The Old Blog

A groundskeeper getting ejected.

The close American Idol vote is being audited. When I asked, whether the vote was truly as close as Ryan Seacrest claimed three posts back, I may have been on to something. Or Ryan Seacrest may just be innumerate.

The reigning queen of ladies’ golf shot a one-over from the men’s tees today, which puts her ahead of notables Sergio Garcia, Tom Lehman, and Stuart Appleby and ties her with Lee Janzen, Scott Simpson, and Hal Sutton. If she repeats the feat tomorrow, she should make the cut for sure.

“Fear Factor:” the video game will arrive in stores next year. I don’t quite think the stunts will translate to the pixellated screen, however. Y’see, it’s not that hard to get your virtual character to eat the congealed blood, bull penises, or embryonic hamsters that would make your real self vomit.

In the “closest” (and only the second) final vote in “American Idol” history, Ruben won by a mere 1,335 votes out of over 20 million cast. It’s not as close as the vote in Florida (or is it??), but that is a very, very tight race. On the other hand, both Clay’s and Ruben’s albums will apparently appear the same week, so this time when the judges said they’re both winners, they were completely right.

Jayson Blair thinks it’s funny that he was able to get away with lies and plagiarism. Any possibly sympathy I could ever have had for him is gone. He has also signed with an agent in an attempt to turn the sordid affair into a book and a movie. Most chilling, however, is this quote:

I was either going to kill myself or I was going to kill the journalist persona. So Jayson Blair the human being could live, Jayson Blair the journalist had to die.

I’m not sure how the two are mutually exclusive. Any ideas? Throw me a comment.

According to this Boston Globe article, the average teen will spend $638 on prom this year. I don’t think a single kid in my high school spent that much! Of course, these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, as they come from a survey by Conde Nast. The scariest part of the article, however, is the justification for the price: the prom is supposed to be the best moment of your life. As I wrote in my newspaper column my senior year of high school, “Who wants to reach their peak at age 18?” It’s a dance, kids, and if your high school was anything like mine, you had at least four of them per year. Don’t count on high school being the acme of your life, because if it is, you have an exceedingly long descent just around the corner.

“American Idol” ends tonight. I haven’t been watching (much), but anyone with at least three working senses now knows that (little, dorky white guy) Clay Aiken and (big, cool black guy) Ruben Studdard are the two oddly-matched (and oddly-shaped) finalists. From what I’ve heard, their voices don’t compare to last year’s winner, Kelly Clarkson. However, these guys need to star in a new version of “The Odd Couple.” I’m not suggesting this, I’m DEMANDING it. It would certainly be better than that “From Justin to Kelly” movie in which last year’s finalists are starring. Admit it, you two: you’ve been boinking like bunnies since Simon last insulted you.

But You Know What I Can’t Stand?
All those fake pre-made signs that FOX hands out to the studio audience. They’re just too “punny,” too “copywriterish,” and too evenly distributed to be legitimate. Plus, every single sign spells the contestants’ names correctly.

That said, American Idol is one of the best marketing gambits of the past 20 years. You find the group that controls the money (the “tweens and teens”), you ask them whose album they’d most likely buy (or beg their parents to buy), and then you hand the person they choose some pre-written songs to make an album that would go platinum even without radio play. It’s the world’s most successful focus group. (Can you imagine taking part in a focus group on, say, soda, and then rooting for your choice to win? That’s exactly what this is.) So considering how the show manufactures careers (especially that of Ryan Seacrest), it kind of makes sense that they’d manufacture the signs, as well.

My family (first my grandpa and now my dad and uncle) owns Buy Rite Foods, a grocery store in Milford, Iowa. When I was little, I used to see the warnings on the sides of the milk crates and wonder if anyone actually got busted for using them improperly. Now I finally know.

On Sunday, 19-year-old Bronx resident Jesse Taveras was ticketed for sitting on a milk crate. The ticketing cop and his partner made a few disturbing statements, including:
1) Don’t blame me, blame (Mayor) Bloomberg.
2) We have to make our daily (ticket) quote.
3) It’s not a big deal, the judge will throw it out anyway.

This is beyond asinine. To make matters worse, Taveras’ court date is scheduled for the middle of his trip back to his home country, the Dominican Republic, to visit his mother. So even if the ticket is thrown out, it will cost Taveras lots of time and the $700 in plane fare he has already spent. The manager of the Sunnybrook Farms store where the crate came from claims to lose hundreds of crates per year, and has little sympathy for Taveras, yet he hasn’t sent anyone to retrieve the “stolen property;” the crate still sits in front of the same store it always has.

I usually stick up for cops, but stories like this make it hard to do.

We’re back at Terror Alert Orange. In absolutely, completely unrelated news, Ari Fleischer is stepping down as National Lapdog–he even got a kiss on the forehead from Dubya when he announced his resignation.

My larger problem with the terror alert system is that we seem to raise it after bombings, as though it’s a reactionary alert (insert your own political comment here) instead of a precautionary one. In the meantime, we still have not captured or confirmed the deaths of Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, there are still al-Qaeda organized bombings occurring around the world, the anthrax mailer remains at large, and we haven’t found much evidence for the massive amounts of WMDs that Iraq was supposedly hiding. I’ve said it before, but it seems like the “War on Terror” is going about as well as the “War on Drugs.”

Fun For the Kids…and Bostonians
Here are a couple of alternate terror scales: