Kelly Clarkson Survived a Broken TV Home.

Despite having already written the self-described "definitive treatise on American Idol" (still the second most popular blog post in MySpace history, following Joe Rogan's legendary 2005 flame war with a Thai restaurant waiter). I made another couple of mild attempts to get into it this year (well, the auditions anyway) without success. You want just one reason why I'm not furiously texting each week on behalf of, say, a moisturizer-loving white guy warbling "A Change is Gonna Come?" Here's just one:



Forget for a moment that the other two "judges" on this show are a crackpot choreographer who got lucky and a guy primarily known for using the word "dawg" more awkwardly than Sean Connery. I think I'd have more musical taste in common with just about anyone - even Ryan Seacrest, a guy who makes Carson Daly look as gonzo as Hunter S. Thompson - than Simon Cowell.

All this time I've had absolutely no idea what this guy had done in the music industry that even qualified him to critique the handwriting on a setlist, much less anyone's singing ability, so I looked up his entry on the perpetually super-accurate Wikipedia (and by the way, the NY Times running an article about someone else's inaccuracies is a bitter laugh indeed). Turns out in addition to signing a bunch of UK pop drones I'd mostly never heard of (note: as bad as you think American pop music might be, just rememeber the British scene is always substantially worse), Cowell's also got the following credits under his belt:

"He also released several novelty recordings featuring the likes of wrestlers of the World Wrestling Federation, Zig and Zag and the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, that were huge successes."

Wrestlers? Power Rangers? Zig? Zag? Before looking at his resume, I always thought Cowell's idea of a perfect pop star would be a trilly-voiced, mall-ready sexpot who finds herself irresistibly attracted to a flat-topped sleazoid seemingly oblivious to his own prissiness. Turns out it would be Jet Jaguar.



Meanwhile, from elsewhere on the interwebs, here's your first, tantalizing tease as to the contents of The Wire season 5 (Thanks to Recidivism for the link). With all due respect to UBM, I kinda consider Maniac Cop to be the "Dr. Strangelove of police procedurals." I'm gonna go waaaay out on a limb w/ a prediction for the final season: McNulty will die, while Omar and Bubbles will both survive. Oh, and Clay Davis will resign as state senator and join the Comedians of Comedy tour. I think they've been building up to that one for some time.