I’m watching Idol again this year. Now that I’ve become a fan of the show, I’m kind of hooked.

I was going to do a rundown of this past week’s show, but didn’t take any notes, so I guess that’s out. Instead, I’ll just say that the fans got most of the picks right for who had to go. That Colton kid… he looks like a train wreck waiting to happen, actually. Good thing he’s gone, but I bet the Idol producers are nervous about him being the first one to commit suicide after being booted from the show.

The other guy to get booted in the first week of the “Top 24″ eliminations was Garrett. Definitely a good choice; I can’t believe they let him get as far as they did, except that he *does* have a nice voice. Thing is that he’s got zero star quality whatsoever.

As for the gals, they were part right and part wrong. Amy shouldn’t have been booted; not only does she have a decent voice, but to be honest she’s got a pretty nice rack. I would have kept her for at least another week, just to check her chest out see if she could do a better job picking and singing a song.

Joanne, on the other hand, was a good choice for elimination. This season, for whatever reason, the producers didn’t put through very many big black women singers with those awesome big soul voices. Last year, it was cool, because we had both Lakisha and Melinda make it into the Top 12, and they could both really SING. Of course, I’m a bit partial to the blues and soul, so maybe it’s not really racism that’s driving the producers; after all, they do have to try and find artists that are going to have a career.

They would have been totally lost as to what to do if Melinda had won last year (which she should have, if it were strictly a singing competition). I can’t imagine anyone under the age of 16 buying a record of hers.

Anyway, this season, no black chicks with big pipes. Joanne was a “plus sized model” and a pretty gal, but to be honest I didn’t think she was much of a singer compared with many on the show now or from seasons past. She did a bad job with her song and is now gone.

Who should get whacked next week? Well… from what I’ve seen in the previous shows to now, I’d knock out Luke and Chikeze. Luke looks really good in still photos, and that’s about all he’s got going for him; he’s got a rather high tenor voice and I don’t think he’s very good. Chikeze actually has kind of a cool voice at times, but the pressure is eating him up. Going to the big stage for the Top 12 would just kill him, and he doesn’t have much else to make him interesting (although he’s got kind of a cool/weird name).

For the gals, I’d boot Brooke and Kady. Brooke was born about 35 years too late; she’s like some kind of late 60’s, early 70’s hippie girl, in both her voice and whole persona. Blech. And Kady is one of those kinda-hot-for-now Texas bimbo girls that looks like in 15 years she’s going to weigh about 40 pounds more, have a rapidly growing alcohol problem, angry at her husband who’s cheating on her and one of those psycho moms who spikes her daughter’s cheerleading rivals cookies with rat poison.

Yeah, I don’t like her much. Can you tell?

Early favorites for this year: Michael, of course. He’s got an awesome Aussie accent, a hot wife, and can really sing. Syesha has looks and a really open, unaffected personality working for her, plus she’s got some pipes, too. I think they’re my favorites and also currently moving towards frontrunner status.

Don’t worry, I’ll return to the usual blend of life, politics and random musings.

This is a pretty cool little animation that someone FAR more creative than me worked up. (I saw it on Kevin Gilmore’s page- he’s a controller in Minnesota. Haven’t ever met him, but ATC is kind of a small family- only 15K of us nationally.) Sometimes I see something like this and wonder just how incredibly talented someone must be- while I could imagine writing that kind of story, to actually work it up as a little art work like that (it’s only a minute or three long) takes quite a gift.

One of the things I did to try and help keep the economy going in the past month was to buy a Tivo box.

I’d just had it with the crappy Comcast digital cable box. DVR (digital video recorder) capability was cool, but the menu system that Comcast went to several months ago blows chunks and the stupid box didn’t always record shows. What’s more, since the box also serves as the tuner for the TV, anything that isn’t working well limits your ability to watch plain old TV.

The Comcast box (made by Motorola) would sometimes have a delay- a BIG delay- from when you pushed a button on the remote to when something actually happened. So say you wanted to change channels; you hit the button, nothing happens, so you hit it again, and maybe even a third time, and then a few seconds later the channel changes… three times, and now you’re past where you wanted to be in the first place.

I got a Tivo HD unit and man, it freakin ROCKS. The setup was pretty easy- just take the old Comcast box to their retail outlet and turn it in, then they handed me a couple of little “Cable Cards”. The Cable Card plugs into the Tivo box; call up Comcast and they do some computer thingy at their end, and pow, you’ve got it working again. I did have a bit of trouble at first but after about ten or fifteen minutes on the phone with the Comcast person (most of that waiting for the thing to reboot) we got it working just fine.

Then I plugged the Tivo into the router in the living room so it has internet connectivity, and go through their signup process, and inside of about 30 minutes it was all up and running perfectly.

Tivo is interesting. It’s always on, and the system watches to see what you watch and like. On the remote, there’s a little red thumbs down button and a green thumbs up button. You hit those buttons while you’re watching shows or going through menus, and the system sees what you like and don’t like. You can give a show one, two, or three “thumbs” up or down, so junk like “Judge Judy” gets three thumbs down.

Just like the Comcast DVR, you can also program Tivo to record a show each time it’s on with the “Season Pass”. Of course, doing so means that Tivo figures you like that show or shows like it.

Now what’s cool is what Tivo DOES with that information. It sits there all day long and never turns off (there’s no on/off button for the Tivo), and it records shows that it thinks you might like based on your preferences so far.

So at any time, I can go to the Tivo and see what’s on it. For example, right now it’s got this week’s episodes of American Idol and that’s about it- I haven’t set up any other shows to be recorded yet. BUT in addition to that, it’s also got other shows that it’s been recording that it thinks I might like; for example, I gave “Law and Order” a thumbs up, so there’s usually at least a few re-runs from TNT or whatever that Tivo has recorded on its own and is holding for me.

