Back from break, Ryan tries to intro the pimpmercial but gets stuck on a prop he has with him onstage: a pendulous sagging water balloon filled with futility. Are the stars of this Fusion commercial Megan? Because yes, they will probably be featured. He tosses it adorably out into the audience, and then the thing itself is a crappy, lazy sounding cover of "Here It Goes Again," but involves Kris and Allison driving up and getting into a water balloon fight with everybody else. It's rare with the pimpmercial that so little would be owed to such effort. I mean, golly, at least there are puppets or buildings or something. This is just watching people toss balloons at Gokey's head and wishing they were dishwashers.
We go through the horrors of elimination, the refused PoV, the hugs from Kara and Paula, the "party" afterward including speeches from well-known public speaker Lil Rounds, and Alexis who can only think to compliment Jorge's hair. Which is as dumb as the rest of his head and the face on the front of it. Allison says something, but in another way she doesn't. Jorge finally drops the act and it turns out he has a British accent and has just been fucking with us, and then Jasmine cries. I honestly thought the fact of the PoV was vicious enough, and then the "nope" thing on top of it was pretty much as bad as it could get? Nope, wrong. Turns out after America fucks you and then the Judges get an opportunity to fuck with you and then fuck you, you are whisked to a horrible tacky pizza joint in East LA and you have to watch the Idols attempt to string words together. God. At least at Shakey's they got wine. I miss the Rock-Afire Explosion. It was like this show, but cool.
Ryan asks Doomed-Ass Alexis what it was like watching somebody else getting eliminated, including forcing her to say nice things about Jasmine as though any of these people give a damn. She's so going home. Then he asks Mike what it's like with the family, and he totally freaks out and starts crying because his daughter is like, "Why don't you want to be with me anymore?" Through the tears, he says fuck it and who cares because it's so awesome to be on this show. Then he tells the camera some stuff about his wife and his kid, and it's pretty much brutal. I really, really like Michael Sarver. Megan drops the retard act for a few seconds and admits that watching Mike cry about his kid is pretty much the most painful thing ever, and it's the Megan I wish we got to know for a second. Then there's footage of her wobbling around with a burka because of her life-threatening influenza that causes her to dress stupid and dance stupid and sing like a person having a stroke, and we're back.
Dude, today was the most fucked up day. I wake up to a pair of little hands and a little face mid-climb into my back second-story window, like, appalled that I would have the audacity to interrupt their B&E. Like I'm being a dick by waking up and looking at him and going WTF dude and thinking about beating him up and both of us wondering if that's even like a possibility. Burgle, Interrupted. They left, I tried in vain for awhile to come up with an appropriate emotional response to this and finally just made some espresso instead, and then who's that down in my driveway staring up? Same dudes. Kids. Spring Break is stupid, and it's not like there are that many kids who need to work on a farm during Daylight Savings or whatever. And now I feel like an ass because I've got all this "casing the joint" and "the jig is up" weirdo movie lingo spinning uncontrollably through my head, like what if I blurt out something about them "casing the joint" on the phone with 911, and they hang up on me for being a d-bag.
So I calmed my neuroses long enough to call the cops, because really it's only my degenerate lifestyle that means I'm home (albeit asleep) mid-morning, which means if it's not me it's going to be somebody else, and I cannot have that. But if it's not any of us -- that is, the people inside the houses getting burgled -- it's going to have to be them, i.e., the little tiny baby cutiepie dumpling hoodlums that thought it would be cool to climb in my fucking window and check out my stuff. And I mean, they were wearing contrasting layered sweatshirts and matching hats. They were awesome. The mental ward escapee has a burglary record, and his cousin the juvie escapee is on probation for possession of the endo. Clearly my kind of people. But they wanted my stuff, and I like my stuff, so down comes the hammer of justice.
So then it gets really stupid, because the cops are like, "We caught some guys, can you identify them?" I don't know what I was thinking, like they're going to show me a hologram or something, but I said yeah. So I've now been awake for all of twenty minutes and I'm in my pajamas in the back of a cop car, breakfast cooling in the living room, with my neighbors staring and yet again wondering what I'm really up to, and we pull into the parking lot of this rec center, and there's the two kids, kids I stress, and that's the lineup. I'm parked at some weird oblique angle looking through all the bars and metal and glass of the car at them getting stood up against another cop car twenty yards away looking mortified, and I'm like, "Yeah, I've seen people before so I know what to look for, that's them. Not some other pair of matching besweatshirted teens roaming the neighborhood at 10:30 on a gorgeous March morning." So then this totally hot Jersey-accent one takes me home -- just in time for my now-thrice-postponed conference call for one of my fifty-seven jobs -- and then the detectives come over to take my statement, during which interim I have just enough time to recover my sanity and put on some pants.
