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Survive This
by Bill Vaughn
Rejected-twice!-by the people behind the phony "reality-based" TV adventure show, our vengeful writer pays a surprise visit to Survivor's Island shoot to wreak some authentic havoc.

Bill Vaughn's Loose Lips
Predictions, curses, and wisdom: Now back stateside, Bill's watching each episode with a careful eye and a very sharp pen.

Episode Thirteen
The Final Chapter: The Fat Guy goes home with a cool million.

Episode Twelve:
For what is this rough beast, it's hour come at last.

Episode Eleven:
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Episode Ten:
Rudy! Rudy! burning bright, in the forests of the night.

Episode Nine:
We Who Are About to Die Salute You

Episode Eight:
An Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend

Episode Seven:
Two Tribes Bad. One Tribe Good.

Episode Six:
Joel Falls Prey to the Matriarchy

Episode Five:
Dirk Swims with the Fishes

Episode Four:
Bill Announces the Big Winner

Surviving Survivor:
Bill Vaughn's Loose Lips
Notes on Episode Four and the Big Winner

By Bill Vaughn

Woe is Ramona. The 29-year-old New Jersey chemist ate her rat-on-a-stick and her squirmy beetle grub with gusto, and gave her all in the treasure chest contest. But, as Jenna said, it was all just too little, too late. When her Pagong tribemates voted Ramona off the island and she walked the Walk of Shame out of my life, I knew I would miss looking at her agreeable frame and listening to her incendiary laugh, but I was not sad. Nor was I surprised. And if you read "Survive This!" in the July issue of Outside Magazine, the account of my efforts to sabotage the boffo CBS summer hit Survivor, you also already knew that Ramona's fate was sealed.

As I reported, she was one of the main topics of gossip among certain large-mouthed CBS film crews as they relaxed in the bars and around the pool at the Magellan Sutera Hotel, 60 miles from Pulau Tiga, the small rain forest island off the northern coast of Borneo where filming had been going on for three weeks when I arrived on the scene in early April. My goal was to seek revenge for being rejected not only as a Survivor contestant, but as a journalist covering the show as well. So I concealed myself among the hotel's gardenia bushes and orchid trees in order to eavesdrop on conversations, or found ways to be near the CBS crews as they lounged around waiting for their turn to go back to the island and work.

Ramona, of course, had faltered her first day on the island. She seemed wilted by the heat and humidity. She couldn't keep down any food, not even a simple meal of boiled rice served in a coconut shell. She groaned. She whined.

I assumed she was pregnant. But she told the cloyingly effervescent hosts of the CBS Early Edition on Thursday, June 22 that because she wasn't a "water-drinker" she had become dehydrated by Pulau Tiga's fierce equatorial glare, and had never fully recovered—an odd mistake for someone whose profession revolves around the effect of one substance on another.

And speaking of substances, I see now how effective my main strategy as a Survivor contestant would have been. My plan was to swallow a Baggie full of vintner's yeast before going ashore so I could secretly make wine from the mangosteens and other tropical fruits thriving on the island. In my strategy, I would become the island's revered Boozemaster, rewarding my allies with my fine product and punishing my enemies by denying them the sauce. Of course, since Ramona couldn't keep down anything until it was too late, I wouldn't even have been forced to make a decision concerning her ration. I would have drunk it myself.

As you know from reading my article, one of the upcoming ejectees from the show will be Joel, the traveling salesman from Arkansas. Joel has already begun to irritate the increasingly threadbare psyches of some of his Pagong tribemates with his bossiness, and may not be long for that world.

And now check out the ages of the contestants. Most of them are in their 20s and 30s; the oldest of this group, at 39, being the manipulative and evil Richard. On the even older end was 62- year-old Sonia, the show's first ejectee. Then there was 64-year-old B.B., who got kicked off the island after proclaiming that the only thing stupider than a cow was a woman (in my article I quoted a CBS crewman who incorrectly identified B.B. as "Bob"). And finally there is the cranky and demanding Rudy, the 72-year- old Navy Seal. But where are the Baby Boomers, the contestants aged 40 to 55? The Bill Clinton generation? My generation? Producer Mark Burnett promised America he was seeking a true cross-section of the Republic—but he lied.

Moving on, the tabloids are falling all over each other trying to pin down the winner of Survivor. The National Enquirer has narrowed the field to a short list of four contestants, and is willing to pay serious cash for information leading to irrefutable evidence of who will take home the One Million Dollars. Because of all those gabby crew people—loose lips sink ships, my friends!—I am 95 percent certain of the Final Survivor, America's newest millionaire. So why should I monkey- wrench CBS and publish this name? Well, first, because they rejected me as a contestant. Then they rejected me as a reporter. Then they scheduled me to appear on the CBS Early Edition as a "commentator." But at the last moment I was bumped because the producers wanted instead the geeky little pinhead who penned a predictable piece in Time magazine about the show.

