Monday Evening With 'The Mole'

Many of my friends don't even own a television. We own three, each with either a VCR and/or a DVD player. Right now my 5 year old's TV is at our other house. It's the smallest TV of the 3 and that's the place where we only get one channel (CBC) and it's often fuzzy or in black and white. We mostly watch DVDs there.

Here in the city we almost always watch the TV in the bedroom, which has both a VCR and DVD in the TV and an additional VCR attached. I watch decorating shows, our DC watches childrens programming, Hubby watches sports, news, sports, every reality show ever made and sports.

I don't mind going to the occasional hockey or football game, but I tune out most of the sports on TV, especially when he watches the game, then the sports on 2 or 3 different channels (each one showing replays of the same goals) and some of the reality shows are just too out there for me.

But there are some I enjoy watching with Hubby. Foremost among them are The Amazing Race, Survivor and The Mole. The thing all 3 shows have in common is exotic locations (although once they get there, Survivor is static). But the contestants in the other 2 shows get to travel from country to country.

Monday night is The Mole and Hubby tapes it while I'm at work in the evening so we can watch it together after I get home. I love to travel and I'm detail-oriented but I couldn't imagine going on the show. For anyone who hasn't seen it, the show takes a number of people around the world, gives them tasks to do as a group and they earn money that goes into the pot. But one person is the Mole, a plant whose job is to prevent them from completing tasks, confuse them, get them lost, etc. The ultimate aim is to identify the Mole and there is a quiz at the end of each show. The person with the least number of correct answers is 'executed', leaves the show. The finale consists of 3 people, one of whom is the Mole. After the final quiz, the winner gets all the money in the pot.

They give the players journals to write in (although they sometimes take them away or give them to their opponents to read or whatever) but there are so many things you have to pay attention to while trying to complete the task that I can't imagine being successful at pinpointing the Mole. And the questions are really tough. Like: Was the Mole wearing a hat during such and such a task? Or: Where was the Mole sitting during dinner (from the host's viewpoint)?

Right now, there are 4 or 5 people left, including Nicole, whom I believe to be the Mole, and the pot is a little over $300,000.

So, how about it? Would you go on a show that meant you had to leave your work and family for a month or more, take part in physically challenging tasks and risk being sent home with nothing, all for the chance to win several hundred thousand dollars?

And what would you DO with hundreds of thousands of dollars? The dumbest answer I've heard came from a guy on a game show who said he wanted to buy a pirate ship!