I'm the weakest link: Goodbye!

This is it, my final column -- ever. My editors have one less reason to drink, and you have one more reason to read the Bloomington Independent.\nI've been writing this column for three days solid, but every draft ends up being 500 words too long. I tried to trim it down by getting rid of all unnecessary words, like "the."\nBut that didn't do it. So instead of deleting all the prepositions, I started over.\nHow to describe NBC's new game show, "The Weakest Link" (8 p.m. Mondays)? The best thing to do is to describe the show's host, Britain's own Anne Robinson.\nShe's a sadistic, smart-mouthed sourpuss whose sarcastic remarks about contestants prove once and for all that the British have no sense of humor.\nCase in point: "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life."\n"The Weakest Link" will not last long if Robinson remains the cruel host who should be clubbed over the head like a baby seal. If the show is to survive, Robinson must embrace the Tao of Ash from the "Evil Dead" trilogy.\nMore later.\nI could explain how the game works, but trust me, you wouldn't get it. As one of my friends says, it's an evil cross between "Jeopardy" and "Survivor" in which during eight rounds, contestants vote off the weakest link: whoever screws up the most.\nThe setting is just an excuse to let Robinson rail at the contestants. She just stands there wearing black leather with her hands behind her back as if she were handcuffed, chicken lips puckered, ready to tell you, "You are the weakest link," adding in an irritatingly condescendingly light tone, "goodbye!"\nShe just made me want to scream "Erin Go Braugh!" -- Ireland forever! Robinson is still upset because someone dropped a house on her sister.\nIn the first show, she got meaner as the contestants banked less money.\n"You banked a miserable, pathetic $7,500," she told contestants one round. Shortly afterward, she said, "You banked a magnificent $0!"\nShe told one contestant, who was still in high school, to come back after college. And when a contestant gets voted off, she elicits insults from the remaining contestants, asking one guy if he'd hire the woman he just voted off.\nAs you can see, Robinson is a jerk. If I could, I would use a certain word to describe her. But the IDS won't let me be obscene in my last column, so I will substitute the offending word with a name that I think captures its essence: Bobby Knight.\n Moving on, although Robinson is a real Bobby Knight, she is so nasty that she fails to translate her raw Bobby Knight-ishness into a character you will stick with.\nYou know the type of Bobby Knight I'm talking about. Denis Leary summed up the Bobby Knight ideal in his "No Cure for Cancer" routine. You were horrified by his monstrosity and astounded by his audacity when he sang, "Sometimes I park in handicapped spaces while handicapped people make handicapped faces, I'm [a Bobby Knight]!"\nA bold statement by Leary. Audacity is what Robinson lacks. To gain it, she needs to learn the Tao of Ash.\nDeftly played by Bruce Campbell, Ash is the Luke Skywalker of horror films. By "Army of Darkness," the third "Evil Dead" movie, Ash has become what Robinson only strives to be: The "Bobby Knight" you look up to, or in some cases you wish you could be.\nIn "Army of Darkness," there is a scene in which Ash brushes off a woman, being so rude to her that she slaps him. Then he grabs her by her neck, undoes her hair and says, "Gimme some sugar, baby."\nCampbell describes the way Ash treats the woman as "chauvinistic and reprehensible." \nYet many viewers stick with Ash because, like Leary, both his good and bad qualities show us that he has balls -- something which Robinson lacks.\nNot just because she's a woman. She picks on helpless victims. Being a "Bobby Knight" is a hard-fought right, not a privilege. She needs the gall to face down situations that the rest of us flinch away from.\nDon't ask me how. It's a game show for God's sake. But she needs to be bold before she can be a like Denis Leary, Ash and Bobby Knight.\nSo, until demons possess her contestants and Robinson has to leap into the air and blow them all away with a Winchester 30.30 rifle, she does not have the right to grab another woman by her neck, say "Hail to the king, baby" and kiss her.\nWatch the end of "Army of Darkness," and this will make sense.\nRobinson, get in touch with the ideal Bobby Knight that Ash represents.\nHail to the king baby.