Anyway, I am 94 percent certain that the Last Man Standing is Rudy, the 72-year-old Navy Seal.

Next week, after dissecting the winners and loser again, I'll move on to my second strategy for winning, and touch on some of the sights and sounds and smells of coastal Borneo.

Surviving Survivor:
Bill Vaughn's Loose Lips
Notes on Episode Five: Dirk Swims with the Fishes

By Bill Vaughn

In the end, not even the Creator had enough clout to prevent Dirk's Tagi tribemates from booting him off the island in the fifth episode of Survivor, which aired on Wednesday, June 28. The bible-thumping dairy farmer began to seem slightly wigged out a couple of episodes ago by the heat and his failure to catch fish, and also by truck driver Susan's relentless nagging: "How's the fishing?" "Catch anything?" "Where's the fish?" But it was Dirk's cloying evangelical zeal as much as his growing skinniness and deteriorating physical condition that finally convinced Susan and Rudy and the others that The Believer just had to go. His banishment was set up, of course, by Kelly getting her butt kicked in the rowing contest by Gervase, which resulted in a Tagi defeat by Tribe Pagong. "I got beat by a guy who can't even fucking swim," Kelly lamented.

No one cares about Dirk, but where have all the fish gone? Is it a simple case of over-fishing? Is there some connection between these bereft seas and the mysterious slick reported last year on the windward side of Pulau Tiga? East Malaysian authorities began cracking down a year ago on local fishermen who were so frustrated with the dearth of finny protein they had begun dynamiting the area's reefs to bring up the bacon. The stingrays Richard speared and the eel he caught last night seem to be the only things swimming around, except for the sea kraits, the deadly serpents that make eels their favorite meal.

So what's with all the jewelry and geegaws the contestants are wearing? Isn't this supposed to be a pristine wilderness where man and woman, naked under the sky, stripped of the decadent accoutrements of civilization, go to find out who they really are? Check out the hardware wrapped around Richard's neck, for example. And Sean's nipple ring. And Kelly's collection of earrings and clips. Or Susan's matching Wal-Mart-quality turquoise ear bobs and necklace? What are these people doing all day when they're not on camera? Shopping?

If the government of the state of Sabah is right, and Americans are going to be attracted to north Borneo in droves because of this CBS monster hit, they're going to find plenty to see and do and smell and taste in places other than the Survivor island of Pulau Tiga. For one thing, they can fly up to Sandakan and see the wildlife at the Sepilok Orangutan Centre. A charming deaf British tourist I had mistakenly spied on when I was gathering Survivor secrets was an accountant named Stuart McNaughton, who told me that on his visit there a young female orangutan had swooped down from a tree, snatched his pack, scampered back up the tree, and ate not only his sun block, his passport and his malaria pills, but his hearing aids as well, which he wasn't wearing at the time because sweat caused by the 90 percent-plus humidity had been shorting them out.

Next time: a visit to Mount Kinabalu and my account of the hellish cab ride from my hotel, through the jungle, to Kuala Penyu. And look for Joel to get his comeuppance in next week's episode, or maybe the one after that.

Finally, that single vote June 28 against my man Rudy is worrisome, but he's weathered adversity before. I still believe the Old Crank will win.

Surviving Survivor:
Bill Vaughn's Loose Lips
Notes on Episode Six: Joel Falls Prey to the Matriarchy

By Bill Vaughn

As Joel Klug discovered on the July 5 episode of Survivor, the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. The heartless matriarchy dominating Tribe Pagong finally wearied of Joel's bossiness and condescension and booted his sorry ass straight off the island, even though he had excelled as a spear chucker, a butcher of rats, and a builder of shelter. But Joel, 28, who's been variously described by the slippery suits at CBS as a fitness consultant, a financial consultant, and a traveling salesman from Arkansas, made the mistake of coming to the defense of the charming but worthless Gervase Peterson, the 30-year-old basketball coach, who had been heard by the Pagong's distaff side uddering that the only thing stupider than a girl was a cow. Bad move, Joel, this underestimation of the femme cabal, and a bad move as well for Gervase, because his big mouth probably means that within an episode or two he will be walking the Walk of Shame himself.

Of course, in Survive This!, which is featured in the July issue of Outside, I predicted, based on first-hand surveillance of CBS production people while I was in Borneo, that Joel was not long for the island. Meanwhile, my man Rudy, the 72-year-old ex Navy Seal who I predict will take home all the bacon, continues to bide his time, untangle the Machiavellian implications of the historic merger of Tribe Tagi and Tribe Pagong, and attempt to avert his eyes from the acres of pale fat flesh Richard is so willing to display for the world. Although Rudy tries to maintain a low profile, he can't always keep his feelings to himself, remarking last week in regard to the Bible-thumping of Dirk the Dairy Farmer, that he, Rudy, was religious as well but would only bring a Good Book to the island if he thought he'd need some toilet paper.

