American Idol - Your Awful Top 10

Anyone who knows anything about how much of a gaywad I am knows that I love American Idol with a passion that's getting a little uncomfortable and may one day find me placed on some sort of list kept by the government. Because this is true, you have to understand how much it pains me to say this: American Idol has been god-awful this year.

I mean just terrible. Here we are at the Top 10 and there's literally ONE contestant... maybe two... that legitimately should be there. And it's not like they eliminated a bunch of awesome people or anything... these remaining contestants are sadly just the best of a bad crop. It's downright disheartening, but I guess not all that surprising, seeing as how this shows been chugging along for nearly ten years. The American talent well is getting pretty goddamned dry.

But anyway, since I did it last year, and because talking about American Idol still makes me both feel warm and fuzzy inside and hate myself, here's your Top 10. For better or worse. Mostly worse.

American Idol - Top 10

Aaron Kelly



Aaron is sixteen, and it's a young sixteen. Like he probably still thinks girls are gross and have cooties. He sings like a Sophomore that just got a supporting part in the high school's production of Anything Goes, yet the judges have decided he's "the next Justin Timberlake," which is only true in the sense that he'll at some point probably get deflowered by a Mouseketeer. There's all sorts of back story with him, too... adoptions and bad parents and once he hid in an attic and read "The Neverending Story"... but it's all too boring to really get worked up over. The only significant moment involving Aaron Kelly this season is when Ellen playfully accused him of copying her hairstyle. Congrats, kid... you just got told you have lesbian hair on national TV. How's fame taste?

Lee DeWyze



Here we have the Idol contestant most likely to sell you weed. He's the bro-iest bro that's ever bro-ed and he has the musical stylings of a Dave Matthews cover band that really wants to move away from Dave Matthews and start covering some REAL shit, like Daughtry or Kings of Leon. There's nothing interesting about him at all, even though he's been declared "a hunk" by several people that have apparently never seen men before. His parents love him, I guess, because there haven't been any heartbreaking montages of him carrying his guitar through an orphanage or whatever.

Oh, and one time he sang that Owl City song "Fireflies" just him and an acoustic guitar and it was so bland my TV had to go take a nap.

Tim Urban



Now HE'S a hunk. All young and floppy-haired and muscled... if I were a seventeen year old girl, I'd let him play with my boobs, all I'm saying. At the same time, there's a STRONG creepy religion vibe coming off of him; they showed his family one time and there's like fifteen brothers and sisters, all genes therein impeccable, and it made my skin crawl like I just discovered an ant infestation. Maybe it's just because I'm currently reading a book about icky Mormon cults, but this dude is TOTALLY (probably) the product of an icky Mormon cult.

Anyway, he sings terribly and he's only still on the show because girls and very, very disturbed older men want to touch his penis. True fact.

Katie Stevens



This is the other sixteen year old, but she's the kind that acts like they're 34 and have a very important job taking business meetings with clients in NoFunsville. She's kind of robotic and she suffers a little bit from an ailment I call "Man Voice," plus she's only marginally talented at singing. Odd, being as how this is a singing competition, but whatever.

Of all the contestants, she's the one that's going to freak out the worst when she gets voted off. You can just see it coming. When she gets critiqued, she appears to be listening intently to what the judges have to say, but you can tell she's just counting down the seconds until she can get back to her dressing room and dig deep cuts into her leg with a razor blade because SHE'S! NOT! GOOD! ENOUGH!

Seriously, when she goes, it's going to be epic. She might punch Ryan Seacrest, which would be like beating up all the world's happiness in the form of a manorexic pixie that can tell you to the SECOND when we're due back from commercial.

Andrew Garcia

Ugh. This guy, I can't even deal with. He has a neck tattoo. A NECK TATTOO. Seriously, he's just the worst and he should have been canned ages ago.

Oh, and I think he was in a gang once or something. I don't know. When he's on, I go to the fridge for a snack, or if I'm not hungry I just stand there out of earshot until I'm sure enough time has passed so that he's not on my TV anymore.

Casey James

Were you a big fan of Jonny Lang back in 1997? Then you'll LOOOOVE Casey James. Because he's basically that, but with longer hair and even less of a personality.

Look, he plays the guitar really well; there's no denying that. But he sings like every band that's ever played Friday nights at Sherlock's Pub here in Arlington, TX (which I realize is a very location-specific reference to make, but I think you catch my drift) and that's just not going to cut it, on this show or as a life choice.

