Frank, my dear ...

We don't give a damn! Plus: The lions are restless.

Dec. 21, 2001 | It's the night after the Moto Maji tribe booted out Brandon. Brandon is a gay bartender from L.A.; you'd think he'd have been a blast to have around, but he turned out to be lazy and ageist, a whiner and a bad schemer, cranky and untrustworthy.

He was a 6-year-old in a twentysomething's body.

The only interesting thing about his demise is that he somehow charmed the paranoid Lex into joining forces with him.

Lex already had an alliance -- with Big Tom, the goat farmer; Ethan, the smolderingly handsome soccer player; and the elder Kim. He thought a temporary concord with Brandon gave the main alliance the security it needed to get the combined tribes down to a manageable level. The others, however, didn't, and in the end Lex was the only person who didn't go along with the Brandon ouster.

And that has left his alliance-mates a bit suspicious.

Brandon's departure leaves the younger Kim, the dumb one, as the last surviving representative of the nearly extinct Samburu Taliban, a cadre of intolerant youngsters who would have been beating their elders with canes like their Afghanistan counterparts if they could have gotten away with it.

Kim, like Lindsey before her, had seen Brandon's betrayals up close and personal. But she's feeling a little guilty about voting to oust him: "It still tugged at my heart a little bit."

The only body part of ours Brandon ever disturbed in this manner was the digestive system.

But Lex's tempestuous dalliance with Brandon is raising eyebrows.

He's spinning it as if it was no big deal: "Tom, Ethan, Kim and I are all still standing and we have an advantage now; we have an advantage because we got everyone else outnumbered," Lex says.

This is actually true: All they have to do is stay together and knock off dumb Kim; Frank, the intolerant gun nut; and Teresa, the "coffee, tea or me?" girl. The guys can thereupon jettison the elder Kim, and then Ethan and Big Tom, the mountainous goat farmer, can turn to the endgame, the object of which is to end up in the final two with dislikable, stressed-out Lex.

(The $1 million grand prize is given to one of the last two players by vote of the previous seven ejectees; either Ethan or Tom seems likely to garner more votes than Lex in a one-to-one matchup in this fashion.)

But Lex still has to worry about getting that far; he knows he's pushed some boundaries, and he needs to make sure his alliance is strong.

He tries to shore things up with the elder Kim: "We're still solid, right?"

Kim mutters something unintelligible -- does she say, "100 percent?"

"All right," he says hopefully.

Ethan continues to speak philosophically about the nature of a promise and ponder what the meaning of the word "word" is.

"He gave his word to Brandon and gave his word to us as well," he reasons with Big Tom. "His word was just as strong with Brandon as it was with us."

Still, he recognizes, "Lex went out on his own and covered his own ass."

Next page: The lioness doesn't sleep tonight!