Memphis gave Dan a nice little birthday present to day by vetoing his nomination, something he had said he would do after he first won the veto, although you never believe these things in BB till you see them. Jerry's only choice for a replacement was Renny, so she obviously knows what's up and that she'll be going by a 2-0 margin on Thursday. Memphis has arranged things pretty damn well, I have to admit. Keesha and Renny were the strongest true pair left in the house; now he's created a scenario where he has two allies of necessity who are both much closer to him than they are to each other (although Keesha also knew in her heart of hearts that Renny was a huge threat to all of them winning). It's difficult now to see how Memphis doesn't get to the end, and if he does, he's going to win, I have little doubt.

The rest of the game should proceed as follows: Jerry is completely isolated now (Memphis taking his archenemy Dan off the block made that clear), and has now been told he can't play for HoH next week (something you really need to know before entering the house). Unless he wins the last veto, or unless Dan or Keesha have some weird epiphany, Jerry is a goner next week. And as far as final three goes, again, I think Keesha will have to win it in order to stay in the game, and the odds aren't with her. Dan has decent insights much of the time, but I don't think he'd go with Keesha over Memphis, and if Memphis wins the last HoH, he knows that Dan is a much bigger goat than Keesha could ever hope to be. I think Memphis might very well beat Dan unanimously.

I hope somebody does something to shock us, because being able to plot out the last two weeks ahead of time is none too thrilling.

Libra is semi-officially a goner. After making a big show of possibly vetoing Keesha and putting Dan up to teach him a lesson, Jerry apparently made an ass of himself yet again with an ostentatious speech at the veto meeting, letting Dan know that he survived a nomination only by the barest margin. Jerry has never been a great social player, but he really doesn't seem to have an idea how little he's being tolerated in there right now. Even those who aren't happy with Dan just don't want to listen to it anymore.

After going on about honor for the last week, there was no way Jerry could really defy the HoH and use the veto, even though he had suggested to Keesha he might use it to save her and even though he'd rather see Dan or Memphis in trouble instead, he had little choice to leave the noms as they were. But he couldn't just give up the spotlight either. And frankly, the suspicion that Dan's actions were because of America's Player ought to make his situation look more understandable, not less. I can't imagine any of them would have turned it down, and would have accepted the role with fewer misgivings than Dan has.

So is there any possibility Libra won't be going? I suppose a Keesha blowup could rile the house, but the reputation of Libra is probably set in stone at this point and will lead to her departure. Besides, in-house surprises two weeks in a row (what happened last week was not an out-of-house surprise) are probably too much to hope for in BB10.

But as April, Michelle, Libra, and Keesha went off once again with their latest mutual screaming fit, with the guys congregating downstairs for the most part (and Dan even trying to hide in the shower), it struck me that this may be the most woman-centered season yet. Season Six at least had Howie until the last couple of weeks, putting himself in the spotlight even if he didn't do much in the way of driving the game.

The dominant personalities in this house, however, are all women with the possible exception of Jerry, who stands out due to the novelty factor, and also because he won't shut up. But no one really thinks he's a driving factor in the game; he didn't even run the game when he was Head of Household during the first week. Jerry is following power pretty shamelessly. Ollie hasn't made an affirmative game move since his early hours, when he ditched the Brian/Dan alliance for the lure of an easy lay (sorry, but I gotta call it like I see it). He's tried to settle April down but basically has been satisfied with following her lead. Dan made the decision to lie low after the Brian and Steven evictions, and although he accepted the offer to become America's Player (and people in the house somehow figured it out too), he too has made no real effort to drive the game. And while Memphis has played a sound social game, to the point where he's amazingly well set up for someone who won a car in the game's first hour, he is certainly not making an effort to stoke the drama--I think it's smart game play to disguise how strong his position is, but he gives the appearance of letting others take the lead.

No, the Alpha personalities in the house right now are the women. Libra became a rare example of a woman leading a first-week rebellion against would-be male dominance (like Nicole in Season Two), and has continued to be seen as the driving force among her allies. Keesha's rivalry with April has helped shape the game too, leading to some extent to the eviction of Jessie. Michelle took a little while to stand out in a gaming sense, but she doesn't have a shrinking violet personality in the least and is likely to be a big force as long as she's still in the game. And of course, Renny. She's playing a game with some similarities to Memphis, in that she influences things quietly. But now that she's more or less openly allied with Keesha (which ought to become more obvious once Libra is out of the house), we can look for her game to come more to the fore too, in addition to which she's become a social player of no small skill.

