Big Brother Competitions

For some reason, I always watch Big Brother every year. Unlike any other show that I watch regularly, I can't point to any good reasons to recommend this show, but I watch it anyway. One thing about it that has really irritated me about the show is some of the competitions. It seems like they don't really put much thought at all into them. The biggest example of this is the kind of competition they used on last night's show. Basically, the rules are, the host asks an opinion question with two possible answers, then everyone answers not what they think the actual answer is, but what they think the majority of people will say. Then anyone who has the least popular answer is out of the competition. Well, the one big gaping hole in this competition that they just seem to ignore is that no one ever knows what anyone actually thinks the answer to the question is, so they also never know what the majority thinks the answer to the question is, so the whole thing is just a pointless random exercise. For example, if the question is who is smarter between George Bush and John Kerry, well obviously if Bush is one of the choices, I would answer the other one, but if I'm in a house with a bunch or republicans, I might assume that they will mostly say Bush, so I would answer Bush. Therefore, no one would ever know that my actual answer would be Kerry, nor would we know for sure what everyone else's actual answer would be. You would think a major network like CBS could have one person who could point this basic fact out to them, but apparently they don't or they just don't care if the competitions make any sense.

The other things that bothers me about them is the way they break ties. Once they completed the pointless crap described above, then whoever is left has to answer a question with a numerical answer, and whoever is the closest without going over is the winner. Now, I really hate that without going over qualification. There's absolutely no reason to do that other than that is how the Price is Right does it. All it does is make it more difficult for someone who may actually have a good idea of the answer to win. One person could obviously make a very good educated answer and be just over the actual number, while someone else could take a wild ass guess and be nowhere near the answer, but under it, and the person with the guess would win. And I think that actually happened on Big Brother a couple of years ago. A lot of football pools have a tiebreaker associated with the Monday Night game's total score, and I won't play one that has this stupid without going over qualification. It makes no sense.