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Last night, because this is Inspiration Week at Idol (what with the Idol Gives Back junk etc), the theme of the week was songs that inspire. Get ready for danger, Will Robinson!

Here they are, with hopefully brief comments from me:

Michael Johns – “Dream On”, Aerosmith: Didn’t see the performance, but saw the judges comments. Sounds like I didn’t miss much. Seeing his brief recap at the end of the show, sounds like I didn’t miss much.

Syesha Mercado – “I Believe”, Fantasia: The second week in a row of picking a big song, and the second week in a row of just missing the mark. A good performance, but deemed irrelevant because it doesn’t match the original. I’m starting to wonder about Syesha and how she talks herself up as being a wacky girl. I never see any of that. Maybe she needs to bring a bit of that to the stage?

Jason Castro – “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”, as performed by Israel “Iz” Ka’ono’i Kamakawiwo’ole: It’s rare that a performer on American Idol performs a song that I could see myself illegally downloading and having in my large library of songs so that it might pop up in shuffle mode once every three years. This was one of those performances. It was charming, as Jason always is, but this time there seemed to be something behind it, emotionally. The performance of the night, for me.

Krisy Lee Cook – “Anyway”, Martina McBride: Anyway, she’s still here. Good performance, but she has absolutely no stage presence.

David Cook – “Innocent”, Our Lady Peace: His worst performance to date. Not good at all. His previous weeks have given him enough credentials to allow him a bad night or two, so no worries this week. Bad performance, though.

Carly Smithson – “The Show Must Go On”, Queen: Didn’t like this at all. Despite your big voice, I think you might be in trouble this week.

David Archuleta – “Angels”, Robbie Williams: A good performance, solid and all that, but rather bland in the grand scheme of things. A great performance from anyone else, but from AI phenom Archuleta, we now except Wow! everytime. This wasn’t Wow. Second favourite performance of the night, though.

Brooke White – “You’ve Got A Friend”, Carol King: Not a very good performance, really. Is Brooke having an emotional crisis on stage? She seemed weirdly odd after the performance. What’s up with that?

My bottom three of the night: David Cook, Brooke White, Kristy Lee Cook

America’s bottom three as predicted by me: Carly Smithson, Brooke White, Michael Johns

Leaving, as predicted by me: Carly Smithson

Last night, because this is Inspiration Week at Idol (what with the Idol Gives Back junk etc), the theme of the week was songs that inspire. Get ready for danger, Will Robinson!

Here they are, with hopefully brief comments from me:

Michael Johns – “Dream On”, Aerosmith: Didn’t see the performance, but saw the judges comments. Sounds like I didn’t miss much. Seeing his brief recap at the end of the show, sounds like I didn’t miss much.

Syesha Mercado – “I Believe”, Fantasia: The second week in a row of picking a big song, and the second week in a row of just missing the mark. A good performance, but deemed irrelevant because it doesn’t match the original. I’m starting to wonder about Syesha and how she talks herself up as being a wacky girl. I never see any of that. Maybe she needs to bring a bit of that to the stage?

Jason Castro – “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”, as performed by Israel “Iz” Ka’ono’i Kamakawiwo’ole: It’s rare that a performer on American Idol performs a song that I could see myself illegally downloading and having in my large library of songs so that it might pop up in shuffle mode once every three years. This was one of those performances. It was charming, as Jason always is, but this time there seemed to be something behind it, emotionally. The performance of the night, for me.

Krisy Lee Cook – “Anyway”, Martina McBride: Anyway, she’s still here. Good performance, but she has absolutely no stage presence.

David Cook – “Innocent”, Our Lady Peace: His worst performance to date. Not good at all. His previous weeks have given him enough credentials to allow him a bad night or two, so no worries this week. Bad performance, though.

Carly Smithson – “The Show Must Go On”, Queen: Didn’t like this at all. Despite your big voice, I think you might be in trouble this week.

David Archuleta – “Angels”, Robbie Williams: A good performance, solid and all that, but rather bland in the grand scheme of things. A great performance from anyone else, but from AI phenom Archuleta, we now except Wow! everytime. This wasn’t Wow. Second favourite performance of the night, though.

Brooke White – “You’ve Got A Friend”, Carol King: Not a very good performance, really. Is Brooke having an emotional crisis on stage? She seemed weirdly odd after the performance. What’s up with that?