Meanwhile, Americans are already showing up in Borneo to see the island of Pulau Tiga, with their own eyes, where the show was filmed between March 14 and April 20. If you're compelled to make this long journey you owe it to yourself while in East Malaysia to climb the highest peak in Southeast Asia, Mt. Kinabalu, some 40 miles from the Sabah state capital of Kota Kinabalu. By all accounts, this is not a difficult walk, even for someone who's never climbed at all, although the mountain is almost 14,000 feet high and there is a 150 feet of a bouldered steepness to negotiate by stationary rope. My friend Wilmott Ragsdale from Hartsteen Island, Washington, made the ascent when he was 82 years old. "You've got coastal jungle and rain forest at the base," he said. "Then that turns into an evergreen forest at 11,000 feet, where there's a rest house where you can spend the night and get a simple hot meal. Then you pass through the timber line along a dry streambed and the summit is bare granite. From there you can see all the way to the Philippines." What did he like most about the climb? "The wild raspberries. They're bigger than ours, and they're orange."

More about Borneo next week, and an account of my wild ride through the coastal jungle with the enigmatic Mr. Suardi, my Indonesian cabdriver.

Surviving Survivor:
Bill Vaughn's Loose Lips
Notes on Episode Seven: Two tribes bad. One tribe good.

By Bill Vaughn

And so the watershed merger of Tribe Tagi and Tribe Pagong on the July 12 episode of Survivor is in the can. The flag of this new, improved entertainment product shall be green. And its name shall be Rattana.

Say what? Rattana? You mean, the cast members named themselves after furniture? Three weeks on an actual preserve of equatorial wildness and the only nom de sport these turnips could come up with is no more exotic than the wickerwork chairs you can find in any import market?

Actually surprising, however, is the ejection of the alpha female, Gretchen Cordy, the 38-year-old homemaker and survivalist trainer. Gretchen, of course, was a major threat to my man Rudy Boesch, the squared-away 72-year-old former Navy Seal whom I have predicted will triumph as America's most famous new millionaire on Survivor's last episode in August. And so I was not sorry to see her get the boot, to see her tiki torch extinguished.

So what is Rattana's future? Since Ramona and Joel have been voted off—whose names I pilfered from eavesdropped conversations while in Borneo—I no longer have any inside info about who'll get the sack. Now I am forced, like everyone else, to speculate. One possibility is that Rattana will begin the delicious business of turning on the weak, those chronic under-achievers such as Gervase. Or Colleen, who makes the other creatures on Pulau Tiga that suck and bite for a living look like wannabees. Meanwhile, Rudy continues to slide through his days on the island without giving quarter, nor asking for it, although he has entered into an evil alliance with Richard, Kelly, and Susan. "I was 180 degrees out," Rudy said, explaining his sudden political effervescence. "But then I seen the light. If you want to win the money you gotta get dirty."

And what about Rudy's opinion of the merger of the two tribes? "It's a pain in the ass."

So what does he think about the new folks in camp? "Some of the stuff they talk about don't interest me," he groused. "They talk a lot about sex."

And Rudy has already cultivated an attitude about Jenna. "She ain't shut up since she's been here."

Another possibility is that in a dialectical manner an opposing alliance will be formed to challenge Rudy's powerful cadre, which accounted for the four votes against Gretchen. This alliance would probably be composed of Gervase, Colleen, Greg (Colleen's squeeze), and Jenna. If the tribe continues to eat the strong, refuting all theories about the survival of the fittest, its next meal will be likely be Sean Kenniff, the 30-year-old neurologist who wasted hours building a bowling alley on Tagi Beach in an earlier episode. He might avoid this fate, however, if he finds asylum in an alliance.

On the home front, not to be outdone by Richard, I have been giving radio interviews from my office completely nekkers. It was during one such interview, with a Phoenix station, that I heard the voice of my nemesis for the first time. Mark Burnett, Survivor's executive producer, said he considers me "irresponsible" for trying to get the contestants drunk the day I stormed the island.

"Can you imagine what would happen if starving people were given alcohol?" he fussed. Well, viewers of the July 12 episode found out. Sean and Jenna, acting as ambassadors from each tribe, were brought to the sand spit for a high-level conference and sleepover. Burnett's minions laid on four bottles of wine for the hungry negotiators. And what happened next? They drank the wine and got drunk and the next day, oh my God, they had hangovers!

