Point The Second -- all right, for God's sake, let's just get this part out of the way now, for those of you who are actually shallow enough to care. In person, Rob turns out to be five-two, scruffy, balding, skinny, scowling, and covered with scales. (The magic of TV…go figure.) The boy? Honestly should be wearing a bag over his head. It's that bad. He is also not witty, not smart, not gracious OR charming, and certainly not capable of causing girly palpitations in a model of modern cynicism such as myself. To be honest, we didn't get along at all. Found nothing to talk about. I mean, coffee was at 10:00, and I was at work by, like, 12:30, so as you can tell, it sucked rocks. Any other stories you hear are dirty lies. Quite frankly, it's a good thing, too, because if I had to show up here and say something like "Rob is an extremely good guy, almost as much as he is a hot tamale," it might prevent me from being able to make fun of Esquire anymore. Plus, it would get used as the pull quote over there on the right side of the page, so we can all be glad it didn't happen that way.

On with the show.

Previously on Upchuck, Outplay, Outlast: Camels were depressed, and they showed it. The Guidos were pains in my behind. Amie was sick as all-get-out. Driving around in the Sahara Desert with no idea where you're going didn't turn out to be as much fun as it sounded like it would be. Guido bickered, as did Momily, Danza, and just about everybody else, at one time or another. Team Cockroach got really lost. No, REALLY lost. Like, send-out-a-search-party lost. Once they were found, they were eliminated, proving that even Cockroaches don't actually live forever. (And just as they were beginning to grow on me, too.) Insert your own "once was lost, now am found" Amazing Race joke here.

Credits. Music from the upcoming film, Cutthroat Ping-Pong. (Q-Rob, on the credits: "I love how we're practicing law in our apartment. And there's me, saying, 'Why, thank you, Brennan, for pointing that out in this book, that's very interesting!'")

Even more vomit-inducing camera work than usual greets us as we come up on this week's episode. Phil reminds us that we last left the contestants at an oasis in the Sahara desert, and then he sings the Same Old Song about rules and flags that he sings every week. He explains that while the teams were at the oasis, they heard that a sandstorm was approaching, and that it might be a good idea to haul ass before everybody got swept away like the cast of Dorothy and Toto of Arabia. They were evacuated to another town, and now they're being let go again as they would have been at the oasis.