Day 44: It is the halfway point for the unremarkable residents of the house of forced laughter.

"I could be out of here in 14 days," says a reflective Eddie in the Red Room, "as opposed to 44."

"For me personally," he continues, "it's a big day because every second that passes is one second closer to walking outside and down those stairs [to] my loved ones, my mom and my dad, beating up my little brother, seeing my girlfriend again and palling around with my boys.

"The next 44 days," he concludes pensively, "will have its highs and lows."

Brittany gets up early to make biscuits, clean the house and wave good morning to the sun. With her green pigtails and unnaturally round eyes she looks like an electrocuted elf.

Jamie, the generally demure beauty queen, is all exercised because she thinks the "Big Brother" producers are making a big deal out of her having voted Karen for banishment. She's picking up clues from the questions the "Big Brother" questioners ask her and the other residents in their daily Red Room confessionals.

Karen was voted out Wednesday, after spending a week thinking it was Curtis, not Jamie, who'd voted for her. Jamie never gave her a clue that it was actually she who'd provided the (as it happened) decisive vote. Like a certain Republican presidential administration a quarter-century ago, Jamie's discovering that you get nailed not for the crime but the cover-up.

"I know it's a story line [but] it kind of makes me mad," she says. Now she knows how Nixon felt when Woodward and Bernstein came calling.

Besides, Jamie can't stand being as thought of anything less than perfect.

The residents now plot to talk to certain questioners in the Red Room. Since they live in a house specifically designed to capture their every utterance, it's difficult to put one over on their masters.

Jamie, displaying Stockholm Syndrome behavior, tries to sneak in when her favorite interrogator, Christine, is around. She gets a guy instead. "Oh," she says, crestfallen.

Jamie's in a special form of hell -- entering a beauty contest and working on looks, talent and personality, only to find out that the sole important category is scheming.

"The thing that sucks right now," she tells Curtis, "is that I feel like I have so many sides to my personality and [yet] what's focused on is who I voted for."

This was the late Jordan's take on things as well -- she said the show was edited in a way to make her look bad. As we've noted before, this rationalization doesn't wash. It's kind of like a bank robber who says, "Well, why don't you show the surveillance tapes for when I wasn't robbing the bank?"

Curtis accidentally says something we agree with: "You have a lot of control over who you are and how you're acting."