He has also been declared "hunky," but personally I think he looks like he smells like dirty hair.

Didi Benami

Didi has sung so differently every time she's performed, I'm starting to think she's actually a set of identical triplets who are playing an elaborate prank on America. She's just... I mean, she's not BAD, per se. She actually has her moments where it's like, "I see what you did there, and I approve." Her version of Fleetwood Mac's "Rhiannon" was top shelf all the way. But then she does this weird, vibrato thing where it's like she's singing into a fan, and that's where I think Didi totally loses most of us at home.

I feel bad because she seems like a nice person, but she also seems like the sort that would greatly benefit from a strong drink and the admonition to settle the fuck down.

"Big" Mike Lynche

He's roughly nine feet tall and he just became a dad. These are important facts... I mean, they must be, because they've been mentioned every time he's on screen since the beginning of this fiasco. The man has literally been defined by the fact that he's fucking massive... and he is; Ryan looks like one of the more useless (though well-groomed) hobbits next to him... and the fact that he fucked his wife nine months ago.

It's the same thing as Danny Gokey last year being all about his dead wife, but with a happier, less morbid slant.

Anyway, he sings like you'd expect a huge black guy to sing. He uses too much falsetto for my taste (and he's not great at it), but otherwise he's okay.

Siobhan Magnus

I love her a little bit, but only because she's monkey-house crazy. And I mean that in the most positive way possible, I really do. Siobhan (that's pronounced "Shu-VON, btw) has this vibe that reminds me of an art student starting a band with her roommate because they're bored on a Saturday, but then discovering that they're actually the best thing to come out of New York City since Le Tigre. She had a mohawk once... seriously, they showed a picture. It made me want to smash beer bottles and use the pieces to spell out "marry me."

She has a great voice, but she also does this really high-note screechy thing that was impressive once, still okay twice, and now that she's done it three times in a row, we're all kind of worried that that's all she's got. To us, the fans, she was our one shot at Adam Lambert-level weirdness. If she doesn't pull some amazing shit out of the Phantom Zone (or wherever she gets her ideas) pretty damn quick, she's going to be dunzo. America does not tolerate the merely strange. We want fabulousness too.

Crystal Bowersox



This is your next American Idol. Seriously. She's going to win. No one really even has a chance at this point and... given what we've seen thus far... none of the other contestants are even capable of rising to the challenge. It's been said several times by the judges that she's quite simply on another level than her competition... one that's much higher and just flat-out BETTER... and that statement could not be more true.

Her whole deal is that folksy, Melissa Ethridge, Janis and Alanis, lady guitar soul... which frankly I'm kind of over as a concept... but when Bowersox lays it down, it feels all fresh and new, like when you heard "Fast Car" for the first time. She's SO good, it's kind of retarded that we have to have ten more weeks of this show.

The anti-establismentarian in me loves, too, that she's totally a gross hippie, which is so not the product Idol usually tries to sell us. She has dreads and weird teeth and she carries around a sack of "lucky charms;" it's all so Austin, TX that I was thunderstruck to hear that she's from Ohio or some godforsaken place (no offense, Ohio). All of it wraps up nicely into an amazing package that deserves all the fame and fortune she gets off this show. I hope it's tons, because she's really the only one on the big stage keeping things awesome.

No joke, if there's an erosion of common sense and she gets sent home, I'm fucking done with this show. Fucking DONE. Until next year, of course.

The Health Care Bill

Because I care deeply about the world around me (HAHA, this IS fiction!), I stayed up all night reading the entire Health Care Reform Bill that passed through Congress last night. It was a lot to get through, and I dozed off a few times, and at one point I got distracted by that infomercial where they make a salad in 30 seconds just to shut up an old lady (it's the best thing ever) but... yeah... the whole bill... READ IT. There's some interesting stuff in there, so I thought I'd share what I learned with all of you. You, being the people out there too lazy to read government documents in your spare time. You're so lucky to have me, you know that, right? You're welcome I'm in your life.

(send money)

Finally, a Cure For AIDS!!!: The New Health Care Reform Bill

-Doctors are now required by law to let you use their stethoscopes to listen to your butt.

-All the pills in a given hospital will be laid out in a big bowl by the admittance desk. Go ahead and take what you need. (the blue ones make everything awesome for a little while!)