My bottom three of the night: David Cook, Brooke White, Kristy Lee Cook

America’s bottom three as predicted by me: Carly Smithson, Brooke White, Michael Johns

Leaving, as predicted by me: Carly Smithson

Inspired by some other site’s idea, I thought I’d look at one of the Sketch22 videos we’ve shot and present an image from its 22nd second. The video is Mr. Dressup’n’dresses (YouTube Link), and this is the image from the 22nd second:

This video contains many favourite memories for me, and this moment happens to be one of them. It’s taken during the theme song, and Mr. Dressup’n’dresses’ (Graham Putnam) focus is entirely on the little soap line between his fingers. The soap line breaks at the perfect moment to coincide with ‘ding’ in the theme music (stolen from Mr. Dressup, of course). The moment provided, no doubt, through Graham’s editing.
It’s really a lovely image. The rainbow looks almost like a hat, his hand forms a “c” which could represent all sorts of things.
Mr.Dressup’n’dresses is one of my favourite characters that I’ve come up with. I love how he lives in a totally effed-up universe and somehow has a que-sera-sera, non-judgmental sort of attitude. Would that more people in our universe adopt such an attitude. Would that, indeed.

Technorati Tags: sketch22, Mr.Dressup’n’dresses, video, YouTube

I’m amazed at how things happen sometimes. I mean, what were the circumstances that led to someone saying “Hmm, I bet if you slow down that old iMac commercial with Jeff Goldblum, it’d sound exactly as if he was a wasted boozey.”

So, that’s what someone did: Slowed down an old Jeff Golblum iMac commercial. And, yes, it sounds just like he’s hammered.

What kind of hammered? Well, let’s set a scene to better enjoy the video: Imagine a friend’s hosted a Christmas party. Jeff Goldblum happens to be there. It’s about 3:30 in the morning. Most of the party has ended, but there are still a few people hanging around in the living room. A couple of people are passed out on a chair and on the floor. Everyone is hammered but relaxed. A couple of joints have just been passed around and everyone has that inexplicable grin that won’t go away.
For some reason, the topic turns to the new iMac. Jeff Goldblum pipes up with his opinions on the iMac:
http://www.youtube.com/v/dQmK1CnwOUI&hl=en

This week, I’m gonna do my recap a bit differently. I’m going to review them, as the title implies, from best to worst, rather than in the order they performed. I am only doing this so that my “Dolly Parton has big tits” quasi-joke in the title makes sense.

The theme was Dolly Parton songs.

Best: Michael Johns singing It’s All Wrong, But It’s All Right: Yeah, I know. I’m surprised by this too. I’ve not really been a fan of Michael and kept waiting for him to do something other than perform poorly or perform well singing Queen. He’d been riding the coat-tails of his good looks and lead-singer posturing. Last night was the first time I saw him as being Michael Johns. His vocal was really, really strong, and he commanded the performance. Well done. Best of the night.

2nd Best: David Archuleta singing Smoky Mountain Memories: Like Randy said, David is back with this performance. Really good, but still a bit of careful measuredness to it. While the performance was very good, I’m finding that David is starting to bore me, and I think what it is is he’s a very safe performer. Yes, he nails the notes, and even takes risks in striving for trickier notes, but there’s something a bit boring about his whole package (that’s what she said). He always does seem to find the emotional connections to whatever he’s singing. That’s important. So, good performance, but watch out for becoming too safe and boring.

3rd Best: David Cook singing Little Sparrow: This is the first time I *liked* his performance. I’ve acknowledged some of them as being great performances, but I haven’t particularly enjoyed them. This one I dug. I liked him going for those falsetto notes. I liked him more for hitting them.

4th Best: Carly Smithson singing Here You Come Again: A really strong performance of this ballad. I disagree with Simon’s criticism. Actually, I found I disagreed a lot with Simon’s criticisms last night (he says he likes country, but he doesn’t). My only criticism of Carly’s performance was with the smiling (which she jokingly pointed out she made sure she did) through the song. The lyrics of the song don’t encourage smiling. Honestly, I only noticed a bit of smiling through the song, and it only slightly bugged me, but I mention it because she made a point of pointing it out.

5th Best: Syesha Mercado singing I Will Always Love You: Syesha came so close to having a capital G great performance. It started out really nice, soft and tender, and I had hopes. But she lost it when she went into the Whitney big notes. I’d have loved it if she kept it smaller and looked for other ways to convey the big emotion without the big notes. Because, you can’t beat Whitney on that song. You just can’t.

