Burton is the first to be voted out TWICE!

Burton is the first to be voted out TWICE!

FINALLY!!! It took 36 days, but someone finally woke the women up. If they hadn’t banded together and ousted Burton, I think I might have had to check myself into a mental ward. (Who knows, maybe I’d run into Lil there.) Of course, is Burton REALLY ousted? I mean, he got voted out before and look what happened.

Maybe Mark Burnett will just keep letting him in the game until he wins. But assuming he really IS history, let us take a moment to say, THANK GOD! He started the game off like an overgrown frat boy by making fun of Rupert and his skirt and finished it by spouting off to Lil, ”I hope you can live with yourself. We had an alliance and YOU broke it.”

Okay, this is the point where if this were a movie, the screen would pause. Of if this were a record, the needle would go screeching off the vinyl. Anything to give you time to say… WHAT THE HELL?!? Dude, you JUST wrote Lil’s name down to evict her. Was there a bag of crack in that GMC Envoy they gave you? What planet are you on?

Burton getting ousted wasn’t a huge shock. When they kept hammering it home with quotes from him and Jon saying how stupid the women were, you sorta knew the tables would be turned. And, actually, in their defense, the majority of their comments about the ladies did not offend me.

Sure, when Fairplay said ”The girls in this game have done nothing for women’s rights…. They’d be better off scrubbing potatoes and mopping floors to get bills passed at this point,” that was a bit much. But all that other stuff about how poorly the women had been playing the game? They were right! Jon and Burton had been lying to all of them — several times — and yet they STILL couldn’t figure it out and get rid of them. Well, as stupid as they may have been, it was even STUPIDER for Burton to win the reward challenge and take Jon with him.

Rule number one of Survivor: Never win a challenge that will separate you from the main group and give them a chance to strategize freely against you. Rule number two: If you do win, don’t bring along your best friend!!! If Burton had just taken Lil or Darrah, he could’ve probably saved his skin. Choosing Jon was just plain cocky. And idiotic. Enjoy the truck, dude. (By the way, rule number three is to never give a shout-out to wrestler Mick Foley, which is what I think Fairplay was doing with his little ”have a nice day” bit when he voted for Lil.)

The only bummer about the women forming a last-minute alliance is that it prevented us from seeing Sandra sabotage the camp. C’mon, how great would that have been to watch her ditch all their equipment? That would have been a landmark moment. Not to say we didn’t have other landmarks. Burton, of course, became the first player to ever be voted out twice (saving any of the upcoming Survivor All-Stars from that painful distinction). And, even more astoundingly, we had our first menopause shout-out!

So once again, it was a pretty great episode in what has been an all-around great season. With only the finale left (Sunday at 8 p.m.), how does ”Pearl Islands” stack up against the others? Well, it’s hard to beat the freshness of the original. And for pure unpredictably and memorable morons, I’ll take ”The Amazon.” But for my money, ”P.I.” is right up there with ”The Australian Outback” and ”Marquesas” on that still stellar second level (waaaaaaaay above ”Thailand” and ”Africa”).

Well this is about the time when I guess I’m supposed to make a prediction as to the winner. As I stated in the magazine, I’ve been hesitant to do this, since I’m ALWAYS wrong, but because I’ve been rooting for Sandra since Rupert got axed, I’ll stick with the sassy survivor. And is it just me, or are some of you looking even more forward to the reunion show than the finale? Not only will we get Probst vs. Osten, round 2, but we’ll also get to see Fairplay called out for the lie about his dead grandmother. Good stuff to be sure. Although it will be considerably less good if that clown somehow takes home the million.

It won’t happen. It can’t happen…. Can it?