Hey there, butterfly! Wanna see my nuts?

Well, hello there everybody!  Sorry to have left you out on that cliff again for the past seven days.  Here, let me pull you back up on solid ground so that you’ll better be able to take in the next totally awesome chapter in my Millionaire Journey!  Last week’s installment had more highs and lows than a map on The Weather Channel, and it was all punctuated by a legendary hissy fit from one of the highest paid men in showbusiness.  How can I possibly top that overbloated excitement this week?

How about with the very first showdown for the Hot Seat at today’s taping!

If Double Dare can have a physical challenge, then so can Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

Ahhh, but first, we must get introduced to the television audience, so they know who to root for and who to throw garbage at.  This is our “four seconds of fame”, as I had called it before, where no matter the end result, we would have the camera all to ourselves to say hello to the world however we chose…

Within reason, of course…

Prior to the intros, Regis takes the opportunity to stroll through the Ring of Fire to greet each of us.  For the first, and only time ever, I am going to get to shake hands with someone who’s actually famous!  We were told by our handlers that when Regis stopped by our Bendy Side Out seat to shake our hand, we weren’t to try to make small talk, or ask Reege what he really thought of Kathy Lee Gifford… we were to merely tell him our full names.  The purpose of this was to help Regis out with any pronunciation issues that may result from names that just don’t roll off the tongue…

You can do it, Regis!

Once he’s done making his rounds, and tape is ready to roll once again, Regis first has to deliver the hastily written half-assed explanation to cover for the question writers on their poorly thought out glowing potato question… officially declaring the tomato a fruit and explaining just how inconceivable it is that they’ve injected a potato plant with the “luminescence gene” of a jellyfish to make them glow.  Regis is still totally not buying this bullshit line of reasoning, or really the whole damn science-gone-mad experiment at that.  I mean, if they can make a potato glow when it needs water, what could possibly be next?

Looks like it’s time to change your underwear…

With that out of the way, it’s time for Regis to introduce us!  Here are tonight’s ten new contestants!!!!  And they are…..

Sitting in Seat One….

I firmly believe that the producers, intimately familiar Regis’ tendency to butcher the uncommon, put Wynema Kimbrough in the first seat solely because they knew he’d fuck her name up at least once.  And that’s exactly what he did….

CUT!!!!

So now for his inability to allow a simple six letter name to roll off of his golden tongue, Regis has to go back and even reshoot the damn glowing potato explanation… which I’m sure just tickled him to death.  So the intros roll again… and Regis fucks up yet again!  But the men in the booth know they don’t have all day… there’s a second taping that has to be completed sometime before midnight, so they just let Regis go with it this time, meaning that thanks to Regis’ twisted tongue, Wynema Kimbrough and will forever be remembered in her four seconds of fame as “WYKEMA”

Wy-NE-ma, Wy-NE-ma, Wy-NE-ma, Wy-NE-ma, Wy-NE-ma, Wy-NE-ma….

My intro was up fourth, and as you may remember from when I used the screenshots during our on-stage intros a few weeks ago, I was representin’ for my message board by flashing a “one” and a “three” for thirteen, which went with my username over there (and as I’m sure you’ve noticed at some point in time, my username here on WordPress as well).  I can not even begin to tell you how much I agonized over how to do this correctly since I had made the decision to flash the thirteen earlier in the day.  Why?

Lysdexia, baby!

In a rather old post on my blog, I once talked about my “artistic dyslexia” that comes about by my mind being confused when trying to imagine something from the opposite point of view.  In the image above, I drew MBRS’s left paw backwards… and by left paw, I mean her left paw, not the one on the left of the drawing.  It’s difficult for my mind to correctly “fix” things when they need to be mirrored.  So you can now imagine how I was sweating over which hand needed to be the “one”, and which one needed to have the “three”.  I didn’t want to end up like that poor guy The Offpsring sang about in “Pretty Fly For A White Guy“…

You know this is going to go on your permanent record….

But I did it right, and I made it through the worldwide introductions!  Now it’s time for the first Fastest Finger question of the night!!!!!

Put these stages in the life cycle of a butterfly in order, starting with the earliest.

Oh yeah!!!! Oh, fuck yeah!!!!!

As soon as this question hit the monitor, I am almost physically drooling in anticipation of just how badly I’m going to whip everyone’s ass on this.  The phone game the show used to fill the majority of its contestant slots from features questions just like the Fastest Finger queries that were used to determine the next Hot Seat player… so smart contestant hopefuls always prepared by committing to memory anything in a group of four that could possibly be asked.  In 2001, if you’d have asked me to put the Teletubbies in order of their height, I could have done that without blinking an eye…

Midget, Douchebag, Lardass, and the gay one… final answer.

The life cycle question was just such an ordered quartet that I’d locked into my brain.  The whole time Regis is reading and then repeating the question (The redundancy was always edited out of the real show), I’ve got EGG – LARVA – PUPA – ADULT going over and over and over again in my mind, and it’s just a matter of using my then still-polished video game reflexes to get that answer in before anyone else can!  Holy cow, what a gift this was to get a Fastest Finger question where I already knew what the four choices were going to be, and their correct order, before they even came on screen!!!

I’m just gonna pick this one up…. it’s a gimme!

It seems like I have to wait forever for those choices to appear so that I can start dreading what in the hell I’m going to say when I get into the Hot Seat.  Well, finally!  Here they come…

A. Pupa
B. Adult
C. Egg
D. Caterpillar

There’s Egg….. C, BAM!!!  OK, Larva……. larva…… um, what?  Caterpillar?  Where’d that come from…. um……

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep

That was it.  As soon as I realized larva was not there, but this totally unexpected word “caterpillar” was, my brain shut down.  And I’m not exaggerating… I just sat there looking at my monitor like a possum in the headlights for what had to be at least seven or eight seconds.  I had so psyched myself up for how I was going to play this question before the choices even appeared in front of me, that I was totally unable to adjust when they threw me the caterpillar curveball…

Yeah, I think I’ll have some of what you’re smoking…

When I finally managed to jolt myself back into the world of reality, I really began to panic and just started hitting buttons.  It never managed to run through my brain at all that caterpillar WAS the damn larva stage…. “Um…. OK, no larva, let’s go with Pupa…. um…. then caterpillar…. um…”

Sigh!  To top off what had been a really humiliating experience, I wound up hitting Egg once again for my final choice.  When the train wreck was all over, there was the horrific result of my bumbling staring at me mockingly from the LCD display on my console…

CADC>

That order isn’t going to get anyone into the Hot Seat, regardless of how fast it was entered in.  In the aftermath, when the associate producers came out to confirm the results by telling us what had registered, and if that was what we had really put in, all I could do what shake my head and admit to being a dumbass.  I guess I can always hope for the fact that somehow, everyone else missed this question as well, so that we’ll have to play another one…

Dream on, loser…

The twenty seconds is up, and Regis reveals the correct order that everyone with half a brain should know….

C. Egg
D. Caterpillar
A. Pupa
B. Adult

Please nobody get it right… please nobody get it right……

Hope you like that seat you’re already in, dumbass!

And the winner is….. Ethel Merman!!!!!

You punks never stood a chance with me! Bwahahaha!!!!

Oops, I mean….. Amy Turner!!!!

Woohoo!!! YAYAYAYA!!!!

And so my “semi-acquiantance” from the message board community Amy Turner is going to get to occupy the Hot Seat next….. after this commercial break.  One taping segment down, five more to go….

Insert forboding music here…

We’ll see how she does in the Hot Seat next Friday.  Until then, feel free to step on a caterpillar for me….

Actually, here’s a better idea!