Holy Camoly! Tim Urban is STILL SAFE!!

Wow, I am still in shock. The bottom three contestants were just as I expected, Katie Stevens, Didi Benami and "Teflon" Tim Urban. First Katie was sent back so I was thinking Tim Urban had finally seen his last performance. But no, it was the ever emotional Didi Benami who was saying good bye, and Tim Urban will remain to murder a Lennon/McCartney song next week. The VoteForTheWorst crowd must be ecstatic. The rest of America will have to suffer. That is three ladies gone in three weeks, with only three remaining in the competition. So much for the "year of the women" performers. After Siobhan Magnus performed at a less that wonderful level yesterday, the only lady still going strong is the consistently outstanding Ms. Crystal Bowersox. The only performer more consistent than Crystal has been Tim who is consistently bland and lifeless. How much longer will he last?

Checking the Overnight Statistics!

It is always amazing to see what numbers are coming out of DialIdol after each performance. You can definitely see whose fans are using their PC modems to mass vote the system. If you check the raw vote numbers for last night, for example, Siobhan Magnus actually received more votes than Crystal Bowersox (18K to about 16K), despite her not so stellar performance. Even more amazingly Tim Urban received almost as many votes as Lee Dewyze (both around 10,000 votes.) In terms of their performance Tim was not even close to performing at Lee's level. I sure hope that does not mean that Tim is staying around yet another week. In terms of total votes on DialIdol the lowest voted contestant was Big Mike with about 5,000 votes, who was definitely not the worst performance of the evening (although I do not personally like his singing as much as the judges do). How on earth did Tim receive twice as many votes as Big Mike? Is VoteForTheWorst that powerful? I even just checked USA Today's Idol Meter, and was surprised to see who they put up on top -- Big Mike tied with Lee Dewyze! Somehow he ended up with the same score as Lee and above Crystal. Go figure.

Next checking WhatNotToSing, their ratings has Lee on top as expected with a score of 89 with Crystal right behind him with an 81. One of my biggest surprises there are how much Siobhan fell so that her rating last night was a 28, the same as Didi and much lower than Katie at 44. On the other side is Andrew who was rated at a 65, almost as high as Casey with a 70. Just because Andrew was a lot better last night than he had been in the previous two weeks does not place him in the same league as Casey. At least he did not end up near Lee or Crystal which would have just been crazy.

Who to Vote for to get rid of Tim?

Hmmm, tonight's episode just ended so I thought I might actually vote this time to try to help someone worthy stay on the show. My favorites of the evening were Crystal and Lee, but they are definitely both very safe anyway. Instead I was curious if I could vote for someone so to help them stay on instead of Tim Urban who I find very unpleasant to watch perform. He is worse than the merely boring performers and makes watching an almost irritating experience. The problem is that the likely other two bottom performers are Didi and Katie, neither of which I actually enjoy watching either. I could vote for Siobhan for sympathy for her not so wonderful performance tonight, but she is most likely safe due to the popularity of her screeching (which I believe she does not need to perform so much to succeed.) I could vote for Big Mike since I thought his performance tonight was better than the one from last week although I do not understand why he performed behind the judges which seems unfair. Shouldn't all the performers be required to face the judges? I also do not understand the great praise for Andrew tonight. Although he did seem a lot more comfortable with his guitar again, and performed much better than previous weeks, I thought he was more prepared to play a bookstore or a coffee house instead of a concert. It was a great background music performance, but not a powerful "main event" type performance. I also thought Casey was loosening up a bit more which he definitely needed to do since he often seems too stiff when he performs. But as the judges all stated the best improvement tonight was definitely Lee who has always had a good voice, but this week is finally starting to not look like he is hiding from the IRS any more. There is something about his posture when he performs that seems a bit withdrawn. I think Big Mike has to give some of his "swaggerness" to both Lee and Casey so all three of them can have the proper amount of presence. Then there may actually be a male present who can actually compete with Crystal and Siobhan (who hopefully will improve again after tonight!).

