Okay, let's Give Back. Ride white and blue spotlights, and Ryan has been crying. You can tell. First up: Barack and Michelle, thanking you for watching this show and giving to IGB ($40M+ raised over its lifetime!). Michelle, I like her so much. She seems like a real cool mom/good friend kind of person, like the Tracy Flick head of the PTA that won't quit with the fundraising and powerbaking and yoga classes and then at the end of the year you're like, "She's exhausting but we did just buy a rocketship for our school, and I hope my daughter turns out exactly like her." Maybe actually I will give up my quest to adopt Kylie from the Windows ads and just look into adopting Michelle Obama.
We're not going to talk about the sponsors -- no matter how many times Ryan and his Ryanettes flog them -- because we don't like ethical carbon-trading. Packaging, supply chain, disgusting hormones and creepy chemicals; starting pointless wars, endless lobbying for vile concerns that they don't even care about so politicians will give back to them in return, in order to serve the lobbyists of the vile concerns for the companies that actually derive profit from them: If these companies actually wanted to do good, they would stop doing bad in the first place. That is a very simple equation, and we should be smarter than this.
Ryan likes Simon's dapper outfit, which earns him a sexy wink and nod. Ryan's hair is at its all-time Tintin Tiptop and it is fabulous. Queen Latifah is elsewhere, being the Ryan for some other city I didn't catch because they are both strong gay black women. I don't care about where Latifah actually is, because the Black Eyed Peas are there so it's the kind of party to which I don't require an invite. Also Carrie Underwood, Jeff Beck and Joss Stone, and Sirs Elton John and Annie Lennox, as always.
Over in the Kodak, Mary J and Alicia are there. One good, one evil. Firstly the Top Twelve are reunited for some more Inspiring things, all wearing white. Tim and Crystal and Lee all look very nice harmonizing in a very autotuned way, to some bullshitty song that sounds like a Queen mashup with "All Through The Night." The song seems to be mostly about prevailing weather conditions, and Casey Jones has a fupa. There's nasty old Lacey and Andrew, shoved up on the stairs with Didi and Lee/Crystal. The other ones, I don't remember their names. Then they hold hands and break into couples, and the couples all make sense: Mike/Crystal, Lacey/Lee, Casey with Didi and Lacey. Siobhan has a cute mod hairband/bubble hairdo, like in Hairspray, and looks like she is on Quaaludes. Last night she was like one of Titania's handmaids and now look at her: Beauty school dropout.
Jennifer Garner's lovely wise-little-girl voice tells us about her childhood in West Virginia, how there are mountains and trees and whatnot. She's like, "The difference is that where we're going, the people are dirt poor." One book per every 300 kids, she says, in this particular Kentucky county, and a four-year-old here is equivalent to a 2.5-year-old elsewhere. She's pretty horrified by that one. Me too, man. That's not something you can get back. We're visiting a family of six in a two-room trailer, which is falling the hell apart. "It, um, it's going to be something to see," she says tastefully.
Meeting the people that live there, Garner's voice hops up about two octaves. All the kids are enrolled in Save The Children stuff, with somebody who comes by with tools to make them better-ish. Garner sings a cute song to the littlest one, and tells us how great the kid is. "You've got it goin' on, Brenda," Jennifer tells her, and then she heads on over to the oldest kid's school to check out how Save The Children and other programs are actually making this area a little bit better. Garner cries about how great the kids are, and it's pretty heartbreaking, and the kids kiss the camera.
Then they prop what's left of Posh up against a table and she says some insufferable speech you can tell she barely comprehends, pointing to a couple of hard-luck California kids, like they're a refrigerator on a game show. The first kid himself is better spoken than Posh, which he explains is because he reads at a seventh grade level. The other one just seems like an awesomely awkward person working on becoming way interesting in a few years. Posh leans as far enough away from them as possible and checks every few moments to make sure he's not touching her, and that's: Idol Gives Back.
