And then they -- I'm sorry to say, I'm not making this up -- put their fists in the center of their little circle like the Superfriends and swear their allegiance. If you've ever heard people who watch reality TV talk about the distasteful nature of "mugging for the camera," this is what they're talking about. Nobody would ever put their fists in a circle like that in their day-to-day life in that situation. That's strictly happening because they think it will be a great shot, and they're sure it will be on TV. It's always too bad when it sticks out quite that egregiously. Unless you're taking the form of an ice bridge or the shape of a gorilla, you don't need to do that.

Back from commercials, some editors are showing off with a brilliantly funny sequence regarding Mike working out. We hear some generic and appropriately dated na-na-na-na-na electric guitar business as he keeps exhaling in this loud, whooshing manner by which the editing staff is obviously amused. Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! He's using this weight machine and that weight machine, he's using free weights, and all the time -- whoosh! Then he's jumping rope -- and then he's tripping on the jump rope and having to stop. And the guitar music screeches to a halt. And then he starts jumping again, and it starts up again, and the entire thing is just delightful in every way, in that it is the perfect moment in which a reality show manages to convey that a person is a tool perfectly effectively without saying a word. It's very similar to letting him be hoist with his own petard, only with a couple of letters removed, but I'm not explaining it, because I get enough angry mail as it is. James stops into the gym and asks Mike what's with all the working out, and Mike says that he's just trying to keep up, blah blah testosterone blah. Mike then DRs that when he came into the house, he saw all "hunky dudes," so right now, he's trying to negotiate "a treaty between FourPackiraq and SixPackistan." It's remarkable that that's only the third most upsetting war I've been hearing about this week. Danielle says in the DR that she talked to Mike about his efforts to get in shape, and how he told her he has his mother's hips. So to recap: in this one episode, Mike's mother has learned that he thinks of her as his personal, wide-assed washerwoman. That's going to be one bang-up Thanksgiving.