But let's go back to Borneo and my wild cab ride from the Sutera Magellan Hotel in the Sabah state capital of Kota Kinabalu to the fishing village of Kuala Penyu so I could find a boat and sabotage the show. Raj, a hotel doorman, had found me a cab owner willing to drive me 70 miles south through the jungle for 250 ringgits, about $70. This guy was Mr. Suardi, and he had an almost new Suburu with actual seatbelts. The only problem with Mr. Suardi, an Indonesian, was that he didn't speak English, and I didn't speak Bahasa. Our silence as we left the environs of KK was alright with me, because I was busy taking in the scenery. The canopied jungle, the mangrove swamps, the houses on stilts, the children playing a chicken game in which they ran across the two-lane blacktop in front of 60-mile-an-hour traffic, veiled Muslim women wrapped in canary-yellow-and-blue sarongs walking inches from the pavement, the narrow shoulder where it seems that all of Malaysia wanted to be, the dogs, the goats, the chickens, vendors selling melons, old men on bicycles. And then Mr. Suardi got profoundly lost and the pavement turned into rutted yellow clay spiked with rocks, and water buffalo bearing white egrets on their backs refused to get out of the way until we stopped the cab and shooed them off the path. Time passed. The cab began rattling. The jungle began humming. It rained briefly. Then it rained again. I assumed we would be attacked by road bandits and slaughtered. But as you know from reading my article, Mr. Suardi finally found Kuala Penyu and the next leg of Bill's Excellent Adventure would begin.

Next week, more fun things to do in Borneo that don't involve liquor.

Surviving Survivor:
Bill Vaughn's Loose Lips
Notes on Episode Eight: An enemy of my enemy is my friend.

By Bill Vaughn

Like army ants, Klub Rudy has morphed into a superorganism that devours everything in its path. On the July 19 episode, the alliance scoured the jungle, then feasted on the gooey and vaguely repellent carcass of Greg Buis, the 24-year-old smarty-pants who first amused and later irritated everyone by holding forth on an imaginary cell phone while his tribemates sweated to build shelter, and slinking off every night for steamy couplings with Colleen Haskell. But when he won the archery contest and was rewarded by the smarmy Jeff Probst with the chance to make his own personal video for the folks back home, the Brown University graduate crossed the cordon sanitaire dividing the public nuisance from the public pervert. "Some of us felt you," he told his sister, who had alarmed Tribe Rattana by making lewd monkey gestures at her brother via video and also lewd monkey noises. "And others of us just imagined what it's like to feel you."

My man Rudy, the excellent 72-year-old former Navy Seal, was not amused. "I can't understand a guy talkin' to his sister that way," the ancient mariner from Virginia huffed. "It sounded like Greg was talkin' maybe incest."

Whatever it was that that Greg was talkin', he revealed for producer Mark Burnett's camera that when it came to Colleen the thing beating in his chest was not a sacre couer at all, but just a little black heart.

"You bring this little kitty along," he explained. "You have your little kitten. And you enjoy your kitten. And the kitten sleeps with you every night. And then you're hungry. And you look right in the kitten's eye and you snap its neck."

"We got to put up with this for about two more weeks," Rudy told Greg's sister on camera. "Then we might kill him. Is that doin' you a favor?"

But Klub Rudy, of course, decided it couldn't handle two more weeks of Greg.

"It's cut and dried that we eliminate somebody every time," Rudy explained, outlining the certainty that he and his Tagi tribemates -- Kelly, Richard, and Susa -- will pick off the others one at a time until only the foursome remains. "And if we don't I'll have to break somebody's kneecap or sumpin'." It had been Rudy's idea that Gretchen get the boot in the July 12 episode. "I thought she was gonna be the next leader."

Meanwhile, now that Greg is back with his sister Colleen will have to go without her nightly dose of Vitamin F -- look for her to get fatter. And speaking of fatter, it appears that the others have been putting on a little heft after weeks of getting skinnier. Maybe it's because of that pizza from Ferdinand's Restaurant I saw ferried to the island via chopper while I was spying on crew members at the Magellan Sutera Hotel. Maybe it's the recent finny harvests Richard has been bringing up from the reefs. Or maybe the cast is simply sitting down to dinner every night with the crew.

It wouldn't be the only thing about Survivor that's cooked. The immunity contests, for example, including the rope-and-carabiner race from the July 19 episode, and the treasure hunt and the relay races on earlier installments, have obviously been rehearsed. And, of course, there's nothing about the editing of what must have been thousands of hours of tape that bears any resemblance to the spontaneous. On the July 19 episode we witnessed Gervase lying around while the others work and playing cards while the others sweat. Although admittedly a charming wastrel, the man must be lifting a finger around camp once in a while. But showing that would destroy the apparent seamlessness of his sloth.

Whatever, the jungle has crowded back in on the space where this noisome American television event took place, and Borneo has returned to normal. The Malaysians gather as always in the markets and the cafes, speaking softly to one another in the Malay manner, a sound as soothing as the muttering of geese (in his collection called The Borneo Stories, Somerset Maugham wrote about the sensitivity of the Malay's temperament and how one should never raise one's voice to them).

Across the bay from the Sabah state capital of Kota Kinabalu travelers are still flocking to the five gleaming pulaus, or islands, of Tunku Abdul Rahman Park to snorkel and sail and swim among the coral reefs. And for those who want something a little scarier, something more akin to being trapped in a debris shelter with Richard, Sabah offers some big whitewater in rivers such as the Padas or the Kiulu, which come roaring down from the Crocker Range paralleling the coast of North Borneo.