A pretty old man named Sully -- Seriously? Still? He must be exhausted -- says something about making a difference, and then back to Ryan and his hair. And his pocket square! I totally forgot about that last night in all the Glee-ruining confusion, but there was an amazing moment where Ryan handed Crystal his pocket square and she was like, "What, it's just taped to your suit?" And then they were both like, "Hollywood magic!" And it was amazing, because she'd just crossed the line into Planet Ryan, where sincerity/irony and form/function are all one beautiful thing, and then she says this, like, "Right, because this whole show is fake." And his face was like, "Girl, now you're getting it."
Russell Brand and Jonah Hill are upset because nobody has talked to them or cared about them in a few months, so their mentally ill asses decided to call up IGB and offer to man a phone bank for them, because they are lonely and want to be recognized on the phone by rich and charitable people. But there is no celebrity phone bank, because if there was it would be manned by folks like Russell Brand and Jonah Hill. But apparently there is some well-meaning comedy to be had here, so we have to look at Russell Brand's diseased face and Jonah Hill's fuzzy pumpkinhead for a bit. He is honestly swelling to the point where his chins are becoming a single chin once more.
Russell Brown does that voice I can't ever understand, and Jonah no-homos Ryan, who hates them both so much it's unstoppably beautiful, and they talk but I can't understand what they're saying, because Russell Brand is disgusting, and Jonah does another no-homo joke, because his only good memory of fame is kissing Michael Cera, which was way back. The punchline is that nobody's actually there, so what's going on is that they've spent a few thou on setting up a fake phone bank room, with tables and bunting, rather than spending on something real, and in this way the world gets better.
Let's check in with the nothing that the Idols have to say. Big Mike's "Glad to be a part [and] still around." Tim, for once, is ineloquent: "I mean it's a pretty awesome show to be a part of, so it's pretty exciting." Lee tells us that he cries each week before showtime, because when you're in the zone, you cry. I feel that, Deezle, completely. Let's go to I guess Pasadena, turns out, where Latifah is looking lovely. She needs Blake Lewis to keep her company. He can beatbox and explain about the birds turning into car alarms and she'll finally come out of the closet.
At this point the Black Eyed Peas perform.
, we see some weirdos -- Todd Bridges, for e.g. -- who didn't get tickets to the Hollywood location. QL tells us about malaria some more, and how we've brought down malaria deaths in ten African countries by half. That's fucking remarkable. Latifah then introduces the clip by saying it's going to be awful to watch. And she is correct.
Remember when that lady essentially died in Ryan's arms? I do. Now. Thanks, IGB. So here's a dying pregnant lady in Uganda with a failed liver and kidneys and a billion tubes in every place of her, and her husband staring dead-eyed into space while his wife and kid die. On 26 November, with a hundred women screaming for her, and a little tiny casket. It's not that I don't want to know, it's that I already know and seeing this, lavishly recorded, is taking things a step too far. If this shit was online, I mean to say, I wouldn't watch it. I would delete the email, because it's not my business. Your personal tragedy is not my entertainment.
And while IGB is of course essentially a commercial for suffering I just feel like it's unseemly to go that far, like, year we'll see live footage of a death squad lining people up and shooting them, and Idol can just be like, "Now give us some money." There's no ethical back-end, once you've gone that far, because it all comes under the umbrella of doing good somehow. I'm troubled by things that aren't self-limiting, like, if there's not an obvious point where something becomes tacky, then the starting point is where it's tacky. Like crack. Once you smoke crack, you've done that. It stops mattering who else you are or how great you are at raising your kids while being a crackhead.
Speaking of classy, George Lopez donated late last night enough money to host the eliminations. So he runs up onstage and screams like a total tampon about how excited he is, and about Twitter for a while, and generally like his usual attention-deprived four-year-old cousin self. Interminable jokes about the lighting in the theatre, Ryan's other jobs, his height, picks Ryan up which I hate, and performs every single complaint anybody has ever had about Ryan, while making Ryan look like the example of decorum and the wonderful man that he is. Then he makes the kids stand up, and then sit down again, and then there's a skit where we "judge the judges for a change." This should be retarded.
