A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

YOUR TOP 20: With KCosmo off preparing for her confirmation hearing, I dashed off a quick cheater's guide to SYTYCD's new top 21 and then some:

• New Permanent Judge Adam Shankman: Yay, enthusiasm without shrieking.
• Open Invitation to Paula Abdul: Boo, incoherence.
• Absent Contestant Paula von Oeffen: Yay, absence; boo malcontentedness. Do not invite her back next season, please.
• Dropout Billy Bell: Left the show because of illness. Shankman's heart is a lonely hunter.
• Replacement Brandon Dumlao: A hip-hopper with no pimpage at all. BuddyTV just has a picture of Russell Ferguson next to his name. When you can't tell the crew-cutted Filipino from the black guy with dredlocks, you need to get out of the cul-de-sac more often.
• Russell Ferguson: Krumper with suspicious flexibility and ability to point toes. The stylists don't seem to know what to do with his dreds.
• Bianca Revels, Phillip Atmore, Peter Sabasino: They've got feet. Feet can dance. Do you want to see them dance? You do? All right, then they will dance for you. It would be funny, and tap-appropriate, if every time Atmore pulled a face either Revels or Sabasino yanked him off the stage with a cane.
• Pauline Mata: The Nancy Kerrigan of dance.
• Nathan Trasoros: He looks a little like my brother, which goes a long way. I can't help but think he's manipulating the judges with his aw-shucksness and his rosy cheeks.
• Kathryn McCormick: I cannot imagine a result from week to week -- safe, bottom three, elimination -- that will not cause her to cry. A digression: if you have the same reaction to every event, then what's the point of cultivating different experiences? I hasten to add that hers is a face made for TV.
• Channing Cooke, Kevin Huntley: She looks like Veronica Mars; when he smiles he's a dead ringer for Tupac. I wish they had paired them up so that she could solve his murder.
• Ashleigh and Ryan Di Lello. Ashleigh has a misspelled name, orange skin, and pink lipstick; she pulls giant faces with her giant face. Nigel will not stop attributing his own love of Ryan's arms to the nearest woman.
• Noelle Marsh and Mollee Gray. BFFs whose bond was forged over a surfeit of Ls. Gray was the star of Vegas Week, the TV producer's ideal of the sassy teen dance prodigy. Marsh was introduced in the cut-down episode as Gray's sidekick, a la Single White Female. I guess the way I would describe the differences between these two is that Gray is Cheer Camp and Marsh is Cheer Camp Instructor.
• Ariana DuBose, Ellenore Scott, Jakob Karr, Victor Smalley: So little pimpage here. Smalley seems dumb as a box of hammers.
• Karen Hauer: The Latin dancer not named Di Lello. That three-person Latin dance featuring a husband, a wife, and Hauer was excellently awkward. You could almost see Ryan saying "I will now dry hump Karen perfunctorily from a safe distance before I return to my angry-looking wife." And Hauer was like, "well, I'm going to gyrate out here by myself for a while, so when you get a chance, don't forget to drop by and rub the palms of your hands suggestively down my sides."
• Legacy Perez: I love his solos, but he really sucked all through Vegas Week, both in choreography and in attitude. I didn't see who he partnered with, but I'm guessing that when she made her ticket to LA, she didn't cancel her subscriptions.