Wednesday, October 12, 2005

The Erasing Mace

I was over at a friend's house the other day, watching a bit of the reality TV series The Amazing Race. The concept is straightforward: several teams race each other to the next location, where they pick up an envelope with instructions for the next leg of the race. There are various additional challenges thrown in to keep the audience interested, of course, but mostly it's a race to the $1,000,000 prize at the end of the last leg.

The problem is, the race looks a whole lot like It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium on steroids. Contestants travel to exotic lands where they eagerly seek out travel agents to get them the hell out of there as fast as possible, so they can find a travel agent in the next country to get them out of there as fast as possible.

Here's a little free advice to the winner of the race: sure, pay off debts, give some money to charity, and all those good things, but for goodness sake, set aside part of your winnings to take a trip back to all the wonderful places you've just passed through and actually experience them. There are infinite great and wondrous things in this world of ours, and only some of them are in the good old You Wess O'Vay.