Anyway, the chief will send up a tribe member to put the rock at the top and show the men how to climb the pole. The tribe member shimmies up the pole and puts the stone at the top. Travis explains that even though he didn't believe in the spirit stone, he still wanted it, just "so the girls wouldn't get it." I'm sorry, "git it." Lea says that when the guy was done putting the stone at the top, none of the guys was excited about being picked by the chief, because none of them wanted to be the one to crawl up to the top and then fall down. Hey, at least you're getting a chance, there, Sarge. Don't look a gift chief in the mouth.

The person who manages to get himself picked for the pole is Brady, a very, very pretty FBI agent who says that he figured the only way to get up was to do it exactly the way the other guy did. So that's what he does. The women sit there and hope that Brady will fall, which seems fair, considering that they have yet to have a fair shot at jack, but of course, it doesn't happen. The guys get the stone, so that's a nice assertion of how much of a crap the show gives about the women it has brought into this situation. You know, if this is the way the entire season plays out and this is going to be the gimmick, the way pirates were the gimmick of the Pearl Islands, then between this and Rupert's Million, this show may just do itself in. I really don't think that women find seeing other women treated like this as entertaining as I guess Burnett and Probst do, and I kind of resent having Probst lecture the women about how not being spoken to, how being made to feel less important than the pig, is just "different," and that they shouldn't be all small-minded about it.

Anyway, the guys celebrate, and Travis has some kind of comment about how it abruptly started raining "like pouring pee out of a boot onto a flat rock." Wha-huh? Whatever. Maybe this is as much sense as Tom would have made if I had been able to understand the actual words coming out of his mouth. A frightening thought. And one that makes me miss Tom's old "Aaahhverrnafeeefernuttin" way of talking. The guys have prevailed. And now, finally, Jeff comes out to divide the teams and get this stupid thing underway already. He tells the men that they will remain as the Lopevi tribe, while the women will remain together as the Yasur tribe. Chris the construction worker says that he was glad it was men against women, because eight guys are much easier to fool than eight women. "Women stick together," he says with suspicion. "They're thick as thieves. Men are deceiving, mischievous [he says "mis-chee-vee-us"], untrusting human beings." Blah blah blah. "Men, I can manipulate," he announces. Twila, a highway repair worker, says that she looked around at the other women and wondered what exactly she had gotten herself into. She noticed that there seemed to be some fairly prissy women, and some who looked like they'd never gotten dirty in their lives. Heh. Yep.