If you hate American Idol (and you know who you are, you gloomy gusses) you’re not going to want to read this. American Idol Season 8 starts tonight and I’m officially psyched for the start of this season’s Part 1: Sucky Singers.
I hear this season’s going to be different and that the bad singers section of the show is going to be shorter and kinder. This will undoubtedly elongate Part 2: Good Singers Who Still Make You Cringe With Their Amateurish Antics.
I’m so ready for some hard-core TV watching time. I’ve spent the last year barely watching TV at all. Last year at this time, I was selling my house and getting ready to move, so I rarely even watched American Idol, not to mention any Law & Order reruns or anything else. It was a bad year for TV watching for me, other than the obsessive MSNBC and CNN election coverage I took like a drug. A bad drug, like heroin mixed with chocolate. On Nov. 5 I went cold turkey and turned off those two channels, only to go into hallucinations where I swear Gene Hackman was doing Lowe’s commercials.
All of November and December were a wasteland as far as TV watching went. I did a lot of crossword puzzles and spent prime time on Facebook, super poking people and tending my rain forest garden. I’m about fed up with sending and receiving plants with faces on them, good karma and fruity drinks with umbrellas in them, and ready for some all American TV watching. I might even put an afghan on me and turn up the volume real loud.
Remember last year when I wrote about our American Idol contest? It’s up to 11 people for this year and it’s a motley crew of my husband, a sister, brother-in-law, some nieces, live-in boyfriends, friends, friends of friends, and my mother-in-law, who is our newest member this year.
In explaining the rules – or lack thereof – to her yesterday, I found myself saying out loud the ridiculous nature of this contest.
“The rules depend on whoever is the scorer, which is Nicola this year. Last year Pam was scorer and two weeks after the contest was over, she gave bonus points to the people who watched the show the most times and made educated predictions instead of wild guesses.”
“After the Tuesday night show is on, you send an email to everyone in the group saying what you thought of the contestants’ hair, clothes, manners and sometimes their singing. You can guess how many Red Bulls and pain pills Paula has in her Coke tumbler, and you can estimate the cup size of Simon’s breasts that week. You can use as many exclamation marks as you wish, and all caps is acceptable.”
“After the Wednesday night show, you send another email to everyone bragging about how well you did or complaining that there is an Internet conspiracy to screw up your predictions.”
“It’s fun, though, really, you should join it.”