Last night, the vacuous nonsense that is American Idol took a turn away from the usual vacuous nonsense to run a cheap, vacuously nonsensical imitation of a Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Telethon. In the course of doing so, the producers might have inflicted some lasting emotional damage on one of its most promising contestants with a sleazy stunt that was billed as “the biggest shock in American Idol history.” Back to that later.

Don’t get me wrong—“Idol Gives Back” appears to be a worthwhile charity. Providing aid to starving or diseased chilllllldren in Africa, to chilllllldren rendered homeless by Hurricane Katrina (damn that Bush, anyway!), and teaching chilllllllllldren to read in Appalachia are all worthwhile causes. Of course, we don’t know how much of the money is being put to productive use and some of the efforts are arguably saddled with inefficiencies beyond the control of the charitable foundation. (For example, if $10 will buy enough pills and mosquito nets to keep 20 kids from dying of malaria, how many thousands of kids would $10 worth of DDT have saved were it not for the alarmist response to the late crusading tree-hugger Rachel Carson’s hyperbolic 1962 book Silent Spring, which precipitated a worldwide ban on the one insecticide that could have effected control over the vector for this mosquito-borne illness—albeit at the expense of a few birds. Yeah, that pisses me off.) Anyway, let’s assume that the money is well spent. I have no argument with the idea of “giving back.”

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Halfway through tonight’s American Idol results show, a smile broke out on Simon Scowl’s face as he uttered, “I’m beginning to sense something.” The smile lingered all the way through a boring performance by Martina McBride to the long awaited moment of truth. The bottom three contestants, Sanjaya, Lakisha, and Blake, stood a center stage awaiting their fate. Seacrest milked the moment by making a big deal out of telling Blake that he had survived another week, and then it was down to two. And then it came—America had voted and Sanjaya was finally going home!

Hallelujah!

After that, Simon exuded happiness as I’d never seen from him before.

Not to look a gift horse in the mouth or anything, but I have to wonder whether the Howard Stern minions (the lemmings) have shifted their protest voting attention from Sanjaya to Chris. After all, Chris was awful on Tuesday, arguably second worst only to Sanjaya’s crappy performance. It didn’t make sense that Blake, not Chris was in the bottom three.

Be that as it may, the competition gets fairer from now on. The remaining six are all pretty normal, although the men are significantly less talented than the women. At this point, it looks like Jordin and Melinda in the final, unless Lakisha can step up to the plate and hit a home run. Without Sanjaya, this mindless entertainment gets a little more interesting.