More jokes about the lights, and then Jackson: He says "pitchy," dawg, and should formulate his own thoughts. Jackson nervously laughs like the bullying victim he always laughs like, and the other judges are grossed out and scared about what else he's going to do. Randy is safe, and the safe music plays, and Randy fucking falls out of his chair with a Paula-powered laugh.
Then George calls Kara "DeGuido" and points out how she wants them to "make it [their] own" and how "disappointed" she gets every night, and how she apparently wrote every single song. Which, um, she did. Also, he jerks off to a "nudie picture" she made. She is safe -- although "no cute boy [cut to Casey] is."
Ellen needs to not talk back, first of all, which fuck you; and she always says she loves everything and calls her the Kourtney Kardashian of the judges. I don't know what that means, because I'm not trash. She's safe, and Simon needs to stop "touching" her.
Simon, who looks fantastic tonight as he has done lately, apparently he calls things "ghastly" and "rubbish" and Ryan needs to stop "touching" him. He needs to wear larger t-shirts. My God, George Lopez is like a retarded Jay Leno. He's actually worse than Jay Leno, which I didn't think was even possible. Lopez actually goes, "I'm not saying your shirts are tight, but..." And then a couple moob jokes, and we're done: America has voted, and he has to go back to England. Except for the volcano issue, so he can't travel, so he's safe. Ryan calls him "Erik Estrada" and kicks his dumb ass off the stage.
Strange pimpmercial involving paint and mishaps. I guess they're whitewashing the street just like tonight's sponsors. I guess that's the metaphor. Big Mike sprays a fire hydrant all over Siobhan, and there is bullet-time. I don't want to. So okay, thanks George, but now the show is actually happening. Crystal and Casey come to the Seal, her dress bearing a gorgeous pointed hem and her necklace dripping like diamonds. She rocked. Casey was soulless and dumb, lazy and uninspiring. Neither of them has been B3 yet, but obviously Casey asked for it last night: Crystal is, of course, safe.
Aaron and Lee are . Aaron is dressed like a Mouseketeer and will be a total hottie in about five years, which I never thought about before. Lee's face is getting fatter, and last night was a Moment. One of them, Aaron obvs, is B3, so Lee is safe. These are like the easiest matchups of all time. OH! Are we going to Huff on IGB? There are seven of them, right? So it'll be Tim and Mike, either of whom should be in the B3 this week but it doesn't really matter, and then they'll make Siobhan pick the safe group. Right? Good. I hope she projectile vomits from the stress of being authentic and gross at the same time.
In Pasadena, Jeff Beck is wearing an upper-arm cuff belonging to a much smaller-armed person, resulting in muffin top. Joss Stone is impeccably beautiful as always, and very good at that thing she do. I'm trying to figure out the diff between her skills and Crystal's, and all I can really see is that she looks like something you would want to look at rather than somebody collecting spare change outside the grocery co-op with a dog wearing a bandanna. That's the only difference I can see.
Joss as usual looks like she's about to fuck whoever she's duetting with, arm-cuff issues or none, and I have to say her ass has gotten even more magnificent since the last time I saw her. Damn. Also, Jeff Beck is wearing a leatherish vest and striped track pants and basically looks like somebody in the gay gang from The Warriors, but with Lou Reed's head. She's singing "I'll Put A Spell On You," which is one of those songs that never ends or really starts in earnest, which is why I forgot to say it out loud, but since it's Joss I don't mind. She can noodle about at her leisure.
