Idol Chatter

If you’re that one guy out on the western edge of North Dakota who hasn’t fast-forwarded through last night’s results show to announce the final two, this is your official spoiler alert. Stop reading.

You didn’t do it, did you? You just went right on reading. Because who the hell cares what some obscure blog says when probably every single human being at the Starbucks/on the radio/around the water cooler today has already dumped on you a heaping helping of American Idol information you’d rather not know, like the fact that Syesha Mercado shuffled off the show last night. Which is fine, because she clearly blew off the last two weeks of competition to audition for Cabaret in front of the entire country, and we wish her well with that endeavor because, well, why the hell not. I’m sure we’ll catch her act on Broadway one day when New York fails to offer up a more interesting morsel of overpriced entertainment (or someone drags us kicking and screaming). Her only other option was to plow through David Cook only to lose to monchichi David Archuleta (reminder) anyway, whose star the networks have obviously backed. We officially have nothing against David Cook and might even listen to one of his songs on purpose some day, but the network’s compulsive need to have the entire audience equate Cook with his posse of over-40 “cougar” types (and his mom) have pretty much burned his chances of winning a popularity contest decided by hormonally crazed 13 year old girls (aka network execs), even though Archuleta looks like a muppet and sings in a way that manages to sound both smarmy and cheesy at the same time. Which I guess would make him “smeezy.” Anyway, Smeezy is clearly the favored horse, so that little bit of intrigue is done and over with.

Let’s turn now to the contestant Fox threw off the show after the first week. Remember Josiah Leming? How could we forget, right? Well, turns out we weren’t the only ones who felt that he could have kicked every ass on that stage and a few behind it without even breathing hard. Simon Cowell recently stated publicly that he felt cutting Josiah was a mistake from the beginning, hinting that he had contested the final decision, which belonged ultimately to the show’s producers. That hasn’t stopped Leming, though. The young singer/songwriter’s myspace page went nuts after the cut, and he was invited to guest appear on several TV shows. Reports are finally coming out that Leming has signed a record deal with Warner Bros. So at least we got one decent artist out of this whole AI SNAFU.

Forget the others. Let’s just listen to Josiah again.