'The Mole' a lesson in the game of life

I'm watching ABC's reality show "The Mole." One contestant, whom we shall call "Old Fart," stands in front of a bull with a red cape. Suddenly the bull charges, and we cut away to see the other players' reactions as the bull slams into "Old Fart" Ike Turner-style.\nI laugh like a schizophrenic with a pair of scissors. Maybe I'm going soft, but I found "The Mole" to be a shockingly refreshing change of pace from "Temptation Island" -- a show about people so hedonistic they make campus greeks look like Puritans.\nOn "The Mole," the group of contestants win money by completing "Road-Rules"-esque missions. But that's only half the show's appeal. To avoid losing, they must guess which fellow contestant is the Mole, the player secretly working for the producer, whose job is to sabotage them.\nThus, even though "The Mole" plays on our morbid fascination in watching other people squirm in tight spots, it's not just for people who laughed while reading "The Pit and the Pendulum," because it does not concentrate on sadism; it focuses on the game.\nGames are interesting because they recognize the unpredictability of life. For the last two nights, I've researched this topic by playing Risk with the logicians and tacticians in my building. Despite their Machiavellian cunning, not even they can predict who will win.\nOn "The Mole," you can be a hard worker and a team player and still lose. One contestant was given a task which even the show's host admitted was "unpleasant." She had to stand in a stockade all day.\nBut her sacrifice was for naught, because after two other players wimped out of their challenges, another player single-handedly won $40,000 for the group by doing all of their tasks -- dying her hair, posing nude, wearing a ball-and-chain and getting one leg casted.\nTo add insult to injury, at the end of the show, the poor woman who was in the stockade got "executed." At the end of each episode, players take a quiz in which they provide information about who they think the Mole is.\nAfterward comes the "execution": The person who demonstrates the least correct information about the Mole's identity gets booted off the show. Now, if they would let me on this show, I could find this person real fast, because I'd have "mass-executions." Imagine if you will:\nHOST: Wow Jeff, you identified the Mole in the first episode. How'd you do it?\nME: Well, it was easy. I just waited until everyone was sleeping, then I dressed up like a white rabbit, snuck into their tents all nice and quiet, tied them down and interrogated them with my acetylene blow torch. Turned out everyone admitted they were the Mole!"\nEnough of that aside. Like all good games there's no rhyme or reason that determines who will win. As the poor woman's execution shows, merit doesn't get you there.\nAnd that's what makes "The Mole" different. While most television shows are ruthlessly formulaic, "The Mole" embraces unpredictability. \nThat's true to life. "The Mole" captures the premise of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon: No one really knows why things happen. We live in a world ruled by chance, and there is nothing you can do to avoid random acts of destruction. Anyone, even a good father and citizen, can be wiped out by a falling beam.