Bottom line: the Will Kirbys, the Four Horsemen, the Chilltowns of yesteryear are nowhere to be found. The Alpha males got booted before mid-August this time around, and it's up to the women to give us some game to remember this season by. April/Ollie porn just is not sufficient.

But I have to ask: what the hell is wrong with this guy? I almost never identify with any of these people to the point that I pity them--they all signed up for this--and yet I find myself becoming totally annoyed with Jerry's denunciations of Dan, which are too over the top even for his new alliance. We hear a lot of talk about betrayals in this show, from fans and houseguests alike, but it's rare that anyone has taken it as seriously as Jerry has. He really is completely shocked that anyone would ever lie on Big Brother, which must call into question if he has ever seen the show before, though he claimed he had. It's gone way beyond thinking Dan is America's Player; he seems to think Dan has been using religion to excuse his "evil."

I don't typically go off on houseguests like this, but the guy is just really unpleasant, not adding anything except unintentional comic relief ("the X Factor"?), inappropriate physical contact with and remarks about women young enough to be his grand daughters, and his angry and misguided belief that anything about BB should involve honor.

Last night, it looked promising that Michelle might carry on a week-long vendetta from the Head of Household room, but things have calmed down considerably today. The only suspense was whether Libra and Keesha would be nominated together, or whether anger over Dan as the disloyal swing vote would propel him into the nominee's chair. Michelle chose to keep Dan safe, but he's the obvious pick as a replacement nominee should one of the women win the veto (and wouldn't it be something if Libra finally ended her uncanny run of second place finishes now that she really needs it).

Keesha on the block could be a situation to watch, though. She's a good deal more high strung than Libra, and her season-long anger with April could easily boil over, with April now home free and palling around with Michelle. It has to bug the others that April, who actually nominated Jessie in the first place, has gotten off scot free for his eviction. Libra might actually fare pretty well on the block; it will be interesting to see if she can manipulate Keesha into blowing her stack, preferably after I've turned down the sound on my Real player.

I'm going to look forward to seeing the food competition with the former hamsters--I'm a BB geek that way, even if some of those who appeared are the sorts of people (Boogie) I could easily go the rest of my (Boogie) life without ever thinking about again (Boogie), much less seeing (Boogie).

And just like that, Michelle is back in the driver's seat, in a majority alliance for the first time with April and Ollie seamlessly swinging over to her side, and Memphis obviously not in a position to hold any grudge with her just because she wanted him gone. This sort of reversal takes place so frequently on BB that it can almost be deemed predictable.

The end of the HoH competition gave us that old familiar Season 6 feeling, with Michelle screaming that the win was for Jessie, and of course, just prior to that we had seen her taped message promising revenge against those who got him evicted. The only thing that's going to prevent a badly divided house is that there are too many people in there who don't really have a stake in division. But in the short run, there should be a lot of recriminations over the "surprise" vote, especially with this group having become so accustomed to the idea that what the HoH says goes. The somewhat predictable way they've ordered houseguests to vote this year, with the sure things going first and those perceived as possible swings going later, won't help matters either--saving Dan for last only makes it more obvious that he broke the tie.

Nothing about the lead-in was all that suprising to feedwatchers, who had realized for a few days that Jessie was history. It was still amusing to see the anti-Jessie element realize that they were going to need Dan, who unbeknowst to them was himself looking for a way to let them know that he was a willing turncoat, thanks to the America's Player orders he sensed he would get--though there was still that little bit of uncertainty until the moment Julie gave the word that America did hate Jessie after all.

So after being a major focus of attention from his first hours in the house, Jessie is now history, with only his memories and his misunderstanding of the meaning of the word deviant to sustain him. (And speaking of deviant, why is Libra getting all those audience questions anyway?) But I expect his ghost will haunt us at last as long as Michelle is HoH...and if we're lucky, no longer.

