A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

TWO GIRLS FOR EVERY BOY: Wise choice by Idol to shorten up the auditions this year, because wow, do they ever run together. It's like one three-week-long run of melisma sung by every destitute blind orphan who ever shopped at American Apparel.

So after seven hours of audition footage (watched in approximately three hours of real time, because when a guy walks out in an iPod costume you know you can skip the next three minutes), there are maybe eight or ten I can remember, almost all of them women. Sure, I remember the blind guy because he was inspiring (because he sang without his piano! Not because he's blind!), because he was memorably dull, because his A&F-model brother was too much of a dick to teach him how to use conditioner, and because Seacrest tried to high-five him. And I remember the Osmond because he was an Osmond, was memorably dull, and apparently is one of 13 kids of the -- well, I'll call him the high-strung Osmond. Is that euphemistic enough? If those two get through to the finals, watch them split the Archuleta's moms-and-tweens demo.

Meanwhile, the women were a lot more memorable. I don't give the pixie orphan much of a shot, but the single mom Carmen Kass doppelganger with the one-sleeve tattoo and the Jolie Holland-meets-Tori Amos delivery made the kind of noises you don't usually hear on this show. And I remember not being irritated by the auditions of the ringer who used to be signed to A&M, the sorority girl who they made come back to sing in makeup, the South Asian single mom who they compared to Amy Winehouse (without all the open sores and racism), the teen with the huge smile and crippling poverty, and the one punky woman who had to quit her all-girl band (which, per her MySpace, according to some site I read, included two guys). And while the women who sing thoughtful versions of religious songs always put me to sleep and get the fast-forward treatment during the season, I'll accept that the nine-foot-tall girl from Samoa had a pretty good voice.

Now I'm looking forward to Hollywood week, because there's nothing like people who don't know each other staying up all night to arrange a capella manglings of trashy '80s pop. And I mean that in a good way.