Some thoughts about Malaysian food and architecture next week, and a visit to the central market in Kota Kinabalu.

Surviving Survivor:
Bill Vaughn's Loose Lips
Notes on Episode Nine: We Who Are About to Die Salute You

By Bill Vaughn

You could see it in their eyes, the stunned and helpless gaze of deer frozen by the headlights of a speeding truck on a jungle road. At the wheel of this relentless vehicle, this supercharged hum-vee that swerves not nor slows one whit for any poor critter wandering the night, is the ancient mariner, Rudy Boesch, force-marching Klub Rudy through the dark to a place that's bright. This time it was the blubbery and camera-loving Jenna Lewis who made the mistake of getting in the way. The splat sound she made when propelled from the island by Rudy's powerful Tagi alliance will haunt Sean Kenniff all the days of his life, for it was the obtuse neurologist's spavined "plan," his ejectile voting based solely on the alphabet, that sealed Jenna's fate.

Klub Rudy ruled the night yet again even though one of its co-conspirators has jumped from the vehicle. The wishy-washy Kelly Wigglesworth, the 23-year-old river guide who apparently has still not regained her senses after getting creamed in the rowing contest by the wastrel Gervase Peterson, decided that her best interests lay in Girl Power, the shadowy alliance of Colleen and Jenna, especially after the sisterhood caught its first fish in a crab pot and began dancing around in matching tank tops.

"I thought about a female alliance," the Rudester mused, "and watching them walk around hand in hand I even thought about lesbianism." Was he alarmed by the rise of a competing alliance? "It could happen if they had enough brains," he said. "But I don't think they got enough brains."

With each episode Rudy grows stronger. On July 26 he won the immunity challenge by whipping everyone else in a game of go that employed human bodies instead of counters. When he was awarded the immunity necklace and gazed happily at the jungly talisman at its center, I saw a man smiling all the way to the bank. Yet he doesn't crow about his successes, nor does he cease his service to Tribe Rattana—he keeps the campfire going at Rowdy Rudy's Cafe and boils the rice three times a day. And he still understands that in the face of so much Rattana deviance, eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.

Take, for example Richard Hatch's decision to spend his 39th birthday in his birthday suit, although he finally threw something on when the others complained about his butt crack. "When I go home," Rudy said, "and my wife asks me who was with you I'll say a queer who ran around bare-assed half the time."

Unless Sean finally sees the poverty of his alphabet strategy Klub Rudy will simply pile their votes onto his, and it will be the traitor, Kelly, who'll get thumped in next week's episode (still, hon, it's better than getting your kneecaps broken by Rudy).

And check out the product placement in the July 26 episode, the bottles of Bud Lite prominently displayed at the reward barbecue Colleen won for herself and her newest bestest soul-mate, Jenna. Again, Producer Mark Burnett has some nerve scolding me on Phoenix radio for trying to get the players drunk with Bombay gin when I stormed the island. (My initial strategy when I applied to be a contestant was to smuggle in vintner's yeast on or in my person, in order to make fruit wine for everyone, and thus as tribal Boozemaster to control the island. But Burnett is now laying just as much booze on these "starving" people as I would have, and is thus controlling the island himself using my own alcohol strategy. Maybe I should find an attorney and sue for theft of intellectual property.)

And speaking of the guy who claims to be a former paratrooper in the British army, Burnett describes the process of eliminating contestants on Survivor as "social Darwinism." That's a dandy conceit, of course, as long as the bootees are sweet old ladies like Sonja or crazy old coots like B.B. But Klub Rudy has already ejected three of Rattana's strongest pillars. Eating the fittest bears no resemblance to the animal societies Darwin saw from the Beagle, and Survivor looks less like the institutional victimization of the weak that thrives under capitalism than it does the subjugation of the strong that is the hallmark of the dictatorship of the proletariat that festers under communism.

In East Malaysia you can see both sorts of economies thriving—each one marked by an opposing tradition in building styles. For example, there's the Central Market in Kota Kinabalu, the state capital of Sabah. Here are a couple acres of covered booths packed with locals and the occasional foreigner haggling over everything from exotic melons and weird spices and dried beasts from the ocean to the pearls I bought my wife, Kitty. The market lies firmly in the tin-roofed shanty style of Malaysian "architecture" (although the country boasts the tallest building in the world and is now fabricating the world's longest). The variations are only twofold—boxy concrete slabs, or shacks on stilts built in swamps or polluted tidal basins, which the Malaysians refer to as "water villages" without any apparent irony. An exception to this squalor is the traditional longhouse built by indigenous communal peoples in northwest Borneo such as the Rungus. Their longhouses, whose steep-pitched roofs are thatched, all face the sacred summit of Mount Kinabalu. In a gesture to the beauty and functionality of these buildings the vast lobby of the elegant Magellan Sutera Hotel in KK is built along the lines of a longhouse, open to the sea and the mountains on either end, filled with the sound of gongs blowing in the sultry breezes, which are perfumed with the smell of salt water and tropical blossoms.

