It is that time of summer again! Yes that time when those of us obsessed with Big Brother plop in front of the TV three times a week to watch a group of house guests from all over the country compete with each other for half a million dollars. Week one of season 12 is over and I am going to talk about it because I am mildly obsessed. And when I mean mildly obsessed I mean really fucking obsessed.

For those of you who don’t know what Big Brother is, and I am not sure why you’d be reading this if you didn’t know, it is a competitive reality show in which a group of people, called ‘House Guests,’ move into the Big Brother house which has dozens of cameras and microphones to watch and listen to their every move. The house guests compete for a Head of Household (HOH), the winner of which gets an awesome bedr00m and has to nominate two people for eviction. There is a Veto competition where the house guests compete for the Golden Power of Veto which allows the winner to take one of the  nominees off the block. The HOH must then choose a replacement for the nominee who has been taken off. Of course, the Veto doesn’t need to be used at all. This all leads to a massive amount of campaigning, strategy, backstabbing, lies, double dealing and all manner of other douchebaggery.

The motto of Big Brother is ‘Expect the Unexpected’ and as such each season has some twist or another going on. This season the twist is that one of the house guests isn’t competing for the money but instead is there to basically just to screw everyone else in the game over. If this Saboteur can stay in the game to the halfway mark, he or she then get’s $50,000.  The house guests were told that there was a saboteur but of course not who it was. Likewise, the audience were left in the dark until the last episode of the week, Thursday’s eviction ceremony.

Just so it will be easier to reference later, I will do a quick rundown of the season’s 13 house guests.

Andrew Gordon: Podiatrist from Miami Beach who is 39 and Jewish. He is facing having to make it through the game eating only kosher and apparently the slop isn’t kosher. That is kind of weird and I wonder why it isn’t. He’s also told everyone that he is a shoe salesman as he doesn’t want anyone to know how smart he is.

Annie Whittington: 27 year old bartender from Tampa, FL.

Brendon Villegas: A 30 year old high school swim coach from Riverside, CA. Also lying about how smart he is.

Britney Haynes: 22 year old sales manager from Hunington, AR. She was a semi-finalist for the 2004 Miss Teen Arkansas.

Enzo Palumbo: 33 year old Insurance Adjuster from Bayonne, New Jersey.

Hayden Moss: An ASU student from Tempe, AZ. I am torn here because he is repping my home state but is from my rival college. I sort of root for him and I sort of hate him. He is 24.

Kathy Hillis: A 40 year old deputy sheriff from Texarkana, AR. She was revealed to be the mother of a 22 year old child. She looks a lot like Britney who is 22 and also from AR. Hmmm.

Kristin Bittin: A 24 year old shoe boutique manager from Philadelpha, PA. She has done so little in the game so far I initially forgot to include her on the list.

Lane Elenburg: A 24 year old oil rig salesman. Not the most popular profession to have these days. He is from Decatur, TX.

Matt Hoffman: a 32 year old web designer and singer for the band Shooting Blanks hailing from Elgin, IL. Matt also claims to be a Mensa member but he isn’t telling anyone that.

Monet Stunson: 24 year old model from Glen Carbon, IL. She comes off early as a diva but so far has been less annoying than a lot of other diva sorts on this show.

Rachel Reilly: A 26 year old chemistry graduate who works as a VIP cocktail waitress in Vegas.

Regan Fox: A 34 year old communications professor in West Hollywood, CA.

There are several reasons to watch Big Brother and one of them is schadenfreude. Some of these people are complete idiots and watching them make horrible mistakes is awesome. It is sort of like when people just watch American Idol for the auditions so they can watch people fail. I am not so much for that because I don’t really like seeing people’s dreams be berated but it is fairly amusing to hear people butcher the language and make tactical errors. This first week had a little bit of all of that.

Right off the bat, the saboteur locked up the supply room so that the house guests only had slop, which is the Big Brother food of choice for the losers of the Have and Have Not competition. I am not sure that it has been revealed what slop is but it looks like bad oatmeal mixed with things that generally don’t taste good. As they were all sitting in the nomination area talking to each other, the lights went out. When the lights came back up, the supply door was locked. Because the saboteur is someone in the house, the house guests had to try to figure out who could have gotten off the couch to put on the lock. Right away the two suspects were Brendon and Andrew. Brendon because he got up to go brush his teeth in some sort of Pavlovian response to the lights going out and Andrew because he decided he was going to goof around and act like the saboteur in some effort to prove that he is not the saboteur. This kind of worked insofar as he became the most obvious choice but with the sort of mind games that Big Brother plays that is a cold comfort and an interesting strategy on Andrew’s part.

