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Previously on Survivor, someone named Stephannie was voted off of something called Raro. Wait, who is Stephannie? And who spells their name like that? Also, we don't mean to sound like former Vice-Presidential candidate James Stockdale but where are we and what are we even doing here?

Oh wait, it's all coming back to us. Jim Van Nest, your Survivor author extraordinaire for this season, is being thrown a surprise birthday party tonight by his way-too-pretty-for-him wife. Well, it's a surprise as long as he doesn't read this column. Anyway, the point is that you have gone back to the future and gotten stuck with Kim and David for this one episode of Survivor: The Racist Season or whatever it's technically called. Of course, since Jim is a huge St. Louis Cardinals fan and Game Seven of the National League Championship is tonight, we are somewhat suspicious that he didn't just get a note from his wife asking the teacher to excuse him from this assignment because the dog ate his homework.

While we are at it, we should probably mention that, as some of you long time readers may recall, Kim is also a huge Cardinals fan, meaning her attention is divided tonight. She has a bet going with The Amazing Race scribe Stephanie DeGateo (who spells her name correctly, by the way) about the outcome of tonight's game. DeGateo, whom we love despite the fact that she is New York Mets fan, is banking on living legend Oliver Perez carrying his troops to victory. We won't torment her with the depressing trivia that Perez has the worst earned run average of any post-season starter in major league history. Why kick her further when she's down? She's already a Mets fan, for God's sake.

The main point here is that we will be keeping an eye on the outcome of the baseball game and, if the ghost of Bill Buckner (if he's not dead, he might as well be) arrives, Kim will have to write a short segment at the end proclaiming the greatness of the New York Mets. Odds-makers place the need for this at Mets -124, Cardinals +116 (whatever that means). Under any circumstance, Kim and Stephanie as well as Jim may spend the body of the off-season gleefully taunting David about the fact that the Braves failed to make the playoffs for the first time since the Nixon administration.

Now then, where were we? There was something about Survivor going on. If we recall correctly, it involved some sort of sensitivity training experiment wherein Team Burnett found an ethnically diverse group of people. All of them had one thing in common. They wanted to win a million dollars without having to sleep with Robert Redford. In order to facilitate this transaction, they agreed to get stuck in the middle of nowhere (the Cook Islands doubling as nowhere this season), be split off into ethnically cleansed groups of five and attempt to prove once and for all which nationality/race is the best of them all.

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