Wanda and Desiree are mother and daughter. Mom is the overly pumped-up freakazoid, daughter is the calming influence. Wanda is a single mom, and she's clearly doing a pretty good job, based on how together and well-spoken Desiree is. Desiree assures us that her mom is not about "frumpy little Christmas sweaters," but is very hip. Except for their reference to how happy they will be if other teams underestimate them (ack!), I almost entirely enjoy their intro clip. The way that Desiree talks about the possibility that other people will think they're just "sexy little tamales" makes it sound to me like they get a certain amount of that -- which I'm sure they do, since they're both lovely and probably hang out together a lot, and the world is full of stupid people. There's a wonderful moment when Wanda says, "We're going to...salsa our way to the pit stop," and Desiree laughs in this wonderful, generous way, reaching over and touching her mom's hands, and you can immediately tell that they really do like each other -- it's not one of those strained, weird "my mom is my best friend" situations.

David and Lori. The theme of their participation is "nerds in love." They're from Kansas, and they've been dating for three years. He refers to them as "in-your-face nerdy," and says it's "one of [their] powers." My favorite moment, though, is when he deadpans into the camera, "She's really great at card games; I'm really great at taking tests." And you could believe that he's serious, which would be very unfortunate, except that he's completely cracking her up. She says it will help them that they're in love, because they respect each other so much. And then she says, "How can you lose when you have Dave on your team?" You sort of have to see all of this as either entirely serious or good-naturedly self-deprecating, and I totally choose the latter. They are so much closer to the kinds of people I would be friends with than anyone else on this show that it's not even funny. I would totally invite them over if they were local. The other thing is that Dave isn't the purely bookish kind of nerd -- if you check CBS.com, you'll learn that Dave is the kind of nerd who's in bands, which is a little different sort of nerd than the astrophysicist type. Arguably, this means Dave is a geek more than a nerd, and possibly a dork more than either of those two, but it doesn't make me like him any less.