American Idol 04/05/06 - Mandiva with a "V"!

Welcome friends to the night after Country Music. A night that laid waste to our collective psyche. In fact my psyche started drinking, packed up its things, took the dog and left me...via the tractor. That I don't own. Man, the neighbors are going to be pissed. It took the wrong dog.
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Not amazing, we get a visit from Kuntry Legend (and restauranteur) Kenny Rogers Roasters. Why is it that almost every iconic guest artist that hosts American Idol has to get all contemporary on us with a new song that is a million times awful and ultimately lulls us to sleep?
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"Well Michael, because they are trying to sell albums...did I leave my toothbrush?"
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Shut up psyche!...I put it in a Target bag along with your Lyle Lovett tapes. Why couldn't Kenny Rogers have just come on and sang "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town" or "Islands in the Stream?" You just aren't relevant anymore Kenny, no matter how hard you try. Oh, and by the way, if you are over 30 years old, you need to stop wearing necklaces, puka shell, choker or otherwise.
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In the audience, I have seen death warmed over and it is Travis Tritt.
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The Ford Fakemmercial
Tonight's product placement add with character is more like an expose into the car manufacturing industry much like Supersize Me or Thank You For Smoking are exposes into the fast food and tobacco industries. Sung mamby pambily to "Just one Look," this expose isn't light on mixing metaphors. See, it appears that to save money, what Ford does is take crappy cars and scrunch them all together into new cars. Voila! The American car! To help sell their drama much in the same way that Hollywood bids for cheap publicity, they throw Lindsey Lohan into the mix. Lindsey played by Kellie Pickler in this case. Either way, I'm sticking to German engineering after watching this. Yeah, I know....boooo for me. I should feel so guilty after Branson night and all but then again my conscious is cheatin' with my psyche...that ran away and left me here all alone. I searched the world over and thought I found true love, you met another and pfffft - you were gone! Ha! That never gets old!
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FYI...Next week is the music of Ryan Secrets...appropriately entitled Queen! We must have enough time tonight to spare as they show us a great deal of what has already been filmed for next week. Man, that Idol gig is just chock full of hurry up and wait.
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The Eliminations
Gaaaaaah! It's the 3 groups of 3 thing again! When there are 3 groups of 3, one group of which has the lowest numbers. Tonight it is presented as a novel thing to do but we see it every year. Of course they can only do this when they have 9 contestants. It's as numerologically cool as when the date was 01:02:03 04/05/06 this morning. If you understood that then you spend waaay too much time on the internet...like me!
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The three groups are:
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Group 1 (Let's call them...Ellie-phant)
Elliott, Paris, Mandisa
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Group 2 (hmmm, how about....Kiss)
Kellie, Taylor, Chris
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Group 3 (The Real Losers)
Ace, Bucky, Katherine
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In an upset of the obvious, it's Mandisa, Elliott and Paris who are in the bottom three and none of which who have been there before. As much as I love the Group 3 pairings, there was no way that Bucky was going to leave us after closing the show on a night that featured Kenny Rogers, vests and a song about teen prostitution. It does really shock me that Bucky has stayed in the game this long. I think it was about this time last year that we were saying smell 'ya later to pig nosed Scott Savol, who was just about as savory.
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Mandisa is shown her long vid. From her humble beginnings as an unknown shapeless mass to her meteoric rise as the next Halloween costume for most every gay man into American Idol, Mandiesel keeps her faith and stays true to herself by closing the show with a shout-out to all of her fans. "Bless you in the name of Jesus!"