-If you want cancer because all your friends have cancer and you feel left out, the government will totally give you cancer now.

-You know that one disease where you bleed out of everywhere? Ebola? Man, that's gross. Haha, also diarrhea is gross!!!

-This is really more of a side benefit, but the passing of the Health Care bill combined with the powers of Facebook really helps you figure out who exactly on your Friends List is a right-wing lunatic. Unfriending them means you're a Socialist, but it's the price you pay for not wanting to firebomb your high school every time you log on to check your squash growth on Farmville.

-Heart surgeries are now 2-for-1 with a coupon from the Penny Saver.

-All cast members of ER are now licensed to practice medicine. All cast members of Grey's Anatomy are gaywads.

-There's a part in here that says the Government gets to keep our babies. Hm... guys... we probably should have read all of this thing BEFORE we got it passed...

-Can't find where it's mentioned specifically, but I assume this means that weed is now legal.

-Free cotton swabs for everybody!!!

One of these days I'll post something more substantial, but for now...

Finally, soap you can fuck. This is quite possibly the saddest product I've ever seen. It's even worse than eating a "personal-sized" pizza (which means "this pizza will not fill the lonely hole inside you, but it does come with a variety of toppings!"). It says it's fun for couples, but no couple is going to use this, ever. When you're with someone, you don't really care if your dick smells. I mean, you DO, obviously, but it's not to the point where you buy special-shaped soaps to really get in there and get that fucker sparkling and new.

You know what the Weener Kleener is like? It's like eating in a restaurant by yourself and knowing that the waitress is being overly friendly because her heart is breaking for you and you've got food on your face but no one there to tell you about it so you're walking around like a mustard-stained freak, bumming out the world. It's EXACTLY like that, but way more creepy because it's also about sex toys and having "private time" in the shower. Buying the Weener Kleener should be automatic grounds for having your name put on a sex offender watchlist.

Jesus Christ Chair, this makes me uncomfortable. If I was over at a friend's and saw one of these in the soap dish, I would stab him to death while sobbing and then I'd burn his house to the ground. The jury would be like, "WHY?" and I'd just say, "Weener Kleener" and they'd be like, "Oh, gotcha, he's free to go and he's a HERO!!!"

Ugh. Soapfuckers. Wrong, wrong, and again, wrong.

NOTE: Sorry I shared this with you and now you're thinking about slitting your wrists. I'm sorry about that. Don't do it. There's still hope. I don't know where it is anymore... not after the Weener Kleener... but I'm sure it's somewhere. Let's find it together.

The Jesus Chair

"Remember when there was only one set of footprints? It's because you were sitting on me, motherfucker! Get off your lord and savior, fat ass!"

There are now two people in this world that I have to meet: The person that made this chair, and the person that bought it. And make no mistake, I intend to punch both of them in the balls. Because... seriously... who looks at Jesus and thinks furniture? And who then looks at Jesus-based furniture and thinks, "Ya know, my living room DOES need a Texas Chainsaw-style example of my crazy beliefs to creep out my friends and make my family consider taking away my credit cards!"

Stuff like this makes me want to sneak onto a space shuttle disguised as a very large package of freeze-dried ice cream and seek out life on other planets. We're fucked as a people. But you CAN sit on Jesus if you want. So there's that.

Help ZFS! Get Its Groove Back

Oh yeah, I have a blog. I keep forgetting. It's not that I don't love you or love blogging or have a deep, personal relationship with the Internet (that involves a lot of tongue-kissing) because I do... it's just that... I don't know. Nothing ever seems to HAPPEN anymore. I can't find things to write about because the only things that happen to me are as follows:

-I go to work and either it's really boring, or I deal with hateful customers whom are lucky their food isn't mostly my pubes.

-I go to school and... this semester anyway... do really poorly.

-I drink myself into oblivion like a star imploding in on itself (drunkenly).

And it's kind of just an endless cycle that don't stop, won't stop.

SO... here's an idea that may or may not work. I'm going to turn the creative process over to YOU, the reader. Give me something to work with... a topic, a picture, an idea you'd like to see fleshed out. I'll pick a few and I'll... you know... do something with them. Something WRITERLY! If you like the way I write about stuff (and I gather that a few of you do), then help a brother out. Kick-start the brain flow!!! Because seriously, I got nothing right now!!!

Please help, won't you?