Lost idols...

What was up with TV on Wednesday night? First, we have Chris Sligh sent home on American Idol. That was just wrong. Chris was the best male singer on the show this year, and one of the very few contestants who had a strong personality from day one. He never had a bad performance, but the judges made up a “weakness” for him – they were continually telling him that he was off tempo. Even when he wasn’t. (I’m not sure Paula can even correctly deduce a rhythm in her perpetual drug-induced haze…) Sure, I suppose his rendition of “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” was a bit ho-hum, but so were most of the performances on Tuesday night…

Well, that does it, then. I’m voting for Sanjaya from now on. For two reasons – first, because his hair is just so darn pretty (and can, apparently, be coaxed into imitating a rooster… that in itself is quite impressive…). But also because I’m sick of people hating him because he’s quiet. Because that’s it – that’s the reason everyone says he sucks. It’s not that he can’t sing, because he CAN (and he did quite well with that Gwen Stefani song the other night). People hate him because he’s quiet. Yeah, let’s all hate the quiet people! Quiet people suck! Quiet people shouldn’t be allowed to sing because they aren’t capable of bursting people’s eardrums! What no one seems to realize is that quiet people are so quiet because we’re constantly THINKING… you have no idea what’s going on inside these brains of ours. We’re plotting… planning… scheming… and one day we shall rule the world. And loud people won’t even see it coming, because they’re all so busy listening to the melodic sound of their own voices…

Uh, where was I? Oh yeah… so I’m gonna start voting for Sanjaya of the Pretty Hair. And if he actually did manage to win, Rick pointed out that he would be filling a niche – we have no Indian-American pop stars in this country, do we? Well, we have Norah Jones… but is she really a pop star? She sort of has her own kind of sound… she’s less “pop” and more “Norah Jones.” And after her debut album, she kinda started fading into the background. Once you’ve heard the “Norah Jones” sound, you’ve heard it. It was new and fresh at first, but now it’s old news. Get Sanjaya into a studio with plenty of microphones and the proper mix of voice versus instruments, and he’d be a big hit. Plus he could create his own line of hair-care products…

And then after that American Idol vote-off show, I watched that crazy episode of Lost. Did anyone watch the crazy episode of Lost? The backstory this week focused on Nikki and Paulo, who, up until this week, I’ve been calling “who?” and “who?”. These two characters were non-existent for the first two seasons of Lost, and then this season they just started popping up in random episodes for absolutely no reason whatsoever. They were like people who just show up at a party uninvited, and everyone is too nice to ask them to leave… so there’s this awkward attempt to include them, even though no one really knows why they’re there to begin with, and no one really WANTS them there anyway. In fact, Paulo had so few speaking lines throughout the season that I didn’t even realize he had an accent until Wednesday’s episode. (Oh… what’s-his-name is Brazilian… I didn’t know that…)

And at the beginning of the episode, some of the regular Losties – the ones we’ve come to know and love – find the two Lostie interlopers dead in the jungle. So at that point, I figured the writers had introduced these two boring characters for the sole purpose of killing them off. Seems to happen a lot on the show. People are introduced, they’re in a few episodes, they get killed off. Happened to Ana Lucia (I was glad to see her go…) and Mr. Eko (I was NOT glad to see him go… they could’ve done so much more with his character…). And now, in an episode that was proving to me that the writers make everything up as they go along, it was happening to Nikki and Paulo.

But wait – at the end of the episode, we see a flashback to what actually happened to these two. It was a spider bite – a scary, creepy spider that curiously no one else on the island has ever run across. And the bite of this spider doesn’t KILL you – oh no, it just paralyzes you. It renders you completely helpless and immobile. It makes you APPEAR dead, even to a trained physician. (Of course, the only trained physician on the island is out playing football with the Others, so he wasn’t much help anyway…) But seeing as everyone assumed Nikki and Paulo were dead, the Losties did exactly what they’ve become so used to doing with all the dead people on the island. They dug graves and buried them in the sand. Just as Nikki was finally regaining movement and managed to open her eyes. Yes, that’s right. THEY BURIED THEM ALIVE!!! Argh!!!! How horrible is THAT?? And since that’s the way the episode ended, we don’t know yet if Nikki and Paulo were able to dig their way out of that sand, or if they’ve now succumbed to suffocation.

Yeah, Wednesday night is just a crazy TV night. I should go read a book…