What a shocker on "American Idol."
Who would have predicted that the bald rocker from North Carolina, Chris Daughtry, would get the boot?
Did you hear that great sucking sound at the end of the show last night?? That was America gasping when Ryan Seacrest told Daughtry that the journey ends tonight. Holy Cow!
Chris himself looked like he was going to throw up.
In my regular Wednesday "American Idol" column, I predicted that Elliott Yamin would get voted off the show. You may recall back in March I wrote that if Yamin didn't win this competition, it would be proof that America was tone deaf.
And although I'm happy that I was wrong, it does come with mixed feelings, because Daughtry was one of the best contestants on the show. Any day now I was waiting for my wife to ask me to shave my head, because it was only when Chris was performing that she really got interested in the show.
I was also particularly hard on Taylor Hicks in my last column, and I will stick to my original review. However, in the results show, when actress Rebecca Romijn requested an encore of "Jailhouse Rock," he was excellent.
If Hicks continues to perform like that over the next two weeks, he will be in the finale.
Katharine McPhee got yet another reprieve, and although I like her voice, I'm not buying the sexy image she tries hard to foster (although she's sexy without trying ... someone should tell her that).
However, after Daughtry's exit, I really believe that it will be Taylor and Elliott in the finales.
Cyberspace Issues
Cyberspace is getting more and more complicated by the day.
With more and more of us banking, shopping, e-mailing, chatting, getting our news, listening to music, buying tickets and watching videos online, there are far too many passwords, far too many user identifications, far too many profiles and far too many ways to forget!
And to make matters worse, half of these sites require usernames and passwords to change every few months.
And then there's the authentication process that many sites use to make sure you are actually there when setting up a profile.
You know those mosaics with a word embedded in them so that the application knows a real person — and not some spam or other mischievous program — is trying to sign up for an account?
I understand the need for such a process, but some are too creative for their own good.
Recently a co-worker was trying to buy Yankees tickets online.
Here is the word she was required to enter to authenticate her order.
Can anyone out there tell just what the heck the word in that box is supposed to be?
Several of us dotcommers gathered around her computer to see who could figure it out. I said TURBAN but was shunned, and then told that I was politically incorrect. Grrr! How is turban politically incorrect?
Somebody else suggested LURHAN, which made me think immediately of Lindsay Lohan, but lest anyone thought I was being sexist, I kept my mouth shut.
Another said LURTAN, which made me think of the former Miami Dolphins defensive corner Patrick Surtain. I thought about doing my best Al Michaels impression by pronouncing LURTAN, lur-TAN, with the emphasis on the TAN just like when the sportscaster is calling a nice tackle, but I knew nobody here plays Sony Playstation's Madden NFL, and it would have been lost on my co-workers.
Finally we agreed on L-U-R-B-A-N ... but it bounced back as incorrect.
The next word up for bid was W-A-X-E-N, and that was quite clear, and she got her Yankees/Red Sox tickets.
I hope she has a better time than I did on Tuesday night, when the Yanks were slaughtered by the Sox. I sat in the stands watching Alex Rodriguez ground into double plays and make two crucial errors that allowed the Sox to take the lead.
And this guy gets $25 million a year to play baseball. I don't get it.
Speaking of America's pastime (oh wait, football season is still a few months out), does anyone care that Barry Bonds is about to tie Babe Ruth's homerun record*. That asterisk says it all, doesn't it? And for that matter, the Babe doesn't even have the record anymore. Why is everybody forgetting about Henry Aaron this week? Grrrrr.
I believe every pitcher facing Bonds should simply roll the ball over the plate. Why pitch to a cheater? Just walk him, and hopefully he'll just walk away. Far, far away.
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