I think Angie might be in that latter category. True, she didn't display incredible gamesmanship during her time in the house, but it's also clear that she simply could not click with the other women of BB10, and in a season where women seem to be calling most of the shots, that proved fatal for her. She was the third straight evicted player whose fate was sealed more due to social decisions she made in her early hours in the house than because of any threat she posed or alliance she belonged to.

Angie came into the house billed as the recent divorcee who was ready to spread her wings. I don't think the BB house is the place to do that by any stretch--when I think about things that spread in there, disease typically comes to mind. But she was attractive and appeared relatively good natured. Best of all, or so we might have assumed, she seemed to be the one woman in the house who was on the best terms with the most men. The early days of Big Brother are typically dominated by a male-led alliance, and women who can come along for the ride can often prosper in the game (of the three women who have won BB, two, Lisa and Maggie, fit this basic description).

Angie was usually the only woman who hung out in the backyard in the early days as Brian and his friends held forth. Of course, as much as she smoked (unless I've forgotten someone, she is clearly the most prolific smoker in BB history), she almost had to live outdoors. But her social game didn't seem to have much to do with belonging to an alliance. She rarely seemed to talk game with the guys, or with anybody really. This proved to be another problem in her eventual relationship with the women, because Libra in particular was all about the game, and helped to create an attitude whereby having a friendly demeanor towards targeted players meant that you were likely in cahoots with them.

Angie showed she could separate friendship from the game when she voted against Brian and Steven along with the crowd. She also became loosely associated with the Jessie/Michelle/Memphis alliance, although it always appeared that it was mostly self-defense on her part--she needed someplace to go, after all. If this were a normal season of BB, her status as an outsider should have kept her safe for a good length of the game. Unfortunately, this season is abnormal in many ways, and Keesha used her HoH reign to target not Jessie (who was the HoH who had gotten rid of Steven) and not Memphis (who could have been campaigned against on the grounds that he won the car), but Angie.

Angie was probably my favorite of the women in the house this season, but frankly this had a lot to do with the competition. She was a great sidekick for the men, with whom she seemed to share a relationship not unlike the lead character in My Boys. But after Brian and Steven left, she seemed to fade some as well, as if she realized that her only path to staying in the house was through the other women, and that was a road she wasn't going down. Talking to Julie Chen after her eviction, she clearly implied that she was targeted because the other young women, particularly the one who nominated her (Keesha), were jealous of her relationship with the guys, and I have to agree that Keesha's rationale for going after Angie--she supposedly didn't defend Steven enough--was pretty lame considering everyone in the house voted out Steven and there didn't seem to be any controversy about it.

But she's back with Dan and Steven now, and won't even have to endure sequester. Let's just hope she kicks the cigarettes at some point.

The fight pushed the veto competition well into the second half of the show, and this was followed by Michelle ranting about her prize (justified in a way--anyone would be mad in her spot--although her personal attack on Libra was in very poor taste). I don't think there was a single game conversation shown after the veto, no scene where April went over the plan with Jerry, or the nominees made entreaties. It's a different way of constructing an episode, and one I hope they experiment with a little more. Once they see how strong fan reaction is, I think we might get some more of it.

I was curious about one thing, though: didn't it seem as if Jessie was treated relatively gently on the show? His role in the fight wasn't glossed over, but with his Diary Room comments edited in, his behavior almost came across as likably provocative--the sort of thing Will Kirby might have done, although he didn't finesse it all that well. Still, I don't think too many fans of the game would say that what Jessie did was dirty pool: Libra and Keesha really were trashing April, all their profane protests aside; and there's nothing at all wrong with using an overheard conversation in an attempt to help yourself.

Jessie also appeared genuinely moved by the sob story Dan told in order to coax the hug (an excellent piece of gamesmanship by Dan), which was something he did with no game payoff expected. And later, with Michelle at the end of her rope after the veto competition turned out so badly for her, he gave her some nice words of encouragement. I wouldn't find any of this suspicious except that America needs to tell Dan how to vote, and Dan is operating in there on the assumption that Jessie is a goner--the fact that America has voted for him twice, including once for a nomination, is a good indicator that he'll be selected for an eviction vote. But now, with viewers' most recent look at Jessie being a fairly positive one for a change, it makes me wonder if he might actually come out on top, thus hanging Dan out to dry in a huge way.

