Letters From Camp Koh Tarutao: Cocka-doodle-eww!

Dear Mom,

When we last left our intrepid son in his adventures in Thailand, we had Ghandia being a bitch (I would use the four letter "c" word here, Mom, but I think "cold" isn't the right term for her) and Helen wondering whether or not she had done the right thing in voting off Ghandia over Clay.

Since I'm still camping at Chewing Gum, Jan and I had a nice long talk about her position on the island. She knows that she's the next one to go if they are forced to go to Tribal Council. There's always been something about Jan that I have liked. Now I didn't like the fact that, when Ghandia went on her anti-Ted tirade, Jan didn't go over to Ted to get his side of the story. She just accepted Ghandia's version of events at face value and that was that. But overall, there's something so motherly about her that you just have to love her. She has such a vitality to her that I think is missing in the other campers. Can I just say that watching Jan get her groove on doing the cabbage patch was perhaps the funniest thing that I have seen in my life?

Helen and I also talked after the vote. She told me she completely understood why I told her what I did about taking a look at who is a great contributor to the team and their morale. I kinda knew that it would make a difference in her decision because those Navy people all know about team morale and team unity. She would make a decision that would benefit the group over something that would benefit her personally. She kept saying it was a necessary evil and I have to agree. Ghandia would have been a divisive force on the team pointing barbs at Ted and Brian.

Brian is still pretty much of an enigma. I think that's a good word for him. He's so quiet and unassuming that everyone thinks that they can control him or use them to suit their purposes, but he's just letting people believe that he's their bitch (okay, you would use the term lap dog, but I prefer bitch) and he's ready to take them down whenever it suits his purposes. On the surface, Mom, this is a good idea, but it could ultimately work against him in the final rounds should he advance. Some people just might not understand his motivations and may be apt to work against him.

Clay, meanwhile, has this whole persecution complex. Chewing Gum left their boat without the surest of moorings and it floated off in the middle of the night. He just kept spouting off that if it was him and not Ted who didn't secure the boat, then he would be in the heap of trouble and getting his butt chewed out. It's getting weirder and weirder with him. Everything he does comes with this caveat of if someone else did it and screwed up then it would be okay if he did it then he would get bawled out by everyone. Clay is not winning me over. Maybe he needs to have a corncob-ectomy done to loosen him up just a bit.

Additionally, they are apparently not putting the skills the Red Berets taught them to any use. They are complaining about not finding any food and how hungry they are, but if I am not mistaken, those Red Berets were grabbing plants and chopping them up for a nice salad for which a sea water vinagrette dressing could surely have been made. They get all of this information but it doesn't look like any of them are putting it to any use. I expected Helen at the very least to be storing this information away and pulling it out of her bum when the situation arose.

These people are disappointing me. All of them. You give them a leg up and they just use it to piss on what you've given them.

Over at Sukiyama, Shii Ann is just getting a bad rap. They sacrificed one of the chickens they won in an immunity challenge and then did a long slow boil on it to make it nice and juicy. Now as is our Southern wont, we eat every damn thing on that chicken. The neck, the back, the gizzards. All of it. We pick those bones clean. So for me, it was not really disgusting to watch Shii Ann eat for Robb was so grossed out. He was telling me that her eating habits were gross, but he is one to talk. His hair made him look like a former band member of Motley Crue who had been tossed out because he didn't do enough drugs or alcohol.