Quick shot of David Arquette looking like a 19th century magician undercover in our times, then David Duchovny, apropos of nothing, goes: "Underwear, socks and soap." What is Things You Take To A Craiglist Hookup for a thousand, Alex? No wait, "Breathe Me" just started playing, so it means at some point people are going to start dying in this segment. Some cross-eyed little girl who's like a pudgier, less pretty Lea Michele, and thus is probably Demi Lovato, whoever that is, shrugs adorably and gives us a sprightly "Breakfast!" What is Things You Can't Have If You Want To Make It In This Biz. Chris Rock yells, so angrily, "A smack!" What is Things David Duchovny Bought Just This Weekend. That middle-grade cuteness Jonas smirks, "Laundry!" What is Things My Wife Will One Day Do While I'm Loitering At A Roadside Rest Stop.
Jane Lynch: "A kiss on the lips!" What is Things That Make Me Even More Confused And Upset By My Intense Sexual Attraction To Jane Lynch And No I'm Not Lying And Yes 'Vogue' Sent Me Into Some Kind Of Teen Horniness Tailspin Where I Actually Admitted This To People I Know And Yes It Was Really Confusing And Scary For All Of Us And I Wish I'd Never Said Anything And I Wish I Could Shut Up About It Now But Apparently I Still Can't And I'll Tell You This Much If Jillian Michaels Shows Up Within One Hundred Miles Of This Show I Will Start Drinking And Never Stop And This Recap Will Stop Making Sense Altogether? Alex?
Smooth Hit singer Josh Broganburber and that adorable Emily Beiber the little girls are so damned excited about, they are thinking about "Words of encouragement" and "The last thing my mom gave me was a hug." What are Things That Should Have Been Averted and Things That Happened Right Before I Removed And Ate My Mother's Liver, respectively.
A little baby whose mom died, she didn't hug the baby, because the baby died in childbirth, so the last thing her mom gave her was life. And it's a testament less to my personal grossness and more to how this show has gotten so scary this year that I honestly thought the voiceover was about to say, "The last thing this little girl's mother gave her... Was AIDS." Not appropriate, and this show is the culprit. So instead I will answer questions about Justin Bieber.
Fact Number One: His mom isn't dead or I wouldn't have made the joke: She merely sold him to Usher for three magic beans and US citizenship.
Fact Number Two: Why "Emily"? Well, I'll tell you. In my experience every Emily (sorry Nussbaum and Salzfass) is eventually either 1) The very last girl a gay guy ever dates or 2) A hot tiny lesbian (or occasional FTM, in which case they're even hotter) that likes to dance. Often all three, as in the case of Justin Bieber.
Fact Number Three: Ban Ki-Moon is the UN Secretary General. Not Beiber-related, but something I didn't know. Now will you believe me when I tell you I know absolutely nothing about anything of interest? Well. Maybe his full name must be "Ban Ki-Moon Ban Ki-Moon" which is why I didn't recognize him.
Morgan Freeman, when he talks it's like I'm being educated about something. Or talked through a homicide investigation. One or the other. In this show, probably both. He went to this awful sad place in Mississippi with Randy Jackson to a place Teddy Roosevelt once called "the Jewel of the Delta." But Jim Crow killed it, and now Save The Children is saving it. Along with and including the Children. Jackson goes, "Who would have thought that literacy is still a problem" in our incredibly rich country. It freaks me out, every time. I just hate it. Morgan points out that literacy is step one to not having a horrible life, and they visit some families who adore him.
The people are like, we came to here from Arkansas, because it's actually better by a certain tiny margin. One of them is a burn victim and the other one is down an arm. If that shit happened to me I'd get out of Arkansas too. The kids of the family are adorable, if weird-looking in a particularly chromosomal way, and we watch Morgan Freeman hula-hoop, which is much more relaxing, and then we learn that this place is actually getting better because of Save The Children. One of them has a Bluetooth in his ear, which is confusing on several levels. It would be awesome if it was just a fashion statement and didn't connect to anything, but I don't think that's the case.
Oh God. Alicia Keys. Complete with a concrete jungle where dreams are made of. "Today we're going to do the unthinkable together," she warns us ominously, and then she sings kind of shitty for awhile, but at least her hair's straight and pretty. Remember when we were sure that she was bald and just had a succession of hats with braids stapled inside? I didn't entirely hate her in those days but I was working on it. There's kind of a cool drum sound in this song, but that's about it. Her voice sounds dumb, which is a bummer because if she doesn't have the voice then what does she have? Arm gestures. Well, and this:
Won't you come be in the sky with me?