I think the greater likelihood is Jessie will get Dan's vote to evict and will in fact be evicted, but there's at least a little intrigue in the mix now.

April has put a lot of confidence in her belief that there's no way Libra and Keesha would sell her out after she hung out on the ledge for them as long as she did, but it looks like the two of them plus Renny and Dan (who seems pretty confident, with good reason, that Jessie will be America's target) as going to go after Jessie after all. If April would get her head in the game instead of clinging to this ridiculous notion that what the HoH says has to be so, she could have avoided this--Libra and Keesha have made their preference for Jessie leaving crystal clear, and Renny's feelings about Jessie were evident in the early hours of the game.

But April has stuck with her single-minded desire to get Memphis out--and I'm not sure what that's based on other than her promise to Jessie that he'd be safe--and has simply misread the mood of her alliance (a common mistake whenever a HoH spends too much time in their room and/or hanging out with only their closest ally). April, Ollie, and Jerry are all relying on Dan a bit too much right now; while April might suspect Libra and Keesha will defect, no one seems to be worried about Dan. But this week, America's Player could be the decisive vote-not what Dan would have wanted, but hopefully he didn't think that $20,000 came with no strings.

See? I told you America could make better eviction decisions than that house.

Michelle is the only member of her alliance who has yet to be nominated, and this isn't a bad position to be in. What we've seen so far in this game is less two alliances going head to head, than a big alliance blasting another one to pieces before cleaving into two parts.

We saw this when the group of eight made their demands on Jerry; the only ones outside that group were Brian, Steven (both now gone), Dan, and Renny (who was nominated). Dan was the one survivor out of Brian's initial kind-of alliance, and he seems to have a track to at least the mid-jury given how far outside the decision making he has been to this point (there's an obvious risk to him from America's Player). That first group of eight eventually split, essentially along the lines of who could tolerate Libra more and who could tolerate Jessie more, especially as Jessie became the HoH. Jerry wandered over to Libra's group, as did Renny (who otherwise had no use for Jerry); Memphis, Michelle, and Angie were Jessie's allies. But Libra had the larger group, and Jessie used his HoH tenure to eliminate the powerless Steven rather than make a direct assault on Libra.

Now Libra's side has won Head of Household two straight weeks, and the result is that the alliance Michelle has been in will really cease to be an alliance as of Thursday: she'll have either Memphis or Jessie still, but a pair can't do much in a house of 9. Michelle will be in a position not unlike Dan was 2 weeks ago--almost too powerless to worry about. Libra's alliance has obvious fracture points; Renny and Jerry have little use for each other, and the April/Keesha tension has reignited. Michelle ought to use this opportunity to play as Dan did, and essentially declare herself a free agent, without any obligations and available for the head of household to use any way he or she wishes. I question if Michelle has the personality to pull this off, though. She may have gone un-nominated so far, but under-the-radar is not her natural stance, as we've seen from her continual sulking about the unitard. If she is left without allies, especially if she's left without Jessie, she seems more likely to rage about it than to burrow into her lair and wait for the big alliance to tear itself up one more time.

So April has a pregnant twin sister. Wouldn't it be something if the girls were raising babies right around the same time? I don't want to cast any moral judgments on the behavior of April and Ollie, but please tell me that precautions have been taken in some way.

And along the same lines as the time warp of the house that I mentioned a few days back: how paranoid must you get in there to believe that last week's earthquake was a concoction of Big Brother? I would think the southern Californians in the bunch would know what a real quake feels like, and would be able to say definitively that yep, that's what we had. But there's a genuine school of thought in that house that BB put one over on them. Hilarious.

Cabin fever is setting in. April and Ollie were even getting into it today, and I don't mean the way they usually do: they were fighting. The downside of the mania for unanimity in the house is that a 7-person alliance (6 if you don't really regard Dan as a member, even though he's made it clear he'll vote with the power) is almost always unwieldy.

The presence of America's Player makes unanimity a good deal less likely though, since it looks like Jessie will stay on the block after all, and we can infer that America is going to order Dan to vote him out. This would actually be the basis for a real move against Jessie, given Libra's and Keesha's new anti-Jessie mood and the fact that Renny would almost certainly vote with Keesha, her closest ally. The problem Dan has is that almost anything would be better for him than a 4-3 vote, even if he's on the winning side. He's worked so hard to stay out of the limelight, and you can't put yourself out there much more than a vote margin of one.

