"Next to the SEX PISTOLS rock and roll and that hall of fame is a piss stain."

The Sex Pistols decline to show up for their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Frame. "Were (sic) not your monkey and so what?" Entirely fitting. And shouldn't The Sex Pistols be entirely fitting?

Goodbye to Don Knotts.

Everyone loved the brilliant comic actor Don Knotts. He was 81.

As the bug-eyed deputy to Griffith, Knotts carried in his shirt pocket the one bullet he was allowed after shooting himself in the foot. The constant fumbling, a recurring sight gag, was typical of his self-deprecating humor.

Knotts, whose shy, soft-spoken manner was unlike his high-strung characters, once said he was most proud of the Fife character and doesn't mind being remembered that way.

His favorite episodes, he said, were "The Pickle Story," where Aunt Bea makes pickles no one can eat, and "Barney and the Choir," where no one can stop him from singing.

"I can't sing. It makes me sad that I can't sing or dance well enough to be in a musical, but I'm just not talented in that way," he lamented. "It's one of my weaknesses."

More here:

In Knotts' hands, Fife was a fully realized stooge, a hick-town Don Quixote who imagined himself braver, more sophisticated and more competent than he actually was. His utter lack of self-control led him into desperate jams that usually culminated with Fife at the end of his rope, bug-eyed and panting with anxiety. Sheriff Taylor allowed his deputy to carry just one bullet, which he was obliged to keep separate from his service revolver due to past trigger mishaps.

Asked how he developed his most famous character, Knotts replied in a 2000 interview: "Mainly, I thought of Barney as a kid. You can always look into the faces of kids and see what they're thinking, if they're happy or sad. That's what I tried to do with Barney. It's very identifiable."...

[T]he actor did not recall his childhood fondly.

"I felt like a loser," he recalled in a 1976 interview with the Los Angeles Times. "I was unhappy, I think, most of the time. We were terribly poor and I hated my size."

Thanks for making us happy, so many times!

UPDATE: The NYT runs a correction: it's "Aunt Bee, not Bea."

Upstairs and downstairs, at the Madison Borders.

I was just wandering around Borders today, sipping a large latte, glancing at the occasional book. I was certainly not looking to buy any books, because, in fact, I was taking a break from my house clearing project which, in the last few days, has been mostly about getting rid of books.

Upstairs, three perfectly vibrant young boys, aged perhaps 5 to 9, were sprawled out in the middle of the aisle next to the children's books section. They were completely excited about a book called "The Visual Dictionary of Special Military Forces," which was full of pictures of military weaponry:

"I want that gun."

"That's only for the military."

"Is that a machine gun?"

"It's a submachine gun."

"I love them!"

I've never seen kids in a bookstore reading a book so enthusiastically. Later, I saw the boys leaving with their father, and one of them was clutching a big illustrated "Star Wars" book.

Downstairs, there's a stooped, grizzled man at the information desk looking for books on American Communism. The clerk says the computer search system is "very literal," so unless those words are in the title of the book, it's going to be difficult.

Did you find everything you were looking for?

"Project Jay" -- what's really going on here?

I finally got around to watching "Project Jay," the reality show that follows around Jay McCarroll, the Season 1 winner of the reality show "Project Runway." I was surprised to see that he played a little role on "The Comeback," that fiction show about a reality show that follows around Valerie Cherish, the star of the fictional fiction show "I'm It." He played the designer whose red dress Valerie Cherish (Lisa Kudrow) accidentally wears backwards to the Emmys.

Well, so, how real is "Project Jay" anyway? We see him getting a call from "Project Runway's" Heidi Klum asking him to make her a red dress to wear to the Emmys, and this sets off a flurry of activity with him rushing around trying to complete an assigned task that isn't really what he wants to do -- just like on "Project Runway." The task takes him out to Los Angeles, where he seeks out Kara Saun (from Season 1) to help him and where Heidi inflicts extra surprises on him to create tension: he didn't have her correct measurements (and expresses on-camera amazement at the immensity of her breasts), so he must remake the dress (with some weird old guy sent in to do the actual work), and then she rejects it anyway (making him cry). I smell phony, phony, phony.