I was wondering, baby
Could I make you a baby?
If we do the unthinkable
Would it make us look crazy?
On top of being a boring song, that is also the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Not only rhyming "baby" with "baby," okay, but also what empowered woman hasn't wanted to ask occasionally, "Can I make you a baby?" Like, you just sit there while I do some unthinkable shit. Then she sits down at the piano and sings the song about how many streets there are in New York. As long as we're pushing literacy, how about arresting Alicia Keys and all her rapper friends for the hateful shit they do to language? Because playing fast and loose with grammar is not something we should celebrate in our icons: That's the concrete jungle where Sarah Palin and George Bush Jr. were made of.
Groban, that's his name. He seems nice. I've never had a problem with him, beyond his music and the fact that his eyeballs are way too close for comfort. My stepmom really loves that one song about climbing a mountain, and I love her, so he's all right with me. And there's nothing to be done about too-close-together eyeballs, no matter how much they bother me. Or, I guess, Russell Brand.
Now manning the phones: Woody Allen, Marilyn Monroe, Tom Cruise from both Top Gun and Risky Business -- all of them impersonators paid to be on the show so they can support their Hollywood Blvd. drug habits rather than spending the money on malaria nets -- as well as a gay person playing "Justin Bieber's cousin" and a teen hottie playing "that guy's friend from junior high." I don't know why I'm bitching about this, considering there's been no Ben Stiller yet.
Slash is there but he's really Slash, so very meta, and then they introduce Tatiana (Short hair, maybe some work done, way less pretty) as "Clay Aiken," I mean, it really just keeps happening, this. OMG, actual Octomom and some of her worthless children! Ryan tells Russell not to fuck Octomom and stop dicking around with her kids, and then Jim Carrey comes out, and he stares at Octomom and all the impersonators, and flees the scene. I hate this so much. It's like everything horrible about the Golden Globes but nobody's getting drunk. Except this guy right here. Awww yeah.
QL -- with a seriously pasted-on smile -- and her friend Tommy introduce Carrie Underwood and pretend that she matters, to them or period. She's wearing a great dress, black silk cutouts over shiny cream with the hem dipping down in the back with a dramatic single point, like a train. It's sort of like a bullfighter's wife came over here to start over and started a gentleman's club in the Old West, in silhouette, but up close it's really beautiful and modern. So chic, our Carrie. Even if she's wearing a matching wrist corsage and gold jewelry. Her shoes have cute criss-cross straps and her mic seems to be covered in black glitter.
I think that's the most I've ever talked about clothes at once, which is funny considering the shows I recap, but it was mostly because the song was so boring. The song is sort of yelly and there's like one really pretty note, but the song itself seems to be all chorus, with a really dumb simple melody that repeats like a million times. I don't even know. Something about generically changing the world. I wish she'd sung "Playing For Time" again. Also, the crowd in Pasadena is rowdy and trashy and won't stop screaming. That's why your asses are in Pasadena, peasants.
Ellen took David Arquette to learn about the one in six Americans who don't have food. And I refuse to make a joke about his wife (ex-wife?) in this context, because after literacy it's always the food pantries that get to me the most with this yearly nightmare. There's a beautiful camera-ready family, a teacher with three kids, and they can't feed their kids, so Feeding America is helping them out with that. The point is that they could not be more normal or more like you or more admirable or attractive, so why the fuck are they starving? Man, our country is so fucking fucked up.
, we remember Kara's trip with Elliot from last week, and he's brought a nun back with him. Oh, I want a nun from Angola! She looks so calm and competent. I would just bring her drinks all day and ask for wisdom. Ryan's like, "Watch out because the show's going to go long." Thanks for the warning, bro. And oh, if you didn't know it, they've scheduled a repeat of the Glee Madonna episode for Friday night, so if this show fucked that up for you on Tuesday, don't believe your listings: They are doing it over.
