No big surprises, and no need to waste a lot of time like the show does. Josie, the model who had the brutally low score, goes home. I feel worse for her partner, Alec, who actually won the first season, and now two seasons in a row has gone home the first week. Get him a better partner next time!

The rest of the show is standard fare. Dolly Parton comes out to do the typical two-fer, first a classic (9-to-5) for the audience to get into and the pros to dance to, and then something from her new album that no one cares about.

They do the usual audience reactions (who cares? the producers will just ask a bunch of people who they like and dislike, and then only show the ones they want), and the comedy bit is now Kenny Mayne instead of Jimmy Kimmel. We get it. You need a plug for your other ABC shows. A caveman makes an appearance, but no one cares.

In a new segment called "Stars of Dance", Savion Glover does some stomping around in green boots. It's quite good. The segment is sponsored by Macy's, which makes me wonder how long the show would be if you took out all the segments that are only there to plug something (let's see, the Kenny Mayne / Caveman segment, Dolly Parton's second song, the Macy's segment….)

Sabrina the cheetah girl is the best of the bunch right now, which I think is a total cheat because isn't she, you know, a professional dancer? I mean, sure, we've had boyband guys on before, but none of them were still in it, they all had a few years behind them. As far as I know, the cheetah girl thing is a current phenomenon. So when she's done practicing with Dancing with the Stars, she goes and practices with them. It'll be interesting to see how she does in the long haul, especially for the slow and graceful numbers. She can't just wiggle her hips for every single song.

Ok, so apparently the Shakespeare reference by Jared last week (he bought a copy of Henry V from the store) is going to be a regular feature.

This week after discovering how warm a chicken egg is immediately after its hatched, the book tells them that you don't need to keep all your chickens for eggs, you can have some for dinner. This creates quite a controversy among the kids (and I'm sure among the viewers) about whether to kill them at all, and then who will do the killing. The bigger kid, Greg is it?, miraculously has animal butchering experience so he'll be able to do it quick and easy. They agree that as long as they don't have to do the killing, they'll help with the eating.

One girl whose name I forget (come on, there are 40 kids to remember) is so upset by this idea that she and a few others lock themselves up in the chicken coop. Neat idea that they should have keep up with – what would they eventually eat and drink? But instead the situation is diffused in a few minutes. End result, a couple of chickens get killed nice and clean, right there on tv, much to the freakout of the children. Who said that 2 chickens would feed 40 kids?? Jared is loaded with the one liners during this whole process, ranging from the geeky "As Shakespeare would say, To kill or not to kill" to the funnier "We just shortened the natural cycle of life and death for these guys."

The challenge is something about piping water from one place to another, and again the green team comes in last. That's actually one of the most frustrating parts of the show, as the characters on the green team are trying much harder than the spoiled little brats on the yellow team. This week yellow didn't even do their cooking chores, so how long is it before the producers step in with a rule about "If the council decides you didn't do the work, you don't get paid" or something?

Anyway, green loses again, which stinks for them. Remember that they've got the ten cents a day job of cleaning the outhouses. There's a nice moment when the other teams actually console them on their loss rather than being upset that they do not win the prize, but then it turns manipulative again as the host shows them the water pumps that they would have gotten, had green come through. Personally, if the show was really about being a feel good experience for the kids, I say don't even show the reward. If you don't get it, just leave it closed and don't torture the kids with "Look what you lost out on."

Nobody leaves this week, despite that one girl's objection that she would leave if they killed a chicken. I'm not sure if it was made clear whether she actually ate the dinner that night.

Last night, Savion Glover was a guest on Dancing With The Stars. He's now introduced as the World's Greatest Tap Dancer, and since Gregory Hines died, that is probably accurate. He did a very weird number wearing these funky green boots, so it sound a lot more stompy than tappy, but it was still a good show, and he's obviously so amazingly comfortable in what he does that the smile never left his face. He never looked like it was anything more than warm up.

My kids, 3 and 5, are in dance class and both know about tap. So I asked them through the magic of Tivo if they wanted to see what the world's greatest tap dancer looked like. They were both very impressed.

I explained that he was also the guy who "taught the penguin how to dance in Happy Feet." I then had to explain why he didn't teach them *all* how to dance ("They could all dance a little," I explained, "But Mumble was really really good at it.")

And then my 5yr old came out with the quote of the morning:

"Tap dancing is like sign language for your feet."