American Idol Complaints

Last year about this time of year I wrote about American Idol and how I was getting sick of it. A year later, nothing much has changed. I wouldn't watch the show at all except that everyone else in my family LOVES it, and if I want to spend time with them I have to watch it. Luckily, at least we DVR the thing and skip all of the commercials.

Aside from just being tired of the show, though, there are two things about American Idol that bug me:

1. Four judges is too many.

I've noticed this since a fourth judge was added last year. Unless the fourth judge to give a review is Simon, I don't ever care what the fourth judge says. I'm sick of hearing critiques and ready to move on to the next contestant. I understand the need for three judges--if the first two give wildly differing reviews, the third judge is sort of the tie breaker. But the fourth one just takes up time.

2. I hate that we have to listen to the person who got voted off sing again.

This has always made NO sense to me. What kind of an inspired performance are we expecting these people to give us? These are young people who just seconds before received the biggest disappointment of their young lives--they were voted off of a show in front of millions of people. So what do we do? We hand them a microphone and ask them to sing. It's almost cruel.

And from an entertainment standpoint, the idea is kind of dumb, too. I mean, who pitched this idea to the show's producers, anyway? Did it go something like this: "Hey! I've got a great idea! America just voted last night and they told us--by the millions--who their LEAST favorite person on the show is, and what their LEAST favorite moment on the show was. How 'bout we put that person back in front of the camera and have them repeat that terrible moment?" On ANY other show the person who pitched such an idea would have been fired.

I can understand the show--especially towards the end when the contestant has been on for weeks and weeks and viewers have grown attached to him or her--wanting to do some kind of retrospective, but don't follow that up by forcing the contestant to repeat the mistake of a performance that got him or her voted off the show! I'd be okay with the producers deciding in advance which performance throughout the competition was that person's best and replaying THAT one, but forcing them to re-create a bad performance is silly.

The only fun in watching that is to see if the person breaks down and cries. Most have the dignity to wait until the lights go out.

_____________________________

Despite all of these complaints, though, I'm sure I'll get sucked in like I have almost every year.

I've only watched this week's episodes and a few minutes of some of the others, but I will tell you that I think this year's group of contestants is mostly a fairly bland, talentless group. The only contestant I was really wowed by was Siobhan Magnus. Maybe her performance of "Wicked Game" was a fluke, as I've never seen her before Wednesday night so I have nothing to compare it to, but I was blown away. I thought her voice was great, and she has a charisma that--though it was muted by the type of song that "Wicked Game" is--I felt pretty strongly. And the judges all complained that it was one of her WORSE performances!

Based on my now more than an hour of viewing so far, she's my pick.

The Olympics

I'm going to take the easy way out today and not actually write a post...

...Instead, I'm going to point you to a post that I made a couple of years ago. It's about the summer Olympics in 2008, but it pretty much exactly sums up how I feel about the Winter Olympics, too. All you have to do is--in your mind--substitute the name of obscure summer sports with obscure winter sports, and substitute the name of summer sport athletes with their corresponding winter athletes. And I won't have to repeat myself.

Read the original post.

From Bookshelves to Cabinets

This post is a shout out to my brother-in-law, Jackie, who--along with his lovely wife--came to our house Saturday to install some doors for us. Wood is what Jackie does for a living, and he does a good job of it.

When Jackie was here during the holidays for the Sweasy Family Christmas, I mentioned to him that we really liked all of the bookshelves we had in the basement, but that we'd really like some doors on them. We have a limited number of books we want to display, and the other items we placed on the shelves made the basement look a wee bit cluttered. I don't have any good "before" shots of the bookshelves, but here is a shot of one of my younger daughter's friends (she's playing the Nintendo Wii Fit game) taken at my daughter's birthday back in January. You can see the bookshelves behind her:

What you CAN'T see in the photo above is the ugliest part of the entire wall--the area just underneath the TV. Wires hang down to where all of the electronic devices (the Wii, our Roku Player, a DVD player, and a DVR) sit underneath the TV. So Jackie went downstairs before dinner and measured those shelves, and Saturday he came up and installed them. This is what the finished product looks like:

We're very please. So thanks, Jackie and Ann. And if anyone in the Lexington/Nicholasville area is looking for someone to do built in cabinetry, desks, that kind of stuff, I know your guy!