Since there turns out to be no compelling business reason for me to have forced myself out from under the covers and into Manhattan today I'm going to see if I can manage to get last week's episode of The Apprentice out of the way before this brain tumor finally does me in. To no one's surprise, the contestant who quit for the first time ever for the second time turned out to be Verna Felton, who was really not feeling very well (to quote Erin, "A lot of us aren't feeling well", but unlike Verna I am used to the "fast-paced business environment" that Michael Tarshi mentioned about 20 times in the space of a minute and am going to gut it out until I "just get fired with some dignity"). Danny "Asscot" Kastner tried to organize a Verna support group and told her that all the book-learnin' folks would be happy to let her lie in bed while they took care of the task, but when no one else seemed to share his peaceful easy feeling Verna took the hint and took off (and this time Caroline, perhaps having listened to some Sting since the motel incident, allowed her to escape). Danny was heartbroken by Verna's decision and appeared to be on the verge of tears as the group assembled to meet Mr. Trump out in front of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. in Times Square, but the real tragedy of the episode was revealed when Donald began explaining this week's task and it had absolutely nothing to do with the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co.! Instead this week's product was some truly magnificent instant coffee from Nescafe, and when the teams settled down to strategize their marketing of the beverage Bren swiftly managed to name Danny the Magna team manager before Danny or anyone else had a chance to realize what he was doing. My own first thought when this happened was that Bren was a moron to say that Danny should be the leader because of his great marketing skills after seeing clips of his "toss a ping pong ball at this cardboard box while I sing a little song" Burger King campaign, but now I think he was really just setting him up so they would not have to spend another week with that fucking guitar in the suite. With this unnoticed trickiness Bren leaps into the ranks of my final four picks, with Alex, Stephanie, and John keeping him company. Stephanie makes the cut after showing she has what it takes to be a real corporate leader by coming up with the idea to outsource the entire task to an event planner, not to mention getting some effusive praise from the Donald in the boardroom. Michael, meanwhile, proved not to at all deserving of my less-effusive praise for him last week, spending the entire episode either pouting or threatening physical violence after no one liked his idea to use sexy eurobabes and a moped giveaway to entice customers to their crapalicious coffee - Erin says, "It alienates women", Michael says, "But we'll double up on the men!", and Alex has this combination spit-take / ears perking up reaction which is unaccountably not filmed. Something else that was unaccountably missing during this episode was anyone mentioning in the boardroom that one of the reasons they were trying to get Michael fired even though he had an exemption was that he repeatedly threatened his team leader with bodily harm (not to mention his tendency to inflict the English language with bodily harm: "The last person you want to fuster is me", "mediocracy", "My ideas were not reciprocated", and since I didn't write down who said "a collegick education" I'm going to pin that one on Tarshi as well). As a quick side note, I'm also confused by the fact that after all his talk about beating the crap out of Danny and all Erin's talk about how much he sucks, Michael says "You gotta love DannyK!" when linking to him on his website plus calls Erin Ellmore "My favorite brunette from Philly!" and is pictured hanging out with her on Brian O'Goomba's site... which is the real reality here? Anyhow, I'm running out of steam, so let me quickly dump the rest of my notes. Best quote was from Audrey: "I'm sweating balls - hoo!", Chris still has no control over the volume of his voice, Angie the fitness badger was either snorting cocaine onboard the Trumpicopter or the show's editors really wanted to make it look as though she was, and repeated viewing on the TiVO confirmed that in Danny's farewell show of solidarity with the working man he was not giving the doorman a thumbs up, but rather the old shaka bra. I am in no condition to discuss his goodbye song from the cab ride, so that will have to do for week 3.