Househappenings

I seem to recall that in Joshuah's pre-show publicity, he made a lot of noise about stirring things up, gleefully backstabbing, etc. Anyone who's even a mild fan of the show knows that we eat that sort of thing up, even though I've learned not to expect much.

After a few days of feeds, I had Joshuah and Sharon pegged as the shrewdest people in that house, players who were accidentally thrown together but seemed to have complementary skills anyway, with Joshuah coming across as witty and ingratiating, while Sharon was more of a provocateur: raising little game concerns and then backing away to let the information settle in. This all changed in a big way when Joshuah went on his rampage against Amanda, an outburst that was so sudden and violent and profane that I honesty hoped he was acting for the cameras, because otherwise it would have just seemed way too over the top. He actually reminded me a lot of Dick Donato, although there wasn't the same hint that there might be a physical confrontation that was never far below the surface with Dick. By the time Joshuah won HoH, it seemed clear there was the potential for some real dramatics if he ever got in there.

And he hasn't disappointed. The issues with Allison built up at the end of last week, when Allison decided to shift her vote, forcing Joshuah to switch also so as not to be on the outs of a 2-1 majority. By this time Allison had irritated pretty much everyone and probably would have been nominated by any HoH, but only Joshuah would have turned it into a holy crusade. We're used to seeing the gay men in the Big Brother house getting along pretty well with women, but Joshuah seems to have some deep-seated misogyny issues (again, not unlike Dick). I won't pretend to be shocked or even offended by profanity, but his continual use of that word...well, it's an issue for me. That's a place you shouldn't go, certainly not because of any sort of provocation from a television show.

The television show is giving a lot of play to the idea that Joshuah's anger against Allison started because of the lesbian goof with Sheila. I have seen him mention it in the house, but I question whether he's being fed this argument by the producers to explain his antipathy towards Allison (since the lesbian lie always appeared to be a bigger deal to the TV people than to us). While I don't want to discount what Joshuah said about feeling that the lesbian stuff was disrespectful of the struggles of gay people, it seemed to me that Allison and Sheila meant nothing at all by it and certainly never tried to gain any sort of game advantage from the lie. They were bored, the house was already more than a bit paranoid thanks to the Jen/Parker stuff, and they thought it would be fun for a little while to stoke the embers a bit. Anyway, Josh has decided that Allison is evil incarnate and needs to go. That's fine; it happens every year. But man, I really can't wait till this guy becomes a civilian again.

One more thing: there seems to be some consternation about the Sunday TV show ending a few minutes early. My guess is that it has something to do with Dexter at 10 on CBS, a show whose episodes are being edited down from their original airings on Showtime, which were commercial free. It looks like they're taking a few minutes out of BB and giving them to Dexter in order to limit how much they cut out of the latter show Maybe that's the twist and Dexter will be turned loose in the house...?