My rankings and scores (just my personal opinion!):
1. Lee 9/10
2. Crystal 8/10
3. Casey 7.5/10
4. Mike 7/10
5. Aaron 6/10
6. Siobhan 5.5/10
7. Andrew 4/10
8. Didi 2.5/10
9. Katie 2/10
10. Tim 1/10

The Ultimate Idol Database site for Geeks

Since tomorrow night is another performance show I was Googling around for some more statistics on the current contestants since I'm a geeky numbers guy. I found the ultimate American Idol numbers site at WhatNotToSing.com. It looks like it has been around a while, but since I have never really watched much Idol before, it is new to me! They have compiled data on every performance from Season 1 to the present and tracked how highly they have all been rated on the many different polls, blogs and Idol review sites they can find. The results are quite interesting. One thing I have found interesting is that they have listed the top 40 best and worst rated performances of all time, and two of the best rated 40 and four of the worst rated 40 are already from Season 9, and they have only up to 5 performances rated for each of the current season contestants. So after only 5 weeks Season 9 already has 10% of the worst rated performances (from 4 different performers, Tim Urban, Haeley Vaughn, Paige Mills and Lacey Brown), and 5% of the top rated performances (both by Crystal Bowersox.) Interestingly, of the four contestants who rated so poorly only one remains -- the VotefortheWorst.com favorite himself, Tim Urban. He sure is a resilient fellow, and I am curious to see what he does this week. It is truly startling to imagine he will be going on tour this summer with the rest of the Idol contestants.

Interesting Poll response after the March 23 performance.

I am a voluntary member of the HCD Research survey panel that allows every person to vote for one person who should move onto the next round and they just sent the results from their survey of 7,397 people. This are the results from their poll:


Respondents were asked to pick the one contestant that they thought should advance to the next round of the competition:

Contestant	% that voted for contestant to move on
Crystal Bowersox	34.4
Siobhan Magnus	10.7
Katie Stevens	9.9
Casey James	8.2
Michael Lynche	6.7
Tim Urban	5.9
Lee Dewyze	5.6
Didi Benami	5.2
Andrew Garcia	4.8
Aaron Kelly	4.5
Paige Miles	4.0

So even though this properly predicted Paige would be eliminated, the other two from the "bottom three", Tim and Katie, were substantially higher on this poll than one would have expected. If the 7,397 people polled here are representative of the callers for the program, that means that callers for contestants like Aaron, Andrew and Didi must have called a lot more times than the ones who voted for Katie (who was surprisingly in third place on this poll over both Casey and Big Mike) or Tim (an even more surprising sixth over Lee and Didi.) The other solution would be that the 7,397 on this poll are not representative at all and include more Katie Stevens and Tim Urban fans than the general populace.


To register yourself for the weekly Idol Democracy studies go to: https://www.hcdsurveys.com/panel/join.cfm?source=idol2010.


The obvious poll to compare this to are the raw numbers from Dial Idol which are easy to convert to a similar percentage based table. They had a total of over 90,000 calls and busy signals, but it may actually be from a smaller sample of people, but perhaps more representative. Here are the results for this week including both the raw and percentile scores:

Contestant	Votes/Busy Signals	Percentage
Crystal Bowersox	16148	17.6%
Siobhan Magnus	13513	14.8%
Lee Dewyze	10385	11.3%
Casey James	9492	10.4%
Tim Urban	9331	10.2%
Aaron Kelly	8945	9.8%
Didi Benami	8700	9.5%
Mike Lynche	5982	6.5%
Katie Stevens	5597	6.1%
Andrew Garcia	2274	2.5%
Paige Miles	1213	1.3%

The results are quite difference here with Crystal still leading, but with her percentage of total votes substantially lower. Paige is still the unlucky eliminated contestant, but with an even lower percentage of total votes. In both these results Andrew was in the bottom three, but that was not the case on the show, although Dial Idol did predict Katie being the third from the bottom. Tim is even higher here in fifth place, which rather blows my mind. Could there possibly be that many VoteForTheWorst followers, or does he actually have that many fans? Yikes! Who would actually pay money to see him perform on stage or buy one of his recordings? Definitely not me.

My first post -- helping out the guitarists!

My first post here will be about a topic quite appropriate this season when there are a number of guitarists among the contestants, and there is also a lack of much stage presence. I noticed that Crystal did once walk up to the microphone carrying her guitar, so it must have had a wireless transmitter on it, but she still had to walk up to a stand and sing into a wireless mike placed in the mike stand. Why can the producers not allow contestants to wear a wireless headset microphone when they perform? If they want the guitar toting performers to interact with their audience more that is the obvious thing to do. The handheld microphones are obviously wireless and allow people to walk, dance and strut about stage, and allowing headset microphones would help out a lot of performances as well. I am thinking the vast majority of the contestants actually play guitar so it could benefit everybody.

My very own American Idol Blog!

Since everybody else blogs about American Idol, I thought I would do so too, just since I do not have much of a life and it is the top rated TV show on the air. This season there are only a couple interesting contestants, and plenty of mediocre ones. I even find a couple of the "Top 10" downright unwatchable. So instead of talking so much about them, I have some other topics to blab about, just to see if anyone will actually read this thing.