Week 5 Points: We Just Didn't Want to Deal With The Drama...That We Caused

Good afternoon, Jersey Shore Fantasy Leaguers! Sorry I was so tardy posting the points this week. I was drinking like I was in South Beach. Let's get right to it (If you want to skip right to the points, they're in bold below):

It was a big week for The Situation who scored 48 points. In the club he made out with two women (5 points each). You might think it was more because they showed quick flashes four separate times but trust me, I dissected the club/hook up sequence and the backgrounds were similar. As a side note, it appears DJ Pauly D bedded the tall brunette the Situation was making out with at the club.

DJ Pauly D, the Situation, and Vinnie brought home two girls with them from the club (worth 5 points each) HOWEVER, the two other random girls were ones the Situation called himself so I'm going to count those two for the Situation only (giving him a total of 20 "bring home random" points)

All three members of Team MVP implied that they smooshed those three randoms who spent the night and that's enough for me to award them 15 points each.

The other big point score was Sammi who cried, to my count, 4 separate times (worth 4 points each). It's tough to decipher individual bouts of crying because two occasions occurred most likely in the same confessional period but were placed at different times in the episode. I counted the confessional crying (same outfit, same confessional) as one crying.

Some odds and ends:

Snooki cried once (4 points) and called Emilio once (1 point) which I counted because the sentiment was there regardless of whether they were technically dating.

The Situation said "Situation" three times (3 points) DJ Pauly D said "Situation" once, Angelina said it twice.

Ronnie and Jwoww put up zero points.

In list form:

The Situation: 48 points
DJ Pauly D: 26 points
Vinnie: 25 points
Sammi: 16 points
Snooki: 5 points
Angelina: 2 points

Team Scoring:

@CKalange: 99 points
@mattsisto: 73 points
@NotPinnock: 56 points
@RobertAGeorge: 50 points
@handyslunch: 47 points
@wickedcoolmatt: 18 points
@poloshot: 16 points
@MollyMSmith: 7 points

The Leaderboard Through 5 Weeks:

@mattsisto: 246 points
@RobertAGeorge: 233.5 points
@Ckalange: 217.5 points
@handyslunch: 204.5 points
@poloshot: 204 points
@NotPinnock: 162 points
@wickedcoolmatt: 120.5 points
@MollyMSmith: 64.5 points


That's the Situation. Big Episode this week. I was thinking about letting someone guest score if there are any takers. Keep it real.

The Big Trade Post

Good afternoon Jersey Shore Fantasy League!

There are three days left for trades and I thought it would be pertinent to put up some numbers for the various characters as well as trade possibilities for teams most in need. Here goes:

No surprise here: Ronnie is the MVP for the first half of the season. Jwoww is pulling up the rear with a grand total of 1 point.

Ronnie: 117 points
Sammi: 70 points
DJPauly D: 62.5 points
The Situation: 35 points
Angelina: 31.5 points
Snooki: 25 points
Vinnie: 21 points
Jwoww: 1 point


It's clear that any team with Jwoww is going to need to make some moves. I see teams with Jwoww trading her and another third round pick for a top tier performer.

Big trades would include Ronnie or the Situation for Jwoww and Angelina, Jwoww and Sammi, etc...

Teams at the bottom of the leaderboard should consider moving two of their players for one mvp caliber in an attempt to get back in the game.

We also know that Jwoww and Sammi are going to get in a fight and so are Snooki and Angelina. However, same sex fights are only worth 10 pts each plus the x1.5 for the roommate. Compared to one night when the Situation, DJ Pauly D, Vinnie and Ronnie might bring home four random girls at 5pts each any advantage would be eliminated.

Teams @MollyMSmith (Snooki, Jwoww, Angelina) and @wickedcoolmatt (Jwoww, Sammie, Angelina) have the most to gain and are also in a tough spot because of the distance between them and the top of the leaderboard.

A midlevel team like @handyslunch who has Snooki and Sammi is in a position to leverage for a top tier player based on the fact that Sammi has performed so well so far and common knowledge would lead you to believe that Snooki has to do Something. Were he to trade Snooki and Sammi for Ronnie his team would look pretty tough going into the stretch.

Sammi is a huge question mark though. With the recent break from Ronnie it seems unlikely she'll continue to put up these all-star numbers.


If there were any way for a player to leverage to somehow get Ronnie, DJ Pauly D, and The Situation on their team it would be a lock on the top of the leaderboard going forward.