Mosquito nets again, more tiny coffins and the voices of dead children, literal and for real. You know, it's not that I don't care: Their aims in doing this show are valid, but at cross-purposes to what we do. I'm not here to guilt you into donating money, that's the show's job. I'm here to tell you what happened on the show, and I already told you about the mosquito nets. So I don't want you think I'm being uncaring or cold about this, but I did the rant yesterday and I told you about the mosquito nets before, so why would I talk about it now? I don't recap the Previouslies on a scripted show for this reason, why would I go there for this? And in fact, this recap could be way shorter if I just tell you what happens and how it relates to you and me.
Bill and Melinda Gates stare at Ryan like Scientologists and explain that global healthcare is the most important thing because there's not actually any good reason for children or other people to die. Ryan points out that we're all getting screwed by the healthcare, pharma and insurance lobbies in our own country, to the point where people are taking frankly insane and destructive stances to defend those corporate interests against their own self-interest, so why worry about other people being screwed the world over (by those same companies)?
Bill smiles into space and Melinda explains that ten dollars is not a lot of money, and that nobody in America could possibly complain about the fact that it only takes ten dollars to save hundreds of lives overseas, because they would pay that if their neighbor were dying and not think twice. Um, Melinda? You're being retarded. Half of America is engaged in making fucking death threats and racist remarks against our leaders because of their righteous (lobby-created, synthetic) anger toward just that concept.
"Love your neighbor" is not going to fly here, because rich people just like you have spent billions of dollars to market hating your neighbor, as a God-given right and American duty. Show more mosquito nets and dying pregnant women shitting out their lives, and stop talking about poor Americans, who deserve it.
God, no wonder the richest people of all time have made such tiny dents. They honestly think asking people to be nice is going to get things done. That's so naïve! That's so Al Gore talking about global warning. People who don't care are never going to care, no matter how skilled your rhetoric. People who think this stuff is evil are never going to change their minds, no matter how brilliant your logic is. It's not about intellectualism v. true-Americaism, it's about the fact that you're speaking completely different languages. Obama won based on their language, not ours, and has been steadily losing ever since by forgetting he ever knew it:
Talk to emotion, talk to patriotism, talk to self-interest. Learn to speak their language. We don't "stoop" to that level because we think that it's a step down, but that is the elitism talking: There are plenty of ways to live in this world. Liberal intellectualism is but one. And stamping your feet and snarking about how retarded everybody else is does zero good at all. How about respecting the fact that there are people who are radically different from you, and manage to get along just fine without a single Western Civ class or Terry Gross rattling in their ears? How about learning why and how they do things, and coming in on that angle? They're not worthless, they're different. And it's not their responsibility to climb the fence, because they are just fine where they are, and have no reason to do so.
Or, if you want to get really nuts: Stop spending all this liberal guilt money on asking politely for everybody to pitch in, and start putting that money directly into change. Do you know how many developing technologies and X Prize-type schemes there are out there, actually creating ways to fix our environment, that nobody will touch? Or aid packages that get denied funding because they would actually make a difference? Do you know how many intensely brilliant pieces of legislation that would actually change the stakes get voted down, or watered down into nothing every term, because of the financial interests brought to bear on our legislators themselves?
You've got the science at hand. I think part of it is that the Left has as many fucked up ideas about what "kindness" and "nature" mean as the Right does about "service" and "charity." Nature doesn't mean what you think it means. It doesn't mean going organic and driving a Prius and doing yoga. It doesn't mean "do no harm" because it's not enough to just sit back and feel great about ourselves at the farmer's market in our little corner of things. That's just as selfish as anything the Teabaggers ever did. It's not enough for fuckin' Adrian Grenier to fly around in jets and plant a few trees in recompense.