Next week, I'll finally get to some thoughts on Malaysian food that I promised in last week's column.

Surviving Survivor:
Bill Vaughn's Loose Lips
Notes on Episode Ten: Rudy! Rudy! burning bright, in the forests of the night.

By Bill Vaughn

After Richard the Rotund confounded his many foes on Day 29 by winning the fire contest and thus immunity, it looked like Klub Rudy's justice would be swift and sure. I predicted, along with many in the growing cottage industry of Survivor psychics, that it would be the Tagi traitor Kelly Wigglesworth who would get the axe she so richly deserves. But it was Dr. Sean who confounded us all. Proving it's the dull blade that draws the most blood, the neurologist abandoned the alphabet silliness that had targeted Little Miss K as the next bootee, and cast his death vote, along with those of Klub Rudy and Kelly herself, against the valueless but affable Gervase Peterson.

Although Gervase had shown himself to be completely unproductive, spending his days in paradise playing cards, basking in the old hammock, and avoiding work with the fervor of a Tassajara Buddhist shunning television, the Philly basketball coach outdistanced all of Rattana when it came to matters reproductive. The island was all atwitter over the message he received on Day 28, along with a cigar, that his fourth child had been born, this one a bastard just like the other little G's. The Rudester was not amused. "I don't agree with babies out of wedlock, that kind of garbage. Half the problem they got in this country today there's no family life." Gazing at the rising tide and its promise of the cleansing Pulau Tiga so obviously needed, the ancient mariner held forth on all this trouble we're having with Our Republic. "And then they're blaming the schools. It starts way before them kids go to school. They need a family. They need someone to bean 'em on the head."

We knew that Gervase the Gerbil was up Shit Creek without a paddle when he couldn't get his torch to stay lit during the immunity challenge, the fire-building contest. Mark Burnett s moles, of course, had arranged it that way. (Come on, Mark, despite your disclaimers about the stringent laws governing the production of game shows, everyone knows this goose is cooked). And speaking of the orchestrations of Survivor's executive producer, the pizza I saw ferried from the Magellan Sutera Hotel in Kota Kinabalu by chopper finally made its way on camera as a reward for the winner of the luxury contest, the bamboo pole race, which, weirdly enough, happened to be The Gerbil. Rudy, of course, the Navy Seal who was awarded the Bronze Star for his 45 combat missions during the Vietnam War, waved away Gervase's offer of a bite, because accepting favor from a man without honor would not be honorable. And the Rudester, above all things, stays true to himself.

"I'll probably never see these people again," Rudy mused. "It's the way I want it."

I don't blame you, Commander Boesch. Anyway, viewers should stay sharp in the final episodes by scouring the set for the unbelievable-too much eye shadow, say. And where's all that bikini hair that ought to be sprouting like weeds along a Forest Service logging road (after all, the ladies have spent more than a month in the "wilderness" at this point in the show). Also, check out those patrol boats bobbing on the horizon, the ones full of CBS goons patrolling for trespassers. That they never nabbed me when I stormed the island is a testament less to my agility than to their sloth.

And now a few words about Malaysian food.

Back at the hotel following Episode Ten, recent ejectiles Greg Buis and Jenna Lewis made a date with the The Gerbil for a sumptuous Malaysian sit-down dinner, poolside at the Five Sails Restaurant. There would be lots of drink. They laughed. They cried. They ordered some chicken satay, spicy grilled strips of Asian fowl skewered on skinny sticks sharpened at both ends, and dipped in peanut sauce. Meat-on-a-stick is no stranger to corndog-loving Americans, and will probably replace the gyros and the fajita as the Republic's next fast-food craze. They wondered how Richard could maintain his full figure on the paltry 1500 calories everyone was getting, while they washed down their satay with many yummy local beers, such as Tiger and Asahi, the bottles weeping in the sweet, humid breezes wafting in from the South China Sea. Was Richard able to absorb nutrients from this rich air, thus keeping his weight the same as a pregnant manatee, or was he sneaking out at night to harvest for himself all the sugar cane and tapioca CBS planted?

Gervase discussed his fear of contraception. Jenna allowed as how when she got back to the States she was going to make some serious bucks posing nekkers for magazines, although she hoped it wouldn't interfere with her career as an actress in soap operas. Greg said that although he had pretended to be sort of gay in order to court Richard's favor, what he really wanted was his sister.