Here are the teams as they appear now:

@mattsisto: (Situation, Ronnie, Vinnie)
@poloshot: (Ronnie, Jwoww, Sammi)
@handyslunch: (Snooki, DJ Pauly D, Sammi)
@wickedcoolmatt: (Jwoww, Sammi, Angelina)
@MollyMSmith: (Snooki, Jwoww, Angelina)
@ckalange: (Situation, DJ Pauly D, Vinnie)
@NotPinnock: (Snooki, DJ Pauly D, Vinnie)
@RobertAGeorge: (Situation, Ronnie, Angelina)

The time is ripe for trades. We'll see if anyone makes any moves.

Episode 4 Points Break-Down: I Don't Like Tests, That's Why I Didn't Go To College

Good Morning JSFL

This was a slow week point wise but once again Ronnie was the MVP. We saw Snooki break up with her boyfriend as well as a Sammi/Ronnie split. We also some Ronnie pulling some great Infidelity grinding points. Here's how I scored it.

At the beginning of the episode Ronnie was killing it at the club dancing. Instead of counting each instance shown on camera I counted each individual girl he was dancing with. There were three: the girl in a tight black mini skirt, the girl in the red dress, and the short Asian girl. Each one counted for 5 points each leaving Ronnie with 15 infidelity grinding points.

Snooki called her boyfriend for 1 point and they broke up for 20.

Ronnie and Sammi broke up for the 20 points x1.5 with a roommate for 30 points each. I had some qualms about using the roommate multiplier here if only because it ended up giving @poloshot 84 points for this episode alone, more than some teams have total. However, that's the law as according to the rules and at the half-way point of the season I still think anything can happen.

Sammi was crying once worth 4 points

Ronnie had an awesome exhibition of Puking worth 5 points. He also should win a prize for being the drunkest person I've ever seen on television. I honestly fear for his well-being.

Points in list form:

Ronnie: 50
Sammi: 34
Snooki: 21
Situation: 1

Week 4 Team Scoring

@poloshot: 84
@handyslunch: 55
@RobertAGeorge: 51
@mattsisto: 51
@wickedcoolmatt: 34
@MollyMSmith: 21
@NotPinnock: 21
@ckalange: 1

Total Scoring after 4 weeks:

@poloshot: 188
@RobertAGeorge: 183.5
@mattsisto: 173
@handyslunch: 157.5
@ckalange: 118.5
@notpinnock: 106
@wickedcoolmatt: 102.5
@MollyMSmith: 57.5

Finally, just a reminder that this week is open for trading. I have some moves I want to make that you all will hear about. That's the situation.

Episode 3 Point Breakdown: Vincenzo Is Going To Be King of The Sandwich

Good Morning #JSFL'ers!

I had a busy weekend but I'm happy to be back in the swing of things with my beloved Jersey Shore Fantasy League. Does anyone else find themselves tallying points in real life? I saw a girl crying over the weekend and I was like, "oh that's four points for her team." It's just like that now.

In this post I'm going to break down the points from last week, explain my thoughts on the Vin/Snook no-hook-up and the Ronnie/Sammi dating situation, and put up the leader-boards in case you missed them last week. No fears, there will be no philosophical analysis although I think you could make a strong point that Ron-Ron has redefined the phrase "drunken disaster."

Anyways, here goes:

The big points score this weekend came from The Situation, DJ Pauly D, and Vinnie going out on MVP night. Points were accrued for bringing home randoms, four of them, worth 5 points each. I thought for a second that there may have been five, there was a point where in the pool section there was a brunette in a trucker hat but it may have just been Snooki. Evidence was inconclusive.

Ronnie and Sammi Sweetheart put up some big points combined for 2 make-outs (five points) x1.5 with a roommate plus one inappropriate conduct at work worth 3 points (also x1.5 with a roommate) for a grand total 19.5 points each. Sammi Sweetheart also was crying once (worth 4 points), something Sammi Sweetheart teams can look forward to scoring regularly.

Small scores included The Situation saying "the Situation" twice, DJ Pauly D saying "situation" once and "creep" once.

Snooki called her bf for 1 point.

Angelina cried once worth 4 points.

Week 3 Character Points:

Sammi Sweetheart: 23.5 points
The Situation and DJ Pauly D: 22 points
Vinnie: 20 points
Ron-Ron: 19.5 points
Angelina: 4 points
Snooki: 1 point


Team points:

@ckalange: 64 points
@mattsisto: 61.5 points
@handyslunch: 46.5 points
@RobertAGeorge: 45.5 points
@poloshot: 43 points
@NotPinnock: 40.5 points
@wickedcoolmatt: 27.5 points
@MollyMSmith: 5 points

Total Points:

@RobertAGeorge: 132.5
@mattsisto: 122
@ckalange: 117.5
@poloshot: 104
@handyslunch: 102.5
@NotPinnock: 85
@wickedcoolmatt: 68.5
@MollyMSmith: 36.5


This post feels kind of long. I'm going to do the other stuff I mentioned in another post. I was also thinking about discussing possible point shifts in points that might bring the bottom part of the leaderboard closer to the top. That's the situation.

