Are you not familiar with the battle for my love? Click here to see why Max and Shirin are the best, and how their head-to-head battle is going.

A funny thing happens when your tribe wins on Survivor: the episode doesn’t spend much time focusing on you. But we still managed to get a few precious moments of our heroes on screen, so let’s see how they did.

On the episode:

Shirin is the focus of what little we see of the white collar tribe this week, in large part because she saw this massively-scroted monkey get down to business.

(“How’d you spend your evening last night, John?” “Oh, you know, just taking pictures of enormous monkey scrotum. So pretty much the usual.”) Shirin gets in some sweet monkey voyeur time, and she’s pretty excited about it. Fist pump-level excited, in fact.

And because she’s so excited about it she runs back to camp to tell her friends Tyler and Carolyn, who are the worst less enthused about secondhand tales of primate coitus. Less enthused, I might add, even after Shirin goes the extra mile by re-enacting the whole scene.

Maybe Tyler and Carolyn weren’t into the story. Maybe Shirin annoyed them, and that’s bad Survivor strategy. That’s fine. I’ll give you that one. But the competition here, in this post, is to win my love. And I can think of two people who would do the exact same thing Shirin did, down to mimicking the gestures: my wife and my best friend. In summary: You suck, Carolyn and Tyler. And Shirin earns a lot of points for this one.

(Also, if anyone can pull the audio of Shirin saying these things and send it to me, I will be incredibly grateful: “That’s what it’s like when a woman wants a baby” and “No snuggling afterwards. Nothing.”)

Max only gets a fleeting moment of screen time this week comes during the white collar tribe’s hunt for the immunity idol, because apparently the editors have decided not to give the people what they want. Although during that idol hunt, Shirin manages to annoy Joaquin. Again, this may be bad strategy. But this post is not about strategy. I dislike Joaquin. Shirin annoys Joaquin. I am pleased. So for this week, Shirin dominates the on-air portion of the competition (although Max was conspicuously absent from the confessionals hating on Shirin, so his lack of airtime is not all bad). Let’s move on to social media.

This week on Twitter: 

Last week we saw Max’s blurry man-bits on the episode, and you’re not going to believe this (especially if you’ve ever been on the internet) but a few people were upset by that. And Max found some of them.

I don’t know about you, but I am shocked- SHOCKED!- that Max found people on Facebook willing to judge people they’ve never met. Next thing you know he’ll be trying to convince me that people are posting insane political diatribes on Facebook, believing that their opinion is the unequivocal truth and everyone else is a “moran.” Hey, speaking of “morans”…

Why am I posting a Rodney tweet? One, because I’m fairly amazed he spelled appreciate correctly, even taking into account autocorrect. Two, it’s a marvel of Random Capitalization (a grammar nazi pet peeve of mine). Three, because Max retweeted it, and he’s doing something here that I love. He did the same with Drew Christy (a.k.a. Drew-chebag) last season. I’m a sucker for the “presented without comment”-style retweets.

And you all aren’t going to believe this, but Joaquin just figured out how to check his Instagram direct messages, and he was absolutely inundated with nude pics of fans. It’s definitely not something he made up and posted on Twitter to encourage people to send him nude pics. Max delivered the appropriate response.

But like any other normal male, Max became jealous of that stupid, sexy Joaquin. He lamented his failures, and I offered to lend a hand (or whatever other body part I had available).

And hey, let’s stick with the theme and point out that Max also posted this:

Oh, Max. You’re such a handful. At least according to Joaquin and Tyler, who can speak with authority on the subject. Clearly Max put in some work on Twitter this week. Let’s move on to Shirin.

Shirin makes a cameo in this Yahoo recruitment video (Jump 29 seconds ahead to see the only remotely interesting part, unless you’re a programming/engineering nerd).

Why is this relevant? Because Shirin just said “balls” in a corporate video. For those of you not in the white collar world, let me give you a little insight into what happened immediately after her segment was filmed:

Recruiting Manager: Everyone, we have an issue. Shirin just said “balls” in our recruiting video.

VP, Human Resources: What was the context?

Recruiting Manager: Like, grabbing by the balls.

VP, Human Resources: Ok, we’ll put out a memo noting that ball-touching is not something we endorse or condone. We should also schedule some re-training on proper interactions between workers and the genitals of their co-workers.

Marketing Director: But what if that’s our #brand? This could be a huge opportunity. Maybe we’re the new Yahoo!, where we grab balls! Google doesn’t grab balls. Yahoo! grabs balls. Here, I already worked up a mock-up of a new logo.

Recruiting Manager: Actually, she was saying we’d grab a bull by the balls.

VP, Risk Management: I’ll send a preemptive donation to some animal rights groups. Can we also put a disclaimer on the video that Yahoo! does not approve of grasping animal testicles in a non-veterinary context?

Legal counsel: Let’s also make sure we bleep out the word “balls” in the video. And I’ll draft a letter to the FCC noting that this is not a broadcast and therefore not specifically within their legal authority to regulate.

Considering the salaries of the individuals involved, that meeting cost three thousand dollars.

Shirin also worked her Yahoo! connections (presumably, since Community is now on Yahoo) to meet Joel McHale and Abed.

I don’t even watch Community anymore, but I still like- wait, what’s that sound? I think I hear screams of protest from Max.

Nice comeback, Max! Although maybe look a little more excited next time. Or, as Shirin put it:

In fairness to Max, I’m not sure he’s as interested in having Joel McHale wear him like a sweater. I would definitely fault him if he looked as casually disinterested in a picture with Parvati.

This is almost like cheating. Obviously this battle for my love is only between Max and Shirin, but Jenn is magical. If Jenn ends up on the same tribe as Max and Shirin at some point this season, I will become as obnoxious as a Boston sports fan raving about their shitty teams that everyone hates.

At this point, I’m leaning towards giving this week’s victory to Shirin. She dominated the on-air portion, and she at least broke even online. Shirin, is there anything you can add that might seal the deal?

Celebrating Biggie Day? I only have this piece of advice for you, Shirin: Stay far from timid, only make moves when your heart’s in it, and live the phrase “Sky’s the limit.”

Final verdict: Shirin takes the week. She’s up 2-1 on the season.