The other possibility is that April will sense the mood of her alliance and bail on Jessie, or even try to get Jerry to use the veto (he's a prety solid vote against Memphis too, so he might agree). But I somehow don't see that happening, such is the feeling in the house this season that the HoH always gets her way. The notion that April's allies might not go meekly along with her has probably not crossed her mind.

A couple of further points: as mentioned, Jerry won the veto, which appears to have been the now-annual prize swap competition, during which Michelle wound up with the iconic red unitard and Libra won a trip. Michelle's mood, not all that great to begin with, has soured even further. And for some reason--maybe Catholic guilt shows up on his face more readily than it does on mine--there are actually widespread suspicions in there that Dan is America's Player, and this comes before the goofball task he's going to be given after Sunday's show, which is guaranteed to be the thing that's most likely to throw suspicion on him if anything does. Is he savvy enough to keep a lid on this for another 4-plus days? I have my doubts.

Well, April took my advice of yesterday and nominated Jessie and Memphis, enabling her to keep the most important part of her promise to Michelle, and also giving her alliance the numbers edge should the veto be used.

Assuming, of course, her alliance can hold together after the vicious fight that broke out as everyone was waiting around for the veto competition to begin (they have done them at night before, but it's too early for the traditional morph event). The tension between April and Keesha, a big part of the first week of feeds, had been put on the back burner of late, to the point where I had started to wonder if it was buried for good. But April's anger at what she took to be Keesha's behind-her-back sniping, a situation egged on by Jessie, was the flint that sparked a fight that eventually engulfed the entire house, save (I think) Dan, and was only briefly punctuated by a horribly perfunctory birthday celebration. Libra got involved too, not only with April and with Jessie but even with Jerry (I can't recall Libra cursing all that much before tonight); and as for Keesha's "angry voice"...wow.

It's just plain nails-on-chalkboard. It's hard to know right now what the game impact might be. April had given Jessie assurances he would be safe--she had to nominate him, or either go back on her word to Michelle or nominate an ally--but the fact that players have been unwilling to buck the Head of Household the last 2 weeks doesn't mean it has to stay that way. I don't think Keesha really wants Memphis out, and while she went along with the group with the Steven vote, she coud have the numbers to get rid of Jessie. Libra is angrier at Jessie now than she was before, Renny has never really forgotten what happened early in their time in the house, and as for the possible fourth vote to evict Jessie? "Dan is working for you, America!"

Jessie's motive for tattling was to get April suspicious of Libra to the point she might put Libra on the block, but I can't really see that happening barring another fight. It's certainly ironic that Jessie spent much of his time in the HoH fighting off Steven's pleas to nominate Libra, but has done little but make such pleas himself ever since Steven left. But the muscle man's luck may be on the verge of running out.

Meanwhile, today is Keesha's 30th birthday: a milestone for anyone, and perhaps more so for a woman who works at Hooters. At least the house made it one to remember.

That's where America's Player comes in, presumably. Frankly, I was surprised Dan won, since he hasn't been a big TV presence in this week after his nomination and really hasn't been on the feeds much more than that. He fits in the sense that he's already an outsider, so qualms about betrayal aren't going to factor in. But I question if he's a good enough liar to pull this off, if lying needs to take place. But if America's sympathies are anti-Jessie (they might be anti-Memphis if enough people are upset that he screamed at Jerry), he should be on safe ground given the result of the HoH competition.

There are two different kinds of endurance competitions on Big Brother: those that really are about sheer willingness to put up with tedium, such as the fateful cage competition that led to Kaysar's ultimate disappearance from Season 6; and those that have an endurance component but also have a physical element that ensures they can't go on too long. This was closer to the latter than the former (hopefully we'll have a true all-nighter later in the season, possibly when we get to the final three), and it continued a tradition where the early season endurance was won by a woman, namely April, who has more need for a private bedroom than any other woman in the house.