Snook, Digital Lock-in, and Our Perceptive Realities

Last night I almost fell into a giant fit of shouting and exclamation points when on twitter some girl, referring to the cast of The Jersey Shore, both “felt embarrassed for them” and wished they would “go back to where they came from.” Now at this point we have to assume that she knew what she was getting into watching in the first place; he might lie about it but even the president knows who Snooki is and I’m sure it’s because one of his daughters, or maybe both, were part of the five million viewers the show garnered in the first two episodes.

What bothered me about my twitter friend’s offhanded dismissal is that I felt she was over-looking an essential truth about The Jersey Shore: in so many ways it is symptomatic of the culture that produced it. In my mind anyone who has a twitter or facebook page is not much different in action than the cast members. The only difference is the scale.

140 characters isn’t enough to explain this thought: there isn’t much difference between me and Snooki.




I think we can all agree that these are narcissistic times. In their book “The Narcissism Epidemic” the authors cited several studies and noted increases of as much as 30% in the rate of narcissism as measured by the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1979 and 2006. Even more shocking is the statement (taken from another study by the New York Times) that “the year by year increase between 2002 and 2007 in these data is twice as large as the year by year increase found between 1979 and 2006.” Still another study of 4,000 students from the University of South Alabama polled between 2006 and 2009 when compared to a 1994 study showed “a huge increase in narcissistic traits: a full third (1 out of 3) of USA students answered the majority of the questions in a narcissistic direction in 2008-09, up from 1 out of 5 in 1994. Thus 89% more USA students answered the majority of questions in the narcissistic direction in 2008-2009 compared to 1994.”

It’s obviously no great leap to the statement that the cast members of the Jersey Shore are themselves huge narcissists. It takes a special kind of person to flaunt their abs in front of a nationwide audience or to brag that they are “the princess of Poughkeepsie,” however ridiculous that may seem. But their over-exposure isn’t the interesting part. Nor is it that we too share some of their narcissistic qualities. It is interesting that in so many ways they represent breaking the barrier between ourselves in reality and the third wall of our self-awareness.

Wait, what? Here goes:




Internet culture has allowed us to embrace our narcissism and present ourselves as we wish to be seen. I don’t think there is any argument that who we are on twitter or facebook is probably a little shinier than the real life reality. The reason for this is obvious: it’s only natural that we want to show our peers only the finer parts of our character. But it does create a divide between the three basic parts of our character: who we are in reality, how we wish to be seen in the real world and online, and the gap between how we want our projected reality to be seen and the extent to which people buy into it. The first two parts are self-explanatory and relatively non-interesting. The third part is only interesting in as much as it relates to the first two.
There are two kinds of social reality: perceptive reality and objective reality. The first relates both to how we see ourselves and how we construct ourselves to be seen. Objective reality is all about what’s really happening. For instance, I might choose to post pictures of myself in which my nose does not look as big and Jewish. The objective reality is that my nose is in fact big and Jewish. But you wouldn’t know it you only had the digital perception to rely on. Another example is if I were to tweet on a sunny day “Oh my god, I can’t believe it’s raining so hard.” If you lived in the same town and at that moment read my tweet from a cubical in a basement without windows your perceptive reality would be that it was raining. Is it untrue? Objectively yes but only if you know the difference between the perceptive reality and the objective reality. Otherwise your perception becomes the objective reality.

A large part of how we spend our time now is in trying to eliminate the gap in perception and reality. Because we are narcissistic and we only put up the best images and statements about ourselves we are forever increasing the distance between reality and our own imagery. You could easily argue that we aren’t trying to become the people we present ourselves to be but I think that’s largely an act of self-deception: the decision to say one thing and not another, to post one picture and not another, the selection of one word over another speaks to our conscious and sub-conscious desire to shape the way we are perceived.

In his 2009 internet treatise “You Are Not A Gadget,” Jaron Lanier introduces the idea of personal lock-in. The term was originally used to describe the way software programmers followed similar basic steps on their way to more advanced platforming. For instance, the use of MIDI in music creation is a flawed system because it doesn’t account for the fullness of notes in reality. There is just one true C note as opposed to the reality of notes that can be even the smallest bit sharp or flat. The idea of a synthesized version of Brahms’ cello sonata in F is ludicrous particularly because the arrival at harmony from dissonant noise is part of the beauty of classical music and in the best of it is prevalent almost inaudibly in every note. Yet MIDI is the basis for all music programming. The reason for this is not because programmers don’t care about the intricacies of music and sound but that in its earliest stages programmers established the first few steps and everyone took for granted that this is the way things are supposed to be done. They became locked-in to the patterns of the people who programmed before them not out of laziness but because their thought was on developing new programs focused on steps 40 and higher and the first few steps in the programming process were the literal means to an end.