And how about the scene where he just happens to be shopping at Mood (the fabric store incessantly featured on "Project Runway") and -- ooh, look! -- there's Austin Scarlett! (Another Season 1 contestant, in case you don't know.) Austin just happens to have a fashion show soon! What a coincidence! Then Jay goes to Austin's show, and Wendy is there. (If you don't know why that's ridiculous.... just get the Season 1 DVDs and get up to speed, please.)

Okay, all of this is just too absurdly set up! And how about the beginning, where he's back in rural Pennsylvania living with his parents and whining about how isolated he is? But the cameras are there making a reality show about him! Are we supposed to be idiots, or is this a spoof of a reality show?

Well, maybe the tip off is "The Comeback." We're supposed to laugh and enjoy our inside knowledge of the phoniness of reality shows. It's deliberately over-the-top phony, right?

I found this interview with Jay, which kind of hints at the real situation. He has some sort of contractual dispute with the "Project Runway" people, where I think maybe they all hate each other but still want to use each other. He refused the two main prizes he won, and, in the interview, says he can't talk about it but "use your imagination." Apparently, they wanted to own too much of him. I'll bet the Season 2 contracts lock the contestants into the deal beforehand.

TIME OUT NEW YORK: Who do you think will win the new season?

JM: I would love Santino to win. He’s edgy and I’m sick of this one-trick-pony thing that the judges keep telling him. That’s his style. That’s why Calvin Klein makes f**king tunics and why Betsey Johnson makes f**king floral chiffons. Mixing shit up is what he does. He’s arrogant as f**k and people will put him in his place along the way but, once again, he’s covering up for his insecurity. Look at him! He is a gigantic weirdo, six foot five, voice like the devil, looks like Lurch. Would I want to see more of Chloe? Probably not. Would I want to see more of Daniel V.? Probably not.

TONY: Will it be weird for you when there’s another winner?

JM: Let it move on. I’m trying to distance myself from the show and to establish Jay McCarroll. Am I supposed to be more thankful for the process? I feel like I’ve given so much. You saw ten weeks of me. I showed you my family, my collection, my thought process, I cried, I laughed. And I didn’t receive a penny.

Some very hard feelings there. We also learn that "Project Jay" was originally an 8 episode series, but that it got edited down to that one hour we saw. Okay, so I no longer think it was some "Comeback"-like spoof of a reality show. I think it was a crazy manifestation of contractual hostilities and commercial exploitation.

Oh, the things that can entertain us these days!

"I didn't feel my inner peace, I didn't feel my aura."

The WaPo is giving out its own Olympic medals. Example:

Best Johnny Weir Quotes

Gold: "I never felt comfortable in this building. I didn't feel my inner peace, I didn't feel my aura. Inside I was black" (after finishing a disappointing fifth in men's figure skating).

Silver: "I could very likely wake up and feel horrible, like Nick Nolte's mug shot" (before skating his long program).

Bronze: "I dragged myself out of bed, had my Starbucks, put on my self-tanner and went from there" (after winning the national title last month).

Oh, and I love this one:

Things We Still Don't Understand

Gold: Curling rules.

Silver: New figure-skating scoring system.

Bronze: The Lenovo ThinkPad commercial.

Yeah, what's with that commercial? And, with all that time NBC spent on skating, they should have figured out a perfectly brilliant way to teach the new scoring system and make us care about it.

More about that Federalist Society conference.

Rick Garnett was also at the "Rehnquist Legacy" conference on Thursday. Here's his post about it over on Prawfsblog. My post is here. Sorry for not mentioning Rick in my post! His talk, a personal reflection from the perspective of a former law clerk, got compressed into my point #1. This compression should not be taken to mean that I didn't enjoy meeting Rick. (I did!)

Rick writes:

No one asked Justice Scalia -- after his address in which he re-affirmed his view that original-meaning textualism is the best approach to constitutional interpretation -- about Professor Randy Barnett's charge that the Justice is a "faint-hearted originalist."

Doesn't Scalia call himself a "faint-hearted originalist"? I don't have my notes from the time Scalia gave a speech at the University of Wisconsin Law School, but I think he owned up to the term. I'll check the notes later.

Anyway, I'm not surprised that no one asked Scalia a challenging question. The Federalist Society provides a well-cushioned cocoon for him. Yet he does just great when confronted with a questioner who really hotly opposes him. You should have heard him tangle with some of my colleagues. It was quite cool. I prefer an event with more friction!