The threesome, now completely hammered, ordered their main course. Gervase had braised oxtail in a hot-and-sour-sauce, a dish the Malaysians call Ekor Assam Pedas, Jenna had Gaeng Keow Wan Gai, green curry with chicken and eggplant, and Greg, still thinking about his sister, went for the Udang Kalio, enormous curried tiger prawns. They wolfed down everything, then ordered some more sticky rice, and hoovered that as well, along with a pitcher of famous Malaysian jungle juice fresh-squeezed from tropical fruit, which Greg laced with Absolut. Greg and Jenna had to carry Gervase back to his room in the Marina Wing of the hotel. Before he drifted off to dreamland, he caressed the complementary bowl of miniature bananas and quince laid on by the staff every day, and whispered to himself: "I swear on the souls of my children, at least the ones I know about, that I will never be hungry again." Next week, some thought regarding Malaysian justice.

Surviving Survivor:
Bill Vaughn's Loose Lips
Notes on Episode 12: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

By Bill Vaughn

With Klub Rudy's cruel bootation on Day 33 of Colleen "The Waif" Haskell, who described herself presciently as the "last of my kind," the ethnic cleansing of Pulau Tiga has come to an end. Tribe Tagi has annihilated Tribe Pagong with the single-minded dedication of George W. Bush to lethal injection. And good riddance: They were cute, they were peppy, and they were adorable, but in the end the happy-go-lucky, warmer-and-fuzzier-than-thou, dance-around-the-campfire, We Are Fam-i-lee left-brainers made my skin crawl. Let's face it, they just weren't island people. At least not when it comes to this island, where all the warm-blooded things have rabies, and all the cold-blooded things are poisonous. Speaking of Richard and Susan, the dark side of human nature has triumphed, at least for now. In the final episode before Judgment Day and the bright triumph of Rudy—our Navy Seal and shining example of the Best Generation—push can finally come to shove.

As the darling 23-year-old Miami Beach copywriting student allowed, "Rudy just sits there and watches it all happen." Yeah, babe, like the fool on the hill, the Rudester is keeping perfectly still. But it's the kind of hush before the guillotine falls. "If I got fucked over along the way by someone who gave me his word," he quietly informed Richard during a Klub Rudy heart-to-heart, "I'd hafta do something to 'em."

While Colleen walked the Walk of Shame down Snake Alley, her jungle squeeze, Greg Buis, knowing that The Waif would be his arms as soon as the CBS shrink got done debriefing her on her career possibilities, watched her the way a man with a bowl of sticky rice watches a rat broasting over an open flame. But you knew he was really thinking about his sister again.

And Dr. Sean has finally struck a shameless deal with the Dark Side, resorting to naked bribery to save his worthless skin. After winning the Luxury Challenge by correctly answering that a drink of kerosene will kill gut worms, he got to spend a night on the yacht. And—surprise, surprise—his ditzy dad from back home in Dorkville, Long Island, was already on board posing as the Captain. Not only did Sean ingratiate himself to Richard by inviting the Rotund One out to the boat for brunch, the next day he publicly humiliated Kelly by promising that this treat would be hers, knowing even as he said it that without sucking up to Richard and paying off Klub Rudy with care packages from their families, he'd soon be walking the Walk of Shame himself.

"All them ladies are pissed off at him," Rudy observed. Anyway, physician, heal thyself. Because you're next.

The yacht, of course, the Sipadan, is the same boat that was anchored off the leeward side of the Pulau Tiga when I stormed the island in April. The moment I saw this luxurious vessel moored off this allegedly "deserted" tropical isle I began to suspect that Survivor would be as overcooked as a slab of pork in a prison cafeteria.

And while we're on the subject of correctional facilities, why are the Malaysians, the most even-tempered of people, so tough on trivial crimes? Is it because the state religion is based on the insanely punitive retributions of the Koran? While I was in Borneo a 31-year-old father of four was facing ten years in the slammer for shoplifting four ballpoint pens. After his arrest the cops refused to inform his family that he was being detained. Another man was jailed for three months for kipping a T-shirt and two cigarette lighters. A teenager was sentenced to life for the possession of a single marijuana plant. Court authorities admitted holding a man for eight years in prison because of a backlog of cases. And a serviceman was sentenced to two years and three lashes of the cane for an attack at a movie theatre on a lawyer (a lawyer!) who was blabbing on his cell phone during the film.

So what would the Malaysians do with a petty criminal like Kelly "The Traitor" Wigglesworth, the 23-year-old river guide from Nevada who's wanted by authorities in North Carolina for using a stolen credit card? How many lashes of the cane would they mete out for her vicious attack on her ex-husband, which included scratching and nose-biting? What about Richard Hatch's public nekkedness, in a conservative nation that wraps up its women as snugly as a coconut pudding in a pandan leaf? Would they lash Gervase for siring so many little bastards out of wedlock? Would I have to choose between offering myself as a prison mama or a prison papa after trespassing on Pulau Tiga, mooning the crew, bribing the locals, and littering the beaches with baggies full of booze? And what about Survivor producer Mark Burnett? In a just society, his relentless over-editing and his shameless product placement of banalities like Dr. Scholl's Food Pads would earn him enough pokey time to make sure he wouldn't be getting out of stir until Survivor XXXVIII finished principle photography on Mars.