My fear is that we are becoming locked-in to the assumption that who we are online is who we are in reality. As social networking sites become more and more pervasive we accept as totally normal our online voice and images. The lock-in comes in the form of our losing touch with the gap between the objective reality and perceptive reality. We assume that there is no gap because we’ve so habituated ourselves to the task of digital sharing.

But what does all this have to do with Jersey Shore?





Reality television is a microcosm of the breakdown between perceptive reality and objective reality. The very word “reality” makes a play at our acceptance of the term because we know that these people can’t possibly be this way “in real life” yet the cinema verite way they are captured on camera and our relative suspension of disbelief tells us otherwise. At heart reality television is people acting as we expect people who want to be famous/infamous to act. That is to say, acting badly. The Jersey Shore is the apex of the genre.

Over the past twenty years MTV (followed by VH1, Oxygen, the networks, FX, Speed Network, et all…) has conditioned young people to act a certain way in front of cameras. The practical application of this conditioned response plus the feeling that they individually are so important as to deserve a nation-wide audience has led hundreds of young people to reality television notoriety. (I refuse to say ‘fame.’) But what is interesting is not their blatant attempts at self-aggrandizement but the times when they let their television personas slip and their real faces are exposed. In the first season Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino expresses his feelings for Sammi Sweetheart only to have Sammi Sweetheart choose the even more muscle-bound Ronnie instead. For a split second we stop seeing “The Situation” and see a man whose pride is wounded. It’s only a split second but it’s all we need. The Situation in the first season is ripe with these kinds of moments where his perceptive reality is confronted with objective reality and we are given the pleasure of watching.

That’s where reality television is at its very best: when we see others drop their narcissistic sense of self and the real person is exposed. On some sub-conscious level we are all struggling with the divide and it’s refreshing to watch someone lose their grip and let their real self shine through.

Episode 2 Points: I Don't Want To Downgrade Myself

What a night for the Jersey Shore Fantasy League! We had our first point dispute that was settled by the Czar of Reality @jacoby_ , DJ Pauly D put up a season high single episode total with 31.5 points, and Angelina continues to be the dark-horse putting up a surprising 25.5 points. Here's the breakdown:

The big score came when Angelina smacked DJ Pauly D. That normally nets 15 pts but between roommates we use the 1.5x for a grand total of 21.5 points for each of them.

Ronnie got a surprise tattoo worth 10 points.

Ronnie and Sammi made-out when he got back from the club worth 7.5 points each.

The Situation and DJ Pauly D each made out with one random at the club worth 5 points each.

The Situation referred to himself as "The Situation" a season high 6 times. DJ Pauly D said "Situation" 3 times plus an iteration of "Creepin" twice.

Angelina and Sammi Sweetheart both started crying once each.


In list form:

DJ Pauly D: 31.5 points
Angelina: 25.5 points
Ron-Ron: 17.5 points
Sammi: 11.5 points
The Situation: 11 points


Team Scoring for week 2:

@RobertAGeorge (Situation, Ronnie, Angelina)- 54 points
@handyslunch (Snooki, DJ Pauly D, Sammi)- 43 points
@ckalange (Situation, DJ Pauly D, Vinnie)- 42.5 points
@wickedcoolmatt (Jwoww, Sammi, Angelina)- 37 points
@NotPinnock (Snooki, DJ Pauly D, Vinnie) 31.5 points
@poloshot (Ronnie, Jwoww, Sammi)-29 points
@mattsisto (Situation, Ronnie, Vinnie)- 28.5 points
@MollyMSmith (Snooki, Jwoww, Angelina)- 25.5 points

Total points after two weeks:

@RobertAGeorge: 87 points
@poloshot: 61 points
@mattsisto: 60.5 points
@handyslunch: 56 points
@ckalange: 53.5 points
@NotPinnock: 44.5 points
@wickedcoolmatt: 41 points
@MollyMSmith 31.5 points

Quick thought for this week

I just had a brilliant thought about this coming week's episode. Walk with me...

You know how the episode only had about ten minutes in the club and cut to the girls at home and Jwoww putting vaseline on her face?

Do you remember how Jwoww said she was going to kick Angelina's ass? Also, you know how Jwoww does not mess around and likes fighting?

This episode is going to start with the guys and Angelina coming home from the bars and Jwoww is going to kick Angelina's ass. Heard it here first.

It makes me nervous because I don't have Jwoww on my team. I'd almost consider trading Sitch for her... tough call.