None of the rest of the performances I can consider “best” so I’ll countdown from least worst to worst.

4th Worst: Brooke White singing Jolene: It was okay, but mostly it was just boring. You need to bring more to the song, Brooke. And I’m still not digging your little interjections during judge’s comments.

3rd Worst: Kristy Lee Cook singing Coat of Many Colors: An okay country performance, but just too boring. You added nothing special to your performance. Just boring.

2nd Worst: Jason Castro singing Travelin’ Thru: I’ve fallen off the Castro Wagon. He really needs to dig deep and challenge himself to find the emotion within a song. He’s simply too casual in and cruising through his performances. There was one moment, near the end of his performance, where he actually looked like he was feeling it. We need much more of that, Jason. I’d like to like you again, but you gotta bring it brutha.

Worst: Ramiele Malubay singing Do I Ever Cross Your Mind?: No. No you don’t. Only when I use my mind to think who was the worst performer. Just a bland, boring, uninteresting, uninspired performance. Which is a bit of an improvement over many of your other performances.

Bottom Three should be Kristy Lee, Jason and Ramiele. Is it true Ramiele has never been bottom two? She deserves to go this week, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s Jason.

Actually, I have no idea what the fan base is for these people, so I wouldn’t be surprised if someone who doesn’t deserve to go (like Chikezie last week) does go, so watch out Michael Johns and Syesha.

Leaving: Ramiele

Technorati Tags: American Idol, Top 9, Recap

I watched the most of Tracey Ullman’s new HBO (??) show The State Of The Union. I always respected Ullman’s talent, but never really enjoyed her comedy. The same holds true for this show. She’s obviously very talented, but I just didn’t find the show that entertaining.

Basically, the premise of the show is we take a tour of a day in America. We travel to many various parts of America and get a glimpse of what’s happening. Many short scenes, and a full gamut of topics. Wherever we go, whomever we see, it’s Tracey playing the main character (sometimes all characters). We go from a news desk in middle America to a motel room in Texas to an apartment in Washington to an office in New York to a home in Beverly Hills.

As I say, Tracey plays all the main characters. Some are “nobodies”, like an any-woman hanging out clothes on a line, to “somebodies”, like Ariana Huffington. All the characters are very distinct, and very meticulously-crafted (this is the “respect her talent” part). It’s just that they’re not that funny (the “don’t enjoy her comedy” part) to me.

Maybe it’d be better if it wasn’t so “all Tracey all the time”?

Technorati Tags: Tracey Ullman, State of the Unrion, HBO

Yesterday, I returned to work from lunch, and I sensed “something was up”. I saw a gaggle of women kind of lurking in the main area of the first floor of the ATC, looking rather anticipatory. It was as if they were waiting for something, without trying to look like they were waiting for something.

As I passed them, I felt them looking at me; felt like they were trying to guess if I was part of whatever it was they were waiting for. An odd feeling. I thought I overheard one of them say to another, about me “…he’s going to the radio station”. She sounded as if this was an exciting proposition. It was then that I clued in to the possibility that maybe there was something happening at the radio station. Maybe someone famous was here.

The annual seal hunt always brings a number of celebrities (2 years ago it was Paul McCartney and Heather Mills-McCartney, back when they were civil to one another) to protest the cruel and inhuman slaughtering of cute baby seals. Earlier in the morning yesterday, there were unconfirmed reports (later confirmed as false) that Paris Hilton was on the Island, so it was possible somebody famous was in our midst.

I went up to the third floor offices of our radio stations (where I work) and when I came in the door, I saw two hip looking strangers with huge cameras, plus one of our news department people, and I think someone from our promotions department. As I walked past the production studio, where the hip people were converged, I glanced in and saw Corey Tremere interviewing someone. Didn’t get a good look at him, but heard him speaking with a British accent.

Rod, who I share an office with, didn’t know what was going on, so it remained a mystery. After the interview was over, and the group was making its way out of the offices, I took the opportunity to “have to go to the bathroom” and walked past them. A tall, pretty good-looking guy seemed to be the centre of attention, but I didn’t recognize him at all.

When I came back from the bathroom, they were all gone, and I heard the gaggle of women making excited noise on the first floor, so I assumed the group must have just emerged from the elevator down there.

