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This week! Quarter finals continue! CB fights Cale! Tim fights Handsome Dan! Jeremy May suggests Jesse is a “little bitch”! Semi-final matches announced! All kinds of stuff!

Last week’s quarter final matches were pretty OK, in that while they produced one absolutely nothing fight, as freaky Big John McCarthy clone Jesse Taylor laid atop an attempt-attempting Dante Rivera for two nothing rounds, we also got a really nice showing from Amir Sadollah, who finished the feared and much celebrated Matt Brown with a neat triangle choke. And you know what, one kind of nothing fight, one nice little fight like Amir/Matt, I would take that combo every week, really. I would take that every week all day, if you are hip to that lingo.

The influence of last weekend’s Kimbo/James Thomson fiasco is felt early here as I can’t help but inspect every fighter’s ear for cauliflowering. My attitude towards my own burgeoning cauli ear has shifted, too, in the wake of that debacle: I used to be all, “OK cool this is a sign of a dude who grapples and so that is alright; it will make me look raw,” but now I am all, “Can the doctor see me sometime early next week? Yes, of course I can hold.”

We begin with a recap of Amir’s fight with Matt Brown, which was pretty nifty. There have been a couple of good ones this season, to be sure. Jeremy May is carrying on like a fool in the wake of Matt Brown’s loss, immediately asking Brown for a rematch of their fight in which May’s “jeremy jitsu,” like many traditional jujitsus, was revealed to be inadequate to the rigors of modern combat sport. Strangely, Jesse says that if May is invited back to the UFC, Jesse wants to shit in his own hands and put it on his face. Why would that be? Wouldn’t that be two negative outcomes? Wouldn’t just one be bad enough? Why compound your troubles like that? Jesse calls Jeremy both a “queer” and a “dickface” before realizing Jeremy was in the room. Jeremy concocts a plan to provoke Jesse into hitting him and getting kicked out of the house. Sparks! Will they fly?

Jeremy calls Jesse a bitch! As advertised! Man this is seriously bottom of the barrel TV right now. And it just got lower: I am not much of a lipreader, but Jeremy calls Jesse a “Jewish bitch” (maybe “jewish bitch,” lower case, T.S. Eliot antisemitic tribute style, who knows), and they bleep out both “bitch” and “Jewish,” which is kind of a strange call. Jesse, who is Jewish, takes offense to this turn, and another fighter whose name I cannot recall says that his wife is Jewish, and Jeremy is like, “he’s really Jewish?” This is very strange. Next Jeremy will accuse him of being a rootless cosmopolitan or something. Jesse pretty much looses his head but fortunately he is restrained by his card-playing bros, who prevent him from doing anything regrettable. Jeremy is all RESPECK KNUCKS LET’S SQUASH THIS which is I guess his way of saying “that was clearly racist and I am contrite.”

So then: Dan vs. Tim is our first quarterfinal matchup, and Tim, a BJJ black belt, really could not have been more emphatic throughout this season re: Dan’s hotness. Dan thinks he has a good chance on his feet against the much more experienced Tim, who has a clear edge on the ground. Will Tim laisse les bon temps rouler encore? Moi je pense que oui.

Our referee is Herb Dean, and I wish we could have heard his prefight instructions. I love the part where he says, “We will have a good clean fight.” I like that certainty. The two come out and throw kicks to start the round before clinching against the cage. Tim looks for the inside trip (a major rather than minor one) but Dan takes him down with relative ease. He doesn’t keep him there, though: they stand, Dan whacks him around a little standing, and hurls him back down, takes the mount, but gets effortlessly swept by Tim, who passes to side control just as easily. Dan stands right up out of it, though. Tim grabs a leg and gets the quick heel hook submission despite Dan grabbing the top of the cage in an attempt to stay on his feet. Tim, frankly, looked kind of terrible here, which seems like a jerk thing to say about a guy who won his fight in the first round with a clear sub finish. But he got knocked around and out-wrestled by a guy he should have completely outclassed. To his credit, Tim sees it this way as well, saying he lost 1:25 of the 1:30 or so fight.

CB and Cale are up next. CB thinks Cale is a brawler, not a trained, skilled athlete. Forrest thinks CB is an arrogant prick. There would seem to be evidence to support that view. Tim sings Cale a lovely tune about how he is a melon-headed cagefighter who proves his mettle in the cage. An original composition, I think, and I like it.

OH MY GOD GO KARTS! I haven’t been on go karts in forever! Amir says that those go karts were about twice as fun as he thought they’d be. It’s alway like that! I hereby resolve to get a crew together and do some go karting this summer. I am inspired. I will not however, follow that karting with alcohol consumption and property destruction. These guys are tarnishing the good name of both cagefighting and go karting in one fell swoop here, and I’m sorry to see it.

You know who CB looks like? Not Matt Damon, but the Matt Damon puppet from Team America, the one that kept saying “Matt . . . Damon.” You know, this guy. I’m glad I finally put my finger on that.

Herb Dean is once again our referee. Oh no! My download is missing the first ninety seconds of the first round! How does that happen? CB has Cale thoroughly mounted and is elbowing him something fierce as the action resumes. Cale is just in survival mode here, giving up his back and offering no real defense to the many many blows being, you know, rained down upon him. He’s not fighting back. And it’s stopped, after many “If you don’t fight back I’m gonna stop it”s from Herb Dean. Cale says he just got outclassed, which is entirely true.

Forrest really dislikes CB. I join him in that. Forrest think Jesse has the best chance of the remaining fighters to beat CB. I join him in that, too. It wouldn’t be a particularly exciting fight, I’ll bet, but yeah. The fighters are assembled for the semi-final selections, but Rampage is MIA for some reason. Bombing around in that slick Audi we saw a few weeks back? That would be my guess. CB’s sunglasses are pretty silly. Well, they’d be fine as long as he was outside, but he plainly is not. CB wants to fight Tim. Tim wants to fight Amir. Amir doesn’t really say who he wants to fight. Jesse wants to fight CB, he says, but concedes that Amir would be, for him, an easier road to the final. Forrest and Dana think CB is the best. And there’s Rampage in his Audi! He fell asleep watching movies (”There were good movies on”) and slept in. I’m pretty sympathetic to that kind of happening.

AND THE FIGHTS WILL BE: Jesse vs. Tim and CB vs. Amir. I would guess we’ll get a Jesse vs. CB final out of this. Tim, I don’t know, his wrestling looked awfully shaky this week, but Amir has been full of surprises so far . . . you know what, I am legitimately intrigued by these semifinal matches. At least a little bit.