This, okay, this in a week comprising SXSW, my birthday, three hours of this crappy show, and still two of the most complicated episodes of television I've ever had to deal with (BSG and GG were both B-A-N-A-N-A-S this week), and five hundred words on cryogenics for another of my fifty-seven jobs, and my sister whom I love more than anything in this world is in town for SXSW, so I took her to dinner and the Twelves show at Rusty Spurs even though I have three deadlines clicking away including this one, and then after dinner we got panhandled by a five-foot ex-drag queen with lung cancer, AIDS, diabetes and a raging need to get to Huntsville -- because that is what happens at SXSW, and I am not making any of it up because why on earth would I, and I do believe every word, because you can't fake all of those things at once -- so I gave him a cigarette and lit it for him, that is how Sanjaya I am inside myself right now. "Have at it. Smoking cannot possibly hurt you at this point. You already have all of the diseases."
And so for literally the last twenty-one hours, as I'm writing this, it's just been, "And the best thing I have to look forward to is, at some point, somebody I like but don't really care about is going home on Idol, after singing some shitty song again." That, and the scary Adam Lambert song playing underneath it and informing my every thought and movement. And just so we're clear I'm not actually complaining about any of this, because this day wasn't actually "bad" in the Daniel Powter sense, and I didn't feel like sad or mad at any point, although that's all my horoscope seems to be worried about this week. No, my entire mood has been just this sort of Universe Are You Kidding Me the whole time, which makes Idol the bright spot for real, because Idol is the universe saying "Badurrrr" to that question. And because results shows take five minutes and you're done, plus Ryan, plus most importantly science recently taught me that if you mute Michael Sarver while he's singing, it's like he's saying very many really filthy things really quickly, just for you.
Grand Ole Brad Paisley looks like he cheats at poker and uses the Shu Uemura mini-curler, and that's all I know about him. And given the egregious overuse of a single slide guitar note which is like the opposite of the point of a slide guitar -- plus his inability to grow a believable goatee and of course his pinche shiny white cowboy hat -- I can tell that's all I will ever need to know, and so let's move on.
When they say "Twilight. Be the first to own the special two-disc edition," do you secretly think, as I do, that it's a pretty worthwhile goal? I've never been the first at anything. If I were going to be the first -- even if nobody knew it -- I would rather it be Twilight than, you know, something stupid. I've already made a deal with myself that I'm not buying Nick & Norah's until after March sweeps, because any earlier and it'll be just like Sept 2004 - Jun 2005 when I kept Mean Girls playing on a loop day and night. But Twilight, as perfectly perfect as it is, I do not think I could watch over and over like that because my understanding is that eventually, not having sex stops being more interesting than having sex, and then you're in big trouble. Me, I've sworn off dating altogether and now I just watch Bum Fights with a nice glass of Rioja. Same diff.
Carrie Underwood looks like a mental patient and Randy Travis is dressed like the girlfriend from Nightmare Before Christmas, so I am fairly certain this shit isn't getting recapped either. There's some wit about how Randy T felt dumb mentoring because he doesn't actually have any technical knowledge -- but it was fun -- and Ryan's like, "I can identify!" Instead of booing this concept that Ryan is not the best at doing whatever it is that he does than anybody since cavemen invented junkets, the crowd just watches Simon for a reaction. It doesn't come until Ryan shoots those smoky baby blues over that way, and presumably gets a smile.
Simon says that one of the two, the Judgery might save... And then yet another commercial. You can see the lights slowly blinking out of Michael's eyes as they do this. It's like kicking a puppy, if the puppy lived inside a giant sexy robot the size of a Camry. Okay, finally here we go. Michael. You are safe. Alexis, you have stupid pink stripes in your hair and forgot to bring it. Where did you leave it? Go get it, we'll wait.
Simon flashes eyebrows at her all, "You were the one we were thinking of saving, so sing for your PoV supper so we can once again not save you with it." The desperation is there from the first note, and it just gets more and more warbly from there; the judges huddle and stare at her and babble, and she sings right at them, and they won't meet her eyes, and her performance gets shittier and shittier and her voice cracks all over the place, and her flailing weirdness goes beyond pantomime and into darkest childhood, and then screaming, and it's totally the grossest thing in the whole world.