This means that even if there’s nothing on, and you are “caught up” on your TV watching, the Tivo likely has something sitting there that you might want to kill some time and watch.

Beyond this, just the look and feel of the thing is fantastic. The menus are really easy to use, the thing is responsive and works, and… well, it’s just generally a kick-ass little box.

The cost isn’t that bad, either. Comcast was getting 15 bucks a month for their DVR box; Tivo runs at 11 bucks a month for a year pre-paid, plus they had a promotion for one month free. The Tivo HD unit itself ran 300, but to be honest the functionality of being able to watch TV normally alone was worth it… when you add in all the fancy stuff that Tivo does, it’s DEFINITELY worth it.

And if you pay for 3 years upfront, the cost drops to just over 8 bucks a month- a pretty screaming deal when you figure that by the end of that time, Comcast will likely be jacking you for 20 bucks a month or so just for their DVR box. You’d pay for the Tivo in your savings on your monthly bill pretty quickly at that rate.

On top of all THAT, the Tivo HD box offers “Tivo To Go”… and I haven’t even begun to mess around with that yet. With it, you can plug your laptop into the Tivo and then transfer recorded shows to it so you can watch them on the laptop when it works for you. I can’t wait to have enough time to give that a try, and my gf will really like it since she’s on the road a LOT and can take her shows (when new shows start coming out again, thanks to the resolution of the writer’s strike) with her.

There’s other gee-whizzy stuff that Tivo does that is uber-cool. You can name an actor you like and it’ll record anything it finds with them in it. You can name other stuff, like a director or genre, and it’ll snag those for you, too.

Oh yeah, you can rent movies with Tivo, too. You select what you want and the box downloads them through the internet connection, and then you have a certain amount of time to watch the movie (I haven’t tried it yet so I’m not sure of the specifics). You can even buy movies you really like, and it keeps track of what you bought so if you lose it for some reason, you can snag it again in the future.

And another thing (I sound like I’m making money on this, don’t I?) is that you can plug an external hard drive into your Tivo box and really increase your storage- and even though they only rate one drive for this right now, the pricing is about what you’d pay for an external hard drive anyway.

In other words… Tivo just completely and totally dominates. About the only thing it looks like it doesn’t do- yet- is offer movie rentals/purchases in HD. I think the problem there is mostly the time it’d take to download them; HD content needs a hell of a lot of bandwidth.

I bring all this up because the other day I was messing around online and was reading a bit about Apple’s answer to Tivo, the Apple TV. Frankly, for the price, I can’t figure out quite what Apple is thinking; their device lags SO far behind what you get with a Tivo that I can’t imagine anyone who is a careful shopper at all buying the Apple TV box. (It does physically look pretty cool, but that’s about it.)

I’ve got to run to work, so maybe more on this later… the end result? Dump your Comcast box and buy a Tivo.

Well, the campaign season is starting to really get rolling now. The other day, Michelle Obama said one of those things that candidates (or, in this case, their wives) probably regret as soon as the words leave their mouths.

Speaking in Milwaukee, Wisconsin today, would-be First Lady Michelle Obama said, “for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.”

Then in Madison, she said, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.”

John McCain is about 99% assured of being the Republican nominee, so while his campaign is officially still in a “primary” mode, the reality is that his rhetoric from her on out will be intended to play to the general population. So HIS wife came out with this statement:

A clip of the remarks ran on Fox TV, allowing McCain to flaunt her unwavering patriotism. “I am proud of my country,” she said at a rally in Wisconsin today. “I don’t know about you. If you heard those words earlier, I am very proud of my country.”

Later, when reporters tried to get her to be specific and say she was ragging on Ms Obama, she demurred and just said she was proud of her country.

You can expect to see a LOT of this if Obama is the nominee. Between him being black and him having a pretty strange (to most American ears) name (Barack Hussein Obama) and having (gasp) Muslims in his family background, the Republicans will jump on EVERY chance they can to suggest that he’s “not American” or not patriotic enough.

See, they can’t come out and bluntly say what they want; criticizing him for being black will go over like a fart in church. But to Republicans, a person’s patriotism is ALWAYS something they can play political games with.

It’ll be doubly bad since McCain is a genuine war hero, a true fighter pilot who flew combat missions (unlike George W Bush, who guarded Texas from attack when he wasn’t ditching his military service to snort coke and chase women) and was a prisoner of war, tortured and beaten.

But McCain’s wife should be careful. Michelle Obama has a much more impressive resume than Cindy McCain, and there’s more and more progressive/liberal folks who’re willing to take the gloves off and fight like Republicans do.

Check out this blog entry on the site DailyKos. A snippet:

Michelle Obama is proud of America too, but she’s not Republican, garden club, percocet munching ex-cheerleader like Cindy. And she doesn’t steal drugs from charitable organizations.

Michelle Obama is proud of America too, but she’s not Republican, garden club, percocet munching ex-cheerleader like Cindy. And she doesn’t steal drugs from charitable organizations.

Michelle never had a trust fund like Cindy and she grew up under humble circumstancesw on Chicago’s South Side. Her father was a pump operator and she managed to overcome her disadvantages as a working class black woman and attend Princeton then she graduated from Harvard Law School where she met Barack Obama. Michelle has paid enough dues to be far more credible than dozen stoned out Republican trophy wives when she tells you she is proud of America. America should be proud of Michelle Obama.

As Norwegians say… uffda! That’s a serious slam right there.