Anyway, turns out it was this guy, here to protest the seal hunt:

Nigel Barker. Apparently he’s America’s Next Top Model’s Hottest judge.

Oh, and I came across a Facebook pic of the gaggle (if ever there was one) of women, who finally got to meet Mr. Barker:

Technorati Tags: America’s Next Top Model, Nigel Barker, Seal Hunt, PEI

Testing 1-2-3, Testing 1-2-3…

I’ve been using Google Docs quite a bit, lately. In fact, I do all of my personal writing within it. I’ve just noticed that there is an option to post to one’s blog from Google Docs. So that is what this post is about: seeing how it works. (usually, I use ScribeFire to compose my posts) (yes, I’m too lazy to hyperlink to to these things)

Here’s a picture of someone who is NOT too lazy, though. Moe Gorman.

I post that, only to see how inserting an image into a post looks on the blog page. And, now that I’m full of the “seeing how this works”, I am going to un-lazify myself and put in some hyperlinks: Here’s the link to Moe Gorman’s Myspace page. Here’s the link to the afore-mentions ScribeFire.

What else can I do?

There. Now to put this up on the ole blog.

I was pretty much bored by this week’s show. Here’s why:

Ramiele sang Heart’s “Alone”. I didn’t like it. I have yet to like a performance by her, although this one, admittedly, crept closer to likability. Not close enough, though. She’ll be bottom three.

Jason Castro sang Sting’s “Fragile”. Simon was right on when he said is was like a street busker performance. And right again when he said Jason needs to take it to a serious level. He’s pretty much just floating by, week after week. He needs to land one. He’ll be bottom three.

Syesha Mercado sang Stephanie Mills’ “If I Were Your Woman”. Didn’t like the song, but liked the performance of the song I didn’t like. Some nice big vocals, performed well-enough.

Chikezie sang Luther Vandross’ “If Only For One Night”. Some nice moments on a Vandross ballad, but overall, kinda flat. But I’m still liking Chikezie more and more each week.

Brooke White sang The Police’s “Every Breath You Take”. You’re losing me, Brooke. I didnt’ care for this arrangement. You sang the notes okay, but you seemed like you kind of lost any momentum you had when the orchestra came in to make the song bigger. I agree with whichever judge said it would have been better if it remained just you and your piano. Didn’t like the arrangement. At least you weren’t so much a chatterbox this week when getting judge’s criticism.

Michael Johns sang Queen’s “We Will Rock You / We Are The Champions”. No doubt about it, you nailed it, vocally. And you looked totally comfortable on stage. That’s good. What’s bad, though, is that you brought nothing new to the performance. In fact, you have yet to bring anything original (that’s good) to any performance you’ve done. So, in the end, this performance tells me you’d be great as a singer in the Queen musical, or in a Queen cover band. But there doesn’t seem to be much of interest that you’d bring to your own recordings.

Carly Smithson sang Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. Parts of it were really good, vocally, other parts (especially that last note) not so much. My problem with the performance was that it seemed to be too fast. Perhaps that was a problem with the amount of time you have to perform and to get enough of the song in you have to up the tempo, I don’t know. Still, a pretty good vocal, but still I find you a bit of a bland gal. I wish I didn’t.

David Archuleta sang John Farnham’s “You’re the Voice”. Don’t know the song. Didn’t care for your performance of it. You sang well enough, technically, but there seems to be something missing. Is it that you’re trying too hard? Maybe. Bad song choice and you just didn’t do anything special with it. Good vocally, but so what? We want you to wow us. You didn’t.

Kristy Lee Cook sang Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA”. She sang it well, but really, it’s just an anthem. Who can’t sing an anthem? The patriotic flavour of the song should help her get some good ole country boy votes, so she should be safe. I’ll guess she’s bottom three though.

David Cook sang Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”. Yeah, yeah, yeah, everyone goes on with how fantastic it was, the way you sang it and arranged it. How wonderfully inventive and original you are. That all may be true, but honestly, I cannot get past your raspy-rocker-voice vocals and how tired I am of that sound. I realize that’s more a problem of mine and not yours. But I find it really hard to appreciate your musicality when I cannot tolerate the sound of your voice.

Bottom three: Ramiele, Jason & Kristy Lee. Reserve bottom three is Chikezie.

To leave: Probably Ramiele, unless there’s some sort of Ramiele Voter League that I don’t know about.

Technorati Tags: American Idol, Top Ten