Nature's not an Other we're trying to get back to and will never quite reach; nature's not a holy ideal that reminds you of when you were little kid and things were easy and you were playing in a field somewhere and there were strawberries. Nature is immanent, all around you, informing everything that happens to you and every single part of you. Nature is in the Houston grackles I used to write about during that Blake year, when I was personally going nuts and didn't want everybody to know: How they'd mimic the car alarms and that became part of their nature language. That's nature talking to nature.
Holistic therapies and meditation are great, as great as any speech Obama and Gore have ever made, but if you want to cure your cancer, you burn it the fuck out of your body. And those poisons are part of nature too, just like your iPod and your Prius and your recycled plastics. We laugh at the Right for being afraid of or hateful toward nature, but we're just as bad, thinking it's "untouched," and therefore untouchable. Touch that shit. It cannot possibly be worse than what we're doing now.
Real ecology means the Earth has given us opportunities to heal it that we are not exploiting, because we think "nature" is being subtractive: Recycle, reduce, reuse. When in fact the Earth is right here saying: Clean nuclear power, reterraforming, lifestyle sustainability, medical and genetic research. All these abominations we're too good for, right here, handed to you by God to get us out of this fucking mess, and we're praying to Gaea and spending money on putting little green stickers on shit and sending out whiny flyers... Why?
Because the idea of a fundamentally changed world is too frightening for anybody to contemplate. Liberal or conservative, we're afraid to actually ask for a finer world, because it would mean our lives would be different. Maybe better, maybe worse, but more likely very different. And that's the singularity we can't see past, because that's the true unknown. You have no idea what the world looks like after a change as big as we're capable of creating, and we shy away from that blank spot all the time, because we don't trust ourselves enough to create that world. We just know something bad will happen, because that part of our futures lies in shadow, and anything can happen once you don't know what's going to happen.
So in the meantime, Gateses: Stay off the politics and stop describing this as compassion. Americans hate compassion, because it's about other people. Call it "charity," because that's about ourselves.
And there they were, worried because their second choice was Cyndi Lauper, because she's the Irrelevant Gay Ombudsman of Irrelevant Gay Town, and a cottage industry all by herself just like anybody who's stayed past their due date, but at least she's a blind squirrel that can still find a nut now and then -- pardon the imagery -- because what have you got for us, Sir Elton? "No, you can't just change the Marilyn Monroe song to be about AIDS now. No, you didn't actually write the song about Evita, and you can't make that be about AIDS. No, we're not doing 'Can You Feel The AIDS Tonight.' Just sing whatever song you can sing in your sleep," and he was like, "Dunzo."
Aaron Kelly: Not terrible, not worthwhile, kind of fascinating now that you can see the very hot early-twenties manling raring to go up inside his tiny elfin body, but still. Come on. R. Kelly is not a choice, it's the opposite of a choice. You proved to us that you were exactly what you seem to be, no more, and for that you should go home. SAFE.
Casey James: Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and you're a total Monet. The only time you're sexy is when you're doing what you love, and increasingly that list does not include "singing for us." Plus, the shame shared between you and Kara every time the show, especially fucking Jackson, calls back to her totally innocent and frankly adorable flirtation with you has become a national menace, and now we all feel as used and greased-up as the two of you do. Which is not your fault, but it is part of your story. SAFE.
Tim Urban: Wrong week to keep your shirt on, bro. I'm not saying I was waiting for it, as I do own the internet in my personal home and could if so inclined check out your sick body at any time, but I think America would have approved. As it was, you coasted on your charm and looks when you should have been proving to the rest of us that you had the chops. You insisted on doing things your way, which was the gaylord way, and you are finally, finally paying the price. But I will miss you, because you are by far the most intelligent contestant of this season, and pretty smart people give me hope that you really can have it all. But your ouster tells me that the day I can have Glenn Beck for my husband and Michelle Obama as my daughter -- my definition of "having it all" -- might just never come. So I sort of hate you for th... Oh, the smile. Thanks for that, buddy. Everything feels good again.
Wait, and it's SHANIA WEEK week? This PIECE OF SHIT SHOW.