I mean, I see the point of The Federalist Society. It's a very effective political organization that supports and encourages young conservatives in the law. I appreciate the way it emboldens conservative students to express their opinions in the classroom. (When I went to law school, the classroom discussion was boringly one-sided.) But, intellectually, originalism, unchallenged, is tiresome.

That doesn't mean it's wrong. Maybe judges should work hard and selflessly at a job made boring by intellectual abstemiousness. But if they are going to talk about it to a nicely nodding group, well, for me, it's a strange environment.

"Suppose people picked hotels based on how intelligent they expected the other guests to be."

They'd be acting like someone who chooses to go to Harvard as an undergraduate, writes John Tierney -- TimesSelect link -- in his column about Lawrence Summers:

In most industries, a company would cater to customers paying $41,000 per year, but Harvard has been able to take its undergraduates for granted. (It was a radical innovation when Summers called attention to surveys measuring students' dissatisfaction.) Harvard has long known that the best students will keep coming, not for its classes but simply for its reputation. Smart students want to go where the other smart students go.

Tierney puts his finger on the real complaint against Summers:

He dared to suggest that professors teach survey courses geared to undergraduates' needs — an onerous idea to academics accustomed to teaching whatever's in their latest book....

Senior professors can shunt off the more tedious jobs, like teaching freshmen or grading papers, to low-caste graduate students or visiting lecturers. Or they just neglect the jobs that don't appeal to them....

You might expect the Harvard history department to devote a course or two to the American Revolution or the Constitution, but those topics are too mundane. Instead, there's a course on the diaries of ordinary citizens during the Revolution, and another, "American Revolutions," that considers the American and Haitian Revolutions as "a continuous sequence of radical challenges to established authority."

Summers had some allies in his reform efforts, especially in the professional schools. The professors in the business, law and medical schools know their schools' reputations depend on properly training students for jobs in the outside world. The opposition to Summers was concentrated among the college professors who aren't accustomed to being judged by anyone except fellow academics.

Interesting. I had a reporter call me for comments the other day when Summers resigned. But I really hadn't followed the Summers story, other than the very conspicuous controversy over what he said last year about women and science. I never went to Harvard, so I'm normally content to let the old institution -- which the NYT can't stop talking about -- stew in its own juices. The reporter had to prod me with questions about how professors behave, how perhaps they disregard the interests of students and seek only to teach highly specialized courses focused on their own scholarly interests and narrow perspectives. I found myself saying, repeatedly, but I'm in the law school. You couldn't run a law school like that!

Religion, free speech, books, quotes.

Andrew Sullivan has some nice photos from a rally in D.C. in support of Denmark and free speech. I like the H.L. Mencken quote on one of the placards: "The most curious social convention is that religious opinions should be respected." Checking that quote on the web, I found this website. Ooh, Mencken said a lot of crusty things about religion.

That reminds me. I spent some time hanging around at Half Price Books today while they counted up the value of the 15 or so shopping bags full of books and CDs and tapes that I lugged in. ($209!) Mostly, I just read the NYT and did the crossword, but then I finished all that and took to wandering about picking up books almost at random and reading a sentence or two, forming opinions about the quality of writers as quickly as possible. (One sentence from Jay McInerney's "Model Behavior" made me decide he was excruciatingly awful.)

One of the books I picked up was the Bhagavad Gita. I opened it at random -- this would be a good opportunity for God to communicate with me if He were so inclined -- and I get diet advice:

Foods dear to those in the mode of goodness increase the duration of life, purify one's existence and give strength, health, happiness and satisfaction. Such foods are juicy, fatty, wholesome, and pleasing to the heart.

Wow! Just like Dr. Atkins.

Sorry, no profundities here. Just go about your business. Have a cheeseburger or a porkburger or whatever juicy, fatty thing pleases your heart.

Twins rights.

Schools often have the policy of breaking up twins (and triplets, etc.), putting them in different classrooms. The schools think separating them will do them good, encouraging independence, but the other way to look at it is that their special bond is such that the separation causes a special anxiety. If there is some good and some bad in keeping them together and in separating them, who should make the final call, schools or parents? Should there be legislation to the parents the right to make this decision?

Many of [the] parents cite new research that challenges old assumptions. When Heather Beauchamp, an associate professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Potsdam, reviewed literature on twins three years ago, she found that opinions regarding the advantages of separating them were based on perception rather than data, of which there has been very little.

