"Matt Jackson, Jeopardy Jerk."

Sometimes the more you will somebody to disappear, to make like a leaf and dry up and blow away,  the more tenaciously they stick around. The green team on Amazing Race is one –– infallible because they are loathsome. Then take for instance I've been wanting this unpleasant character Matt Jackson to lose on Jeopardy all week, and the rascal keeps going from strength to strength. He shan't put a foot wrong. He shines. He garners all the Daily Doubles. And they keep putting in punch-drunk burnt-out three-time-losing welterweight bums against him.

I disliked him seconds into laying eyes on him. As he was introduced he had won three days already, and so he triumphantly raised his hand with three fingers sticking up. That's unnecessary gloating. All good-minded people, I would think, hated him for his preening self-vanity and wanted him to go.

He didn't. Instead he did the exact opposite. He coasted to triumph against the addled potterers they set against him. When Matt Jackson wins a point he ungraciously punches the air. He always does the thing with his fingers at the start of the game. Alex said, "I wonder what MATT will do when he hasn't got enough fingers to show how many times he has won." A small intimation that Alex too hates the move. Matt Jackson also cuts Alex off and snaps his answers in confident clarion-like schoolmarm tones. He boasts loudly about the jejune critical theory he likes to read. He has a bad-tempered pout on all the time until the end when suddenly he leers horribly. It comes across as supreme sarcasm –– the diva who cannot smile with any sincerity because he is so frustrated by the mortals around him. Yet his autobiographical bit on Friday was strictly banal –– he said he collects Playbills from shows he's been to.

Cool story Matt.

Alex should have said that.
Alex should start saying that generally in that segment. "Cool story bro."
He would say it three times a day every day if he started it.

Purely as an experimental inquiry I typed a few unkind epithets alongside MATT's name and fed them into the search engine to see what other thinking people made of this brazen prannet. Amazingly nothing came up. I sought reassurance that other sensitive people disliked this man MATT JACKSON like I did, but the internet –– which seems to have an echo of every idiotic thought we can possibly summon –– had no comment to make on it.

I thought, "Am I really alone in resenting this guy? Does the problem lie with me?"

Then I thought, "Maybe this is a yawning opportunity –– the first man to capitalize on the nationwide hatred people feel for MATT JACKSON."

Maybe I am grasping for company in this void of human decency, this bad epoch fallen low, this Kali Yuga, this Iron Age, old buddy old pal, but it sounded to me as though Alex said something else on Friday suggesting he didn't like Matt much either. He said, "If you're one of those viewers who likes to root for a player in the competition, this week has probably been a disappointment for you. This guy MATT has won every day and we keep sending in amateurish bumbling clown school sophomores!" He couldn't come out and say it outright, but he implied a growing weariness.

Who shall rid me of this troublesome prat?