| May. 11th, 2008 @ 02:35 pm Is this mosque kosher? |
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A bit late with this week's thoughts on The Apprentice - for some reason I quite liked having the previous post at the top of the page. Lee McQueen is so concerned about the delay, he's got his vest on.
I picked my lowculture sweepstake, Michael Sophocles, partly because he's Jewish so I figured Sralan wouldn't chuck him in the first week. As a strategy to not be first out of a sweepstake that doesn't even have a prize, I think that's fair enough. Disturbingly though, it seems that was also Sophocles' entire strategy for winning the show itself. And since, as it turns out, even I'm more Jewish than him (and my sole qualification is having briefly dated a Jewish guy several years ago) it really was a terrible plan.
Every year The Apprentice has an episode where the contestants are sent off with a shopping list of obscure items for Sralan, and the ones who pay the least overall win. As a twist this year the task took place in Marrakesh, where haggling is a way of life. Team leader Lee McQueen is not very concerned about this. Lee McQueen is making weird animal noises and getting all excitable. But along the way Lee McQueen is actually remembering to do some planning to make sure they can find all the items, so Lee McQueen's team wins the task. After last week's set-to, Lee McQueen is keen to tell Sara and Lucinda he's willing to see how they do in the task before judging them (which is a bit rich considering Lee McQueen was halfway to proposing marriage to Lucinda a couple of weeks ago when she was team leader.)
Over on the other team, Irish Jenny was Project Manager, and did no planning whatsoever. However she did come up with the idea that Alex and Claire should "role-play" as an engaged couple, something that Claire seemed to get a bit too method about ("How long have we been engaged? And WHY AREN'T WE MARRIED YET?" Careful Alex, next week's task involves wedding dresses.) Even after she'd been told they wouldn't be doing this schtick any more, Claire still chipped in on Alex's attempts at bartering, for some reason believing that telling the salesman about her feet was a good idea.
For a while now the papers have been saying this week saw two contestants trying to bribe a Moroccan salesman into not helping their opponents, and both getting fired for cheating as a result. Well, yes and no. Jenny Celery instigated the bribe and was the first of two people to go, but more because of her general "snake-like" attitude of twisting Sralan's words in the boardroom to put the blame on other people than anything else. After her successful (but wholly transparent) shifting of the blame onto Sara last week, her days were numbered. Michael Sophocles was the other person involved in the bribe, but he stayed - rather miraculously, since he was involved in an even bigger fiasco. You see, one of the items on Sralan's list was a kosher chicken.
My first thought was that this was a bit of a trick item, because Morocco's a Muslim country so this could turn out to be harder to get than it first seemed. Something that Lee McQueen's team realised, found out early on where the Jewish area of Marrakesh was, and got the right item. Jenny's team, on the other hand, were unsure of exactly what a kosher chicken was, and rather than find out decided it would be fine to get one of the regular Muslim stallholders to slaughter a chicken and then, oh I dunno, take it to the mosque or something. Lest we forget, the first words on Sophocles' application form were "I'm a good Jewish boy." Now I couldn't tell you the difference in how to prepare chicken to make it either Kosher or Halal, but I know which one's the Jewish version and which one's Muslim thankyouverymuch. Just in case we weren't sure that Michael's a bit confused where religion's concerned, before going into the boardroom he crossed himself - in the Orthodox way, but with his fingers held in the Catholic way. Seriously, apart from Buddhism and Hinduism are there any of the world's major religions he doesn't think are roughly interchangeable?
Obviously, this rather major error having highlighted that he'd only used his Jewish ("half-Jewish!" he amended this to when Sralan called his bluff) background to suck up to Sralan's own religion, he was almost out on his ear. Sralan blamed a flashback to when he himself was young and overeager for letting him stay, and sacked the totally out of control Irish Jenny instead. Surely my sweepstake's days are numbered now though; apart from the fact that he's now very much in the firing line, he's supposedly dating the already-sacked Princess Lindi so presumably has been out of the house long enough to meet up with her again. I bet Princess Lindi is already getting sick of people asking her just how Jewish Michael actually is. |
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