Since her review, two studies — one in the Netherlands and another, a joint project of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College in London and the University of Wisconsin, that compared 878 pairs of twins from ages 5 to 7 — found that twins separated early were observed to be more anxious and emotionally distressed than those who remained in the same class....

Nancy Segal, director of the Twins Studies Center at California State University, Fullerton, has been a proponent of this new research, writing letters on behalf of parents fighting for legislation on classroom choice.

"In our culture we appreciate uniqueness," Dr. Segal said, "and people wrongly equate twin closeness with a lack of individuality." The insistence on separating twins, she added, flies in the face of what psychologists know about friendship.

"There's research that suggests that when friends are in the same class, they're more exploratory, they cling to the teacher less," she said. "So if we're worried about individuality, why do we let best friends go to school together?"

Psychologists and educators on the other side of the debate maintain that multiples can present themselves as a de facto clique, upsetting the social dynamic of a classroom. It is not uncommon, for instance, for identical twins at a young age to speak in their own private language. It is also not unusual for one twin to act as an ambassador for the pair.

"What we find a lot with twins," said Sandra Bridges, principal of Public School 234 in Manhattan, which has 10 sets of twins, "is that one is generally more verbally dominant; one will do the talking for the other."

Some see the wish of mothers and fathers to keep twins together as an extension of the trend toward parental micromanagement. "They can, in essence, be trophy children," said Bonnie Maslin, a psychologist in Manhattan. "And parents of trophy children are unusually focused on outcomes and the belief that they can control them."

"A huge part of education is not just developing individual difference but learning to be part of a group," Dr. Maslin added.

Lots of conflicting interests here! More in the article too. Parents can ask for too much, and trumping the teachers' judgment with legislation may be overkill. Why don't schools just become more sensitive to the other side of the argument and listen to the parents' requests, consult with them, and then exercise enlightened discretion?

Arakawa... and that unitard!

Despite spending most of the day separated from my beloved internet, I stayed off all the news sites and even blogs and my own comments sections because I did not want to have the results of the women's skating competition ruined for me. But then I was so worn out from a long day, which included 3+ hours of driving and 5 hours in the immune enclave of The Federalist Society, that I kept nodding off during the skating and just wishing it would end already. Once I saw Sasha Cohen fall on her ass, I crashed and slept through the night. This morning, I watched Cohen and the rest on TiVo.

Congratulations to Shizuka Arakawa, who did what's gotten really hard to do under the new system of scoring: not fall on her ass.

When Sasha Cohen finished skating, one of the announcers said something like, "Other girls skate to 'Romeo and Juliet,' Sasha is Juliet." And a million people must have made wisecracks along the lines of: you remember the part in the play when Juliet falls on her ass.

The announcers say some of the most awkward things. For example, when Kimmie Meissner was skating, they started raving about how long her arms were and said, "Other skaters would give their eye teeth for those long arms." So I'm picturing young women with missing teeth and ultra-long arms. You don't want that!

But let's discuss the costumes! It was one thing for Irina Slutskaya to fall on her ass and not win -- or even equal the on-ass-falling Cohen, but quite another for the pantie end of her garish red and black skating dress to ride all the way up into the crack of her ass until it looked like a thong. And she still had to spin with one big leg clutched in the straight upright position and skate backward with the skirt fluttering up and the ass coming straight at us at high speed.

I praised Slutskaya for wearing a unitard for her short program, but, as we discussed in the comments, it was not a pretty enough unitard. The lower end of it flared out into mannish pantlegs, losing the leotard effect, and the top was too enclosed. A commenter apty compared the outfit to a wetsuit.

But last night, one of the skaters had an exemplary unitard. Sorry, I've forgotten her name, and I'd like to find a picture. It was black leotard with some nice red swirly, glittery decoration, with a lot of illusion fabric used to make it look very naked at the top and all down one side of the torso. This is the unitard that must lead us into the future of ladies' skating fashion!

ADDED: The photo of the unitard that will lead us:

"American Idol" -- the results.

How they fill out a whole hour is a big TV mystery. They're eliminating two girls and two guys.

First, it's Becky who must go. Here's what I said about her performance:

I find her intolerably phony. But she's doing "Because the Night." That's something. Let's listen. Yikes! She's doing Patti Smith, cornball style. She's gesticulating in a way that says: you must find me sexy. Patti would never do that!