Surviving Survivor:
Bill Vaughn's Loose Lips
Notes on episode twelve: For what is this rough beast, it's hour come at last.

By Bill Vaughn

Years from now, when Sean Kenniff's career as a soap opera doctor fades into its final season, he'll turn from his vigil at the bedside of some toothsome blonde victim of a deadly TV fungus, and stare into our homes as violas crescendo, then recede.

"Oh, shit!" he'll whine. "What's my friggin line?"

"Cut!" the director will shout. The crew will shake their heads. A clipboard will read him his line, and the show will go on. This happens all the time. But people are kind. Old Doc Sean is a trooper. Everyone knows he hasn't been the same since he got his first taste of camera back there in Borneo. And they can all see that he's never gotten over Commander Rudolph Boesch, his bunkmate in the debris shelter, his Tagi tribemate, the former Navy Seal who not only served the Rattana people their sticky-rice for thirty-nine days, but taught them about Teutonic honor as well, about what happens when you don't pay your dues to Klub Rudy, about the consequences of going around like some kind of fancy boy with little alphabet schemes and whatnot.

"If somebody gave me your word," the pride of the Atlantic Fleet explained, "that they are in this alliance with me, and I give my word, my word is good. And their word better be good. If they betray me I'll get even with 'em." The ejected waste of this penultimate episode could just have easily been Kelly Wiglesworth, nose-biter and fugitive from the law. But the Nevada river guide saved herself by winning the impossibly hokey immunity challenge involving the gathering of masks bearing printed questions about island "lore." Like, say, what happens when a snake visits camp? The snake is good luck, Kelly recited, filming herself with one of the camcorders oily and unctuous host Jeff Probst handed out. Do not taunt the snake because that's, uh, bad luck. Wiglesworth scored a double victory on Episode Twelve by winning the Luxury Challenge as well. Because certain parts of her anatomy were able to absorb more volcanic mud than the same parts on Susan, and thus the goo she transported from mud bath to bucket weighed more than that of anyone, Wiglesworth was awarded a Bud Lite and escorted blindfolded to the Survivor Bar on Pulau Tiga for a big pasta dinner and more brewski and a showing of the first minutes of Episode One. That was the good news, sort of; the bad news, she had to drink with Jeff Probst. (Like a brat who spins his sister's cats just to get them dizzy, producer Mark Burnett loves to see the contestants hammered).

When the Gang of Four meets next week will the center hold? Unless Kelly wins immunity again this chick is toast. Her immunity, on the other hand, would shatter Klub Rudy. But the victim would no doubt be Susan Hawk, the redneck truckdriver from Wisconsin. How red is Susan's neck? Well, she calls seventh grade her senior year, needs only one more punch on her Tattoos R Us card to get a freebie, and thinks that a good farm program for Wisconsin would be Hee Haw.

While I was watching Kelly film herself as she was being filmed simultaneously by three two-person teams of image workers, I began to swoon with the sort of vertigo you can suffer in a sideshow house of mirrors. What's real, you wonder, and what's not? How much of what we've seen on the screen has been baked and then baked again in Mark Burnett's kitchen? A better question, is there anything that's not baked? Although there have been federal laws on the books governing the production of game shows ever since the TV scandals of the late 1950s, these laws don't say anything about how a show is edited, about the light in which a producer chooses to cast a player based on artful rearrangements of footage. Very little of the truth of Pulau Tiga or Malaysia or what all those silly Americans did there for 39 days has survived Burnett's editors. The contestants themselves now emerging into the media glare are allowing that they're having trouble recognizing what they see every Wednesday night as part of their own past. And that brings up inevitable ruminations about reality television-a true contradiction in terms-and the nature of photography itself.

For me, all photographs, doctored or not, exist on a continuum of misinformation. Even a photographer who rigorously confines himself to just the facts, ma'am, can serve up only a thin and crooked slice of the world. In the same way that the fragrance of a gardenia communicates only part of the flower's beauty, a photograph can bear only one kind of knowledge, despite what we've been trained to believe we see. And the parameters of that skinny data have already been determined by some limited being just like me, who's chosen such factors as angle, timing, lighting and cropping along lines that can't be anything but subjective.

So where is Survivor on this Big Phony Curve? Live sporting events, of course, are much closer to zero, if zero is absolute reality, whatever that is, as are events like the superlative documentary from the 1970s about The Loud Family in Santa Barbara. And moving in the direction away from zero are excellent game shows such as Win Ben Stein's Money and the truly awful Taiwanese offering I saw in Borneo in which contestants cram themselves into clear plastic balls so they can compete against each other in an enormous pinball machine. Network news shows are much further out, somewhere in the same neighborhood as Survivor and that dismal CBS disappointment, Big Brother.

But in the end, since it's all been cooked one way or another, either in the oven, in the wok or the microwave, what matters is how tasty it is. Survivor, as it turns out, is delectable.