Here are just some brief notes from last night’s episode of Real Curling Broomers of the Olympic Village, because, well, that episode was kind of boring and, honestly, I’d rather be watching the Olympics tonight.

Speaking of the Olympics, there is a great sports metaphor for what is happening with Lisa right now. It’s like short track speed skating (or, more appropriately, biathlon, because there are often shots fired), and Lisa has been at the head of the pack for some time now, leading in popularity and prominence before all the other ladies. Brandi, well, she’s trying to make a move on the outside and outpace Lisa, taking her down a few notches and coming out in front. The other ladies are sort of assisting her, but they are much more experienced professionals and they know that you should never discount Lisa’s myriad ability or the power of her fan base. Brandi is trying to surge ahead and she is going to fail, wiping out on her giant blades and crashing into the padding that surrounds the arena. The odds, in this instance, are never in her favor.

Here’s the thing: people love Lisa. That is the long and short of it. Everyone either wants to be Lisa, hang out with Lisa, or, you know, chill in the closet and rip off some of the handbags from Lisa. Lisa Vanderpump is the gold standard of Real Housewives likability. Now, all these other ladies bitch and moan about how she's a puppet master and calculating, but we never see that. If it is true, so is so immensely skilled that her influence is invisible and, if that is the case, then we love her even more than we did in the first place for having the baddest milkshake in the yard.

So, Yolanda Bananas Foster is talking about how she’s mad that Lisa threw a party and invited people that she knew were going to be at her husband's daughter’s wedding. Oh please. We don’t know that she knew and can you fault her for throwing a party the same night as an event she wasn’t invited to and inviting people to her party because she didn’t even know about the first party because she wasn’t invited? (Also, please don’t give YBF the “idiot edit” when she is studying for her test. We all know that she is probably the smartest of all these ladies and probably a majority of Americans don’t know the answer to these questions, so, yeah. Spare us.)

And what is Brandi’s problem exactly? Is it that Lisa mothers her too much? Lisa told Brandi to go to the doctor when she broke her hand and Brandi was all, “I’m fine,” but she was sporting some serious Bionic Woman braces on her hand last night. Maybe Lisa was right. Maybe that’s why Brandi is mad. And Lisa told Brandi to say something to Schaenna (or whatever combination of Scrabble tiles her name is made up of) and say something about her engagement. Sure, it might have been so that Lisa could promote her show The Haunted Manor of Wilshire Boulevard but it might have been so that Brandi would give this girl an empty gesture and keep the peace so that the interactions between the two of them wouldn’t be so fraught.

All I know is that people are not going to turn on Lisa. All this is going to end up doing is make the public turn on Brandi. It might even get to the point where we hate her more than we hate Joyce, a sequin that fell of off Gracie Gold’s short program costume.

The only person who seems to have figured out how to deal with Lisa is my darling Kim Richards. It will never cease to startle me when Kim is the voice of reason or a person of some social sense. Now, Kim comes tottering into Calrton’s husband’s office’s birthday party (or whatever the fuck that thing was) about two hours late, because Kim Richards has never not shown up to a party two hours late and tottering. It’s the only way she knows how. Kim apologized for missing Lisa’s party and muttered, in her awful British accent, that she was in Missouri for a charity and couldn’t make it, a dig on Lisa for missing her daughter’s graduation party because she had her own charity. (God, these people have parties for the stupidest reasons.)

Anyway, Kim turns her animosity into jokes, diffusing it and making Lisa think she doesn't have a problem while really addressing it all over again. That’s a pretty genius strategy. Why can’t more of these women find better ways of dealing with the queen bee instead of trying to unseat her? And how did Kim Richards, a professional actress, ever get a job with a British accent as shitty as hers? Mary Carillo will have the answers right after this commercial break.