My recap of the latest Amazing Race episode is now up.

Everyone else gets the clue to the Detour, which is a choice between shoveling camel food into a bag or using a hilarious little automatic jockey to race a camel down the track. The robot jockey is so awesome; it’s got this whip that goes around and around and whips the camel — “lightly whips,” Phil assures us — and it’s even wearing a little hat. I’m totally taking one to Virginia City next year.

Go read it all.

Episode links:
Miss Alli’s recap
TV Squad review
TV Guide review
Download the episode with BitTorrent

The made-up word of the day: MetroNatural.

I was invited to take a tour of the Ormsby House today. I toured it with Valarie Lehr, one of the owners, with her husband Don joining in for part of the time. They’re really nice people and gracious hosts, and we went over every inch of the place looking at how much work still needs to be done.

It’s going to take me a while to write up a full report, but I have posted a few teaser pictures over at Around Carson.

The dogs are eating the wall.

THE DOGS! ARE EATING! THE WALL!

This is the kind of stuff I love. Blue Sky Studios is giving their animators a weekly challenge. Each Monday they’re given a theme, and they have to come up with a drawing, in their own style, that fits the theme. Past themes have been Muppets, 80s cartoons, and hybrid animals. This week it’s movie monsters. But I love seeing when artists take something that’s familiar and give it their own twisted take. Some of you may remember the Creepy The Pooh gallery I linked to earlier this summer. Same idea.

Here are a few samples from the Blue Sky Challenge, but you’ve got to scroll through the whole page to see them all.

Hat tip: TV Squad.

Internet Explorer 7 has been released. A few years ago this might have been big news, but I look at the announcement with nothing more than a big “Meh.” I mean, especially when Firefox 2.0 is getting so close to release I have no more interest in a new version of IE than I do in a new version of Opera. Or Safari.

The developer inside me says that I should install it just so I can look at my sites and make sure nothing is broken. But the new engine in IE is supposed to me much closer to Firefox’ than the IE6 engine, so I can’t imagine it would render my sites worse. And already I never test my sites in IE6. Why would I start checking them in IE7?

The IT professional inside me says I need to learn how to use it so I can answer questions when my co-workers notice they’ve been upgraded. But I’m not particularly looking forward to it.

Of course, I may not have a choice in upgrading. IE7 is scheduled to be pushed out to everyone as a Critical Update, which means it will be downloaded and possibly installed as part of the Automatic Updates. You can block it from being installed, but that takes a special download. And I don’t have a problem with that, as long as it doesn’t affect the rest of the system.

So, surprisingly, even though I’ve called for Microsoft to update IE many times in the past, now that it’s here it’s too late. This release gets a big “so what?” from me, and that’s my official review.

Update: It’s funny that if you go to ie7.com you see nothing but an oversized Firefox logo.