April's choice for nominations seems cut-and-dried enough: it's going to be Jessie and Memphis, which likely would have been the case even had April not cut a deal with Michelle. However, there seems to be some confusion about whether April's offer also extended to keeping Jessie off the block. This would be a huge mistake in my opinion, one so big that she would probably have to break her word, even though that's something you'd prefer not to have to do. The problem with keeping both Jessie and Michelle off the block is that there would be nothing to prevent one of them from using the veto to save Memphis (or Memphis saving himself, of course), leaving April with the option of going back on her word or losing an ally. There's also the fact that Dan doesn't control his own vote this week. That's not likely to come into play if Jessie and Memphis stay the nominees--one assumes April and co. will come to a consensus as we have seen the first three weeks--but if a fringe player like Jerry ends up going on the block, we're going to have a split vote and Dan's vote could become significant.

The only part of the telecast really worth mentioning came with Julie's confirmation that the banner plane that caused such a commotion the other day had nothing to do with Big Brother, something we had already suspected (true BB banner planes are always easier to see than that). And there was another fun moment as well, when Julie finally let Dan know that she didn't appreciate "Mrs. Chen." Diary probably should have given him a heads-up there before he embarrassed himself.

I've talked before about how the experience of life in the house, the isolation from normal routine and the need to take your emotional sustenance from people who in the end aren't really your friends but in fact are trying to wreck your dreams, can lead to people acting strangely. We've seen houseguests swear undying loyalty to people they have known for a few days, or talk about how great the "experience" is even though we can see for ourselves that it's pretty boring. The lack of stimulation has other effects too; witness the sleep patterns most of them fall into by the game's halfway point.

The veto competiton seemed to me to be the perfect illustration of how time gets distorted in the house. It's incredible that no one else came even remotely close to quitting the game in under an hour, even though all of them saw Keesha bail at a very early stage and had to know that leaving just a little bit after her would put them in the lead rather than Keesha (keeping in mind here that not everyone was all that interested in winning). I think I have a reasonably good idea of how much time has gone by if I'm doing something like reading, which doesn't have a built in time reminder like television does on commercial networks. But everyone in that game thought they were pretty close to an hour. My guess is that you get used to lack of stimulation in the house that what would seem incredibly boring and draggy to one of us does not seem quite as endless to a hamster, because they have all found a way to process the boredom.

Not looking great for Angie right now (the houseguests were finally told there's no show Wednesday), but hope is not lost. We're overdue for a major house shift.

Renny had herself a 54th birthday to remember (complete with calesthenics), but she doesn't even know the half of it.

The highlight from the perspective of the houseguests was the magnitude 5.4 earthquake that was strong enough and close enough to give the house a serious rattle--much more so than the minor tremor on BB8 that was barely noticeable on screen and that not everyone in the house even felt (maybe Kail was right and it is "earthquake season"). That doesn't seem to have affected the game any, but it's never a bad thing to give them something new to talk about.

What most fans and feedwatchers will be most interested in is the revival of America's Player, which was a controversial part of Season 8, due to Eric not being the easiest guy to root for (although he was certainly glib, the best quality you can have in that role), and due to Dick winning the whole season, something that almost certainly couldn't have happened without the twist. This time, though, it's going to be different because the AP will only be in effect for one week, and if it's like last season there will be one night he or she is asked to push for a nomination, a night he/she is told who to vote for, and one "wild card" night where he/she is asked to start a catchphrase or do something similarly random.

Unless someone is completely moronic or is forced by America to do something that strikes the whole house as illogical (e.g April as America's Player being asked to push for an Ollie nomination), I would think it unlikely someone could be discovered in just a week--with the caveat that the vote to evict could be a potential problem in the same way it became a very real problem for Eric last summer. The votes have been so uniform so far that any vote America asks their Player to cast that doesn't conform is going to be immediately noted.

So who might the America's Player be? I'm not sure who the country is taking to so far, but I would assume Jerry is the primary candidate. He has obvious underdog appeal, and even those who don't find him appealing might enjoy seeing him struggle with the dictates of the job (assuming he would even take it).

The part of tonight's TV show I enjoyed most was the attempt by Michelle and co. to persuade the gang inside the house that the banner plane only they saw had a message on it about Libra, delivered by Steven. Not a bad effort, I must say, especially since you never know, in a house as paranoid as the BB house invariably gets, which crazy charge will catch on.