In the end, Casey Turner wound up trusting the wrong crowd.

That's the lesson from the 41-year-old's swift ejection Thursday from CBS' exercise in reality TV tedium, Big Brother 11.

Host Julie Chen seemed to sum up his situation well, noting that he first trusted house nerd Ronnie Talbott early in the game, and later believed bodybuilder Jessie Godderz when he pledged to help get rid of Ronnie this week. Instead, Turner was the one walking out of the show's makeshift house tonight, pushed out by a 7 to 1 vote which included several contestants who claimed to be his friends.

For added indignity, he had been forced to wear a banana costume for much of this week's broadcasts.

"I knew I might be guilty of being too trusting," Turner told Chen in a short, post-ejection interview (you can watch the Early Show newsreader continue her interrogation -- "Why is a grown man calling himself DJ Mingle Mixx?" might be a good question for the part-time DJ -- Friday morning). Moments earlier, he explained a final burst of bitterness toward Godderz on his way out of the house by saying "you can only take so much."

Turner, a fifth-grade teacher at Sanderlin Elementary School in St. Petersburg, seemed to be a victim of two issues: clumsy gameplay and failing to fit in with his younger competitors.

Big Brother, a show built around a bunch of folks sitting in the same house for three months, is mostly a show about fitting in -- or not. Producers this season reinforced the usual cliquishness of the game by actually forcing competitors into high school-style cliques -- which they dissolved after Turner's ejection.

Another change allows one contestant to have the secret power to overturn the contestants nominated for ejection and install their own choices (I wonder how many contestants will actually understand the name producers gave that ability, the French phrase coup de'tat). Viewers get to pick who receives that ability and no other contestant must know until they use the power.

It's an ability Turner could have used, hampered as he was by landing on the wrong side of a super-manipulative geek and a muscleman romancing two other women in the house.

Instead, he's now stuck watching from the outside, bounced from a chance to win $500,000 but saved from weeks more of televised humiliation.