Damn.

I was just getting ready to come over here and write a quick post starting, "I really think Steph is going to win this thing."

Just two more minutes to watch Tom get pounded off the island, and that would be that.

Guess not.

(If you didn't watch, and possess no deduction skills whatsoever, Steph got voted off. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, guess you haven't seen Survivor in awhile.)

What is the matter with those women? With Caryn? They can just never, ever, ever get together on this show. Ever. How obvious could the choice have been.

Greg has also been interesting to watch. I really like him, and in some ways I'm most like him. (Right down to his occupation. I used to do the business consulting thing, too. I still do, part-time.) But he seems really weak at flexibility once he's locked into a plan. I know, because I spent years grappling with that problem, first in the Army, then in the corp world. I always got great reviews for my planning, but I always wanted to stick to them. When things changed, I didn't want to.

Hopefully I'm over that. Painful to watch him make the same mistakes. But he just seems clueless about what's going on around him. "Stick to the plan! We have to stick to the plan!" That was your plan, buddy, and a lot of people paid lip service to it but never intended to ride it to the finish line.

And as near as I can tell, the plan called for five people to stick together till they got to five, and guess what, that's one vote away. They're scrambling hard for fresh options.

Fortunately for him, a key adversary wasn't scrambling very well. Caryn. What is wrong with her. Tom invites her to be part of the solid six--a one-woman add-on to the solid five? When there are seven people on the island? What? So he's saying "Stick we me on this vote, and I'll repay you by booting you on the very next vote"? And she went for it?

Oh course we have no idea what Burnett's not showing us.

But come on, girl. Think, a little. You had your chance to make it to the final four, and with the weakest three alongside you, to boot.

These people. Sometimes.

I've enjoyed this show immensely all season, despite one huge underlying problem:

They have no one to win.

Not a single worthy candidate was cast on the entire show. Not even close.

For a long while I have assumed it will be Tana because she's at least sharp and talented. She's so transparently fake and cheeseball, though--can't imagine her fitting into Trump's organization. And after she announced a few weeks ago that she refused all-nighters and curled up in bed instead of finishing the job--well, that's a deal-breaker in my world.

But who is she up against? All far worse.

No time to run through them all tonight, will save that for later, but Alex is just pathetic. So arrogant he never bothers using the resources around him. Why conduct market research, or make us of designers when superman is all-knowing and all-talented in all fields. He consistently turns out embarassing garbage because of it, and refuses to accept it once he gets the bad news. He may be great as a lawyer or individual performer in certain fields, but he has no concept of leading. He only sees himself--what would he use a team for. And he has no concept of business, of appealing to any consumers outside of himself. He's totally on the wrong show.

And yet I bet he interviews really powerfully. And look who he's up against: the wallflower Kendra and the BS-spouter Craig who had his teammates scratching their heads every time he spoke when he got to lead. I don't see either of them impressing in interviews.

So I have a feeling Alex and Tana are going to the finals. One deserving--for this group--one most assuredly not. (Though I might still put him ahead of Craig. Definitely not ahead of Kendra. She's weak, but he's ridiculous.)

They'll have to bend the criteria a bit to get Kendra in there. In the past no college degree has meant automatically dismissal in this round. But given the setup for the season with half the players in that boat, I imagine they'll do it. Plus, I think she'll come off impressively.

So we'll have a sort of repeat of last season's finalle. But instead of brilliant lawyer whose a joke in business against a great rival, we're going to see a similar joke against a non-joke but not qualified either.

Tana will win easily, and heads will be slapped all over Trump Tower, or wherever the hell he houses his HQ. Oh, to get a hidden camera on those reactions. They are going to eat her alive next year.

Or, maybe I'll be wrong on every count. But this show is a hell of a lot easier to predict than Survivor. As it should be.

Terry Schiavo may have transfixxed the country for a week, but the whole now bears down on a tiny pond in Hamburg.

What the hell is behind those exploding toads?

And the first reports seemed quizzical, I had no idea it was this gruesome:

Local environmental workers in Hamburg have described it as a scene out of a horror or science fiction movie, with the bloated frogs agonizing and twitching for several minutes, inflating like a balloon before suddenly bursting.

"It's horrible," biologist Heidi Mayerhoefer was quoted as telling the Hamburger Morgenpost daily.

"The toads burst, the entrails slide out. But the animal isn't immediately dead -- they keep struggling for several minutes."

Normally, I'm not so big on horror movies, real or imagined. But this. I just can't turn away.

Apparently, the trouble has crossed the border to Jutland, Denmark. And continues in Hamburg. And it gets more revolting:

Some vet in Hamburg seems sure it's crows pecking out their livers. Listen to this:

"The crows are clever," said Frank Mutschmann, a Berlin veterinarian who collected and tested specimens at the Hamburg pond. "They learn quickly from watching other crows how to get the livers."

Based on the wounds, Mutschmann said, it appears that a bird pecks into the toad with its beak between the amphibian's chest and abdominal cavity, and the toad puffs itself up as a natural defense mechanism.

But, because the liver is missing and there's a hole in the toad's body, the blood vessels and lungs burst and the other organs ooze out, he said.

AP led with the theory, but wouldn't this activity be highly visible? Aren't there a lot of people watching right now? If they're seeing all the poor suckers grappling in their death throws, wouldn't someone have noticed a thousand crows descending to mount a toad? (Or one incredibly greedy crow with an insatiable hunger for liver darting madly about the pond?)

Over at the Hamburg Institute for Hygiene and the Environment they're rolling their eyes at the bird theory:

We haven't seen that. It might be, it might not be," said institute spokeswoman Janne Kloepper. "It's speculation," until it's observed, she said.

Local authorities are trying to talk people away from a peek at "the death pool." Yeah. I'm sure they're having a lot of success with that. Geraldo is probably boarding a jet even as we speak.