The Amazing Race for the Amazing Race

This week the Amazing Race started, one of the few television programs I've ever cared to remember to watch. Although never truly as good as the one, single season of Amazing Race: Family Edition, the Amazing Race: Vanilla is still a pretty good time. Especially if you enjoy strangers yelling at each other in taxi cabs. This series' first episode was relatively unremarkable, but I imagine it achieved what it meant to -- that being to identify the snowboarding dudes as dudes, the cocktail waitresses as bimbos, the grandparents as slightly senile grandparents, the Survivor couple as scheming soon to be scoundrels, the male flight attendants as the token gay couple, and the twins, apparently, as not having memories that can last longer than thirty seconds. I imagine the climax of the season will be when either of the brother-sister duo runs the other over in their brand new, special edition 2012 Ford Focus.

The episode reminded me, however, of a friend and I's amazing race last spring in an attempt to have the most amazing movie marathon ever: an Amazing Race amazing movie marathon. What could be better than spending a whole day watching a whole season of Amazing Race? The answer is a whole lot of things, but in San Antonio not much. Being the master planner of this party I was assigned the task of obtaining the videos, and so I devised a plan.

Plan A: Go to Blockbuster and rent it.

Genius in its simplicity. Unfortunately no Blockbuster admitted on their website to owning any Amazing Race DVDs in the entire San Antonio area, and sure enough none of them actually owned them when I visited their stores and demand they show me where they kept them. Blockbuster does own a surprisingly large number of Firefly copies, however, which is why I imagine they went into bankruptcy.

Plan B: Go to another movie rental chain and rent it.

Very similar to Plan A, Plan B was different in that it involved going to other movie rental chains. Not surprisingly it too failed. People do not want to watch Amazing Race in South Texas. Not when there's sweet Tejano music weekly at El Mercado at least! Seriously, what can compete with an accordion?

Plan C: Go to any other store I can think of and buy it.

This plan was admittedly devised on the fly while driving about in my fruitless pursuits of Plans A and B. I visited two separate Best Buys, a Walmart, a Target, and even a used booked store which for whatever reason also sold movies. The end result was no Amazing Race, but a decent book on the Soviet Union's war in Afghanistan and, somehow, a 2000 piece puzzle of a castle in Germany.

Plan D: Use NetFlix to rent the series.

Brilliant idea in that NetFlix has multiple seasons of Amazing Race for rental. Terrible idea in that you can only rent one of 3 or 4 DVDs in a season at a time. Not ideal for a one day marathon. Aborted.

Plan E: Use NetFlix streaming video via Laura's giant television.

Laura has a gigantic television. Its size is measured in yards and the weight of it has ruined the foundation on that side of her house. Assuredly inside of all that plastic and hardware there would be a means of connecting directly to the Internet. There was not.

Plan F: Use NetFlix streaming video via Paul and Rachel's Nintendo Wii.

Easy to obtain. Easy to hook up. Already wasted a whole heck of a lot of time previously setting up a NetFlix account for Plans D and E. It seemed pretty flawless to me. It was at this time that we noticed NetFlix does not stream any of the Amazing Race series over its streaming video.

Plan G: Screw it. Let's watch The Pacific instead.

Around back up plans five or six is generally when I consider giving up, and so way gave up after Plan F. Clearly someone, divine or otherwise, did not want us to have an Amazing Race marathon. It likely would have been too amazing. There probably wouldn't have been anywhere to go after that and the rest of our lives would have been lived in listless boredom and indifference knowing our best day was already in our past. In either case we watched The Pacific instead and it was confusing. Too many guys with dark brown hair and average height. Thankfully most of the difficult to tell apart characters got killed off early in the series so by the end I had some idea what was going on. It turns out the war with Japan was rather wet. Or at least that's what I believe the take home message was.

Our amazing race ended in failure, but in the process I learned a lot about Laura and together we learned a lot about ourselves. We didn't win the grand prize, but what we lost we more than made up for in friendship. I wouldn't have run the race with anyone else. Mostly because no one else has a love for the show and a gigantic TV. But also because of the friendship. It is its own reward, especially when you don't have a real reward. Or a television movie marathon to watch.