom drops out of the bee market, loped through the first leg like they were moseying through an old R. Crumb cartoon. (I wish they were forced to walk through the race with one giant foot placed in front of the other like the "Keep On Truckin'" mud flaps.) There is no such thing as a '60s-era hippie in a hurry, thereby making the Amazing Race anathema to them. In the end, they trundled in last, and after being eliminated, Arthur said, "It was a good run." Well, it wasn't, actually, but perhaps he was flashing back to something else that was (his mad dash to get that brown acid everyone was talking about?), so we'll let it slide. After all, we can forgive any hippie for being driven to distraction by having to wheel around boxes of something called Blong. They're delicious enough as they are, but if you ignore the "l" in "Blong," it must bring back a lot of distractingly happy, burbling memories.

So what do you think? Was it too soon for Anita and Arthur to go? Who's your early pick to take it all?

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