During the Head of Household competition, the house guests had to jump on full heavy bags made to look like hot dogs and ride them across a long stretch that looked like a grill surface (with the charcoals being the mats they will land on when they fall). The first person across for the winning team gets $10,000 and the subsequent house guests across get decreasing increments until the last one gets HOH. Winning money in Big Brother is tricky because while you have won the money you also get a target on your back because people are resentful and jealous but also because if you have won some money they people don’t feel so guilty about sending you packing out of the house without winning the prize money in the end.

This competition was pretty goofy, like most of the competitions and involved a lot of slipping and falling. The successful players were the ones who jumped up (or were thrown up) to grab the webbing at the top of the hot dog. Given how slippery the hot dogs were from all the sprays of catchup and mustard, this was a good tactic. Right off the bat there was an injury as Britney fell off and hurt her leg. This led to Deputy Kathy to go out to check on her as Andrew, who chose to sit the game out as the host and thus put more suspicion on him, didn’t want to reveal he was a doctor by helping her. Classy. Britney then delivered the best line of the week “I lost my dignity to a slippery wiener.’ I can’t imagine it was the first time.

Hayden won the HOH and set about putting together the first alliance in the house, or group of people who work together until it is time to screw each other over. The alliance is made up of Enzo who spearheaded the idea of this alliance and refers to himself as the Meow for reasons I really don’t want revealed to me, Lane , Matt and Hayden. Enzo suggests the alliance be called the Brigade. Lane doesn’t have any clue what a brigade is.  They decide to target Brendon and Rachel who have become really close in the game and seem to be starting a showmance. Brendon is the real target given he is a saboteur suspect.

The saboteur shows up and reveals that there are two people in the house that have known each other all their lives. Hmmm like the two women from AR who look like mother and daughter and are age appropriate for it? Where when one got hurt the other was the first on scene but who we never see bonding over being from the same state or even talking at all? Hmmm wonder who could it be…

The Power of Veto competition happens and house guests are selected to take part. Basically they have to find letters and spell out the longest word that is spelled correctly. Hayden, Enzo, Andrew, Monet, Rachel and Brendon are the contestants and everyone spells their word correctly except for Andrew how claims to have thrown the competition. The dude is so generally goofy it is hard to tell if he is playing well or just being a goof ball. Brendon wins and the competition was disappointing if only because usually these spelling competitions feature hilarious misspellings.

Brendon takes himself off the block and Hayden throws Annie up in his place as Annie has been getting cozy with Brendon and Rachel. Indeed they are the house’s other alliance Tres Amigos. The alliance is based on Brendon and Rachel’s mutual love for science (She reads Popular Science every month!) as well as their mutual admiration for each other’s chests. Annie seems to be involved mostly because of a love of lying in hammocks with couples who are a bubble away from fucking right there.

Annie campaigns to try to stay in the house in a last ditch effort to keep from being ‘back doored’ which is not where she get’s it in the pooper but rather sent out of the house without any chance to save herself.  She makes a pretty compelling argument too as if Rachel and Brendon aren’t split up they could ride all the way to the end like last season with Jeff and Jordan. I liked Jeff and Jordan though and I really don’t like Rachel that much. Sure her boobs are some of the best money can buy but her laugh is annoying as hell and just about everything about her makes me want to turn the TV off.

It was revealed to America on Thursday that Annie is the saboteur and we get to see how she pulled off the padlock then going so far as to bump into Andrew and no one mentioned it. Anyway it is in her best interest to stay in the house and she makes an impassioned ‘don’t vote for me speech’ before she is unanimously voted out. So much for that twist.

I really can’t for the life of me understand the reasoning for keeping Rachel in the house. I know she annoys the house guests and being in league with Brendon just makes her that much more of a threat. To punctuate the point, she went ahead and won the HOH after Annie was evicted. So now as the next week starts, I assume that the target will be Hayden as Brendon told him that he would be gunning for Hayden if he didn’t play ball. Hayden obviously didn’t play ball so now he will be targeted.

There is a lot of game play early on for the two alliances and there are a few people just sort of on the sidelines. Tres Amigos now down to Dos Amigos needs to do some serious recruiting which should be easier now that one of them is in the driver’s seat. I am not sure what the producers are going to do now that their big twist is already over but hopefully they can pull something out of their asses. I haven’t really connected with anyone on the show yet that are favorites to win. So far they either annoy me or I am indifferent. Some seasons it takes longer to find someone to root for than others. We’ll see how long this one takes.