She's still pretty. They ask her to sing her (losing!) song again, and she takes the mike and does a damned pageant speech about the opportunity "American Idol" has provided... blah blah. She sings. I block it out. Who cares? She lost! She was bad! She's still young and pretty. You'd be an idiot to feel sorry for Becky. Extra question: what's with wearing jeans under a knee-length dress?

Now, cut a guy. I'm hoping it's someone other than Bobby, just to make things interesting. But it is Bobby. And it should be. He talks a lot, all about how cool it was for him to make it to the final 24.

Now, they cut Stevie Scott, who really was weak last night. I like her, but, what the hell? She was never going to win.

And, now, they cut Patrick! Oh, he wasn't bad. That hurts a little. But let this be a warning: quit singing "Come to My Window."

Afraid?

Are you like me: afraid to click on anything, lest you read who won in women's skating? I guess this is your big chance to muck up the comments, because I'm afraid to look. Won't some mean bastard reveal the outcome? So you might as well go in there and denounce me about all manner of things. Because I'm not looking at anything until it's over!

At the Rehnquist conference.

I'm back from Milwaukee. I got there on time, despite some bad traffic and the fact that the ramp listed on my Mapquest instructions was closed and I didn't have street map in the car. Travel tip: don't do that.

Here are some notes on the Federalist Society-sponsored conference, "The Legacy of the Rehnquist Court."

1. There was plenty of talk about what a smart person, what a good person, what an interesting person, what a tennis-playing person, what a family-loving person, what a geography-loving person, what a time-limit-enforcing person, etc., etc., Chief Justice Rehnquist was. He exercised "remarkable command over the courtroom," per Solicitor General Paul Clement.

2. Solicitors General pretty much have to speak well of the Court, don't they? I love being a law professor.

3. Rehnquist "never lost his characteristics as a Wisconsinite." (Clement again.) Evidence: He liked the Badgers, he kept the courtroom open even when it snowed, and he rigidly enforced the time limits on oral argument.

4. If you want to read the key Rehnquist opinion of all time -- according to former Solicitor General Walter Dellinger -- it's the dissent in Fry.

5. According to former Solicitor General Theodore Olson, "the best opinion of the modern era" is Justice Scalia's dissenting opinion in Morrison v. Olson, and he wasn't just saying that because he was a party and only Scalia sided with him.

6. Dellinger recounts that a few days after the 9/11 attacks he was asked how it would change the way the Court would balance security and liberty, and he said the Court would tilt the balance more toward liberty security [what a slip!!], but it would nevertheless retain the judicial role in saying where the balance was.

7. Lawprof John O. McGinnis said the most important federalism case of the Rehnquist era was the school vouchers case.

8. I didn't take many notes while I was on the dais. Sorry! C-Span recorded the panels though, so maybe you can watch it sometime.

9. When Justice Scalia rose to give his speech after lunch, he got an instant and long standing ovation. He got another standing ovation when he finished. (By the way, a lot of free lunches were served!)

10. Scalia honored his "former leader" for achieving three important things: producing majority opinions (fewer than 10% of the cases lack a majority opinion), preserving the public's esteem for the Court (I'm impressed!), and seeing that all the Justices remained friends with each other (during the entire period, every Justice was always friends with every other Justice).

11. Per Scalia, we shouldn't refer to the eras of the Court by the names of the Chief Justices. It would be better to use the names of the Presidents, but then he wondered if John Roberts would be pleased to have the current Court called the Bush Court. I try to hear if he's really saying that he's sad that there's no Scalia Court.

12. Scalia sets out to refute the accusation that the Court is a "conservative activist" court. He says that if you calculate the average annual number of statutes invalidated by the Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist Courts, you'd find the numbers are, respectively, 1.44, 1.76, and 2.16; but that the Rehnquist Court was much less likely to strike down state laws. He says that state law is a more important reflection of democratic will than federal law. But that sounds conservative to me, for two reasons: 1. the preference for state law, and 2. the likelihood that many of these were cases where the Court decided against constitutional rights claims.

13. His best argument was that what really makes the Court look activist is that Congress is activist. He marvels at Congress's "sheer inventiveness" in thinking up new ways to test the limits of its power: it's "a legislative Thomas Edison." Cases that reveal this: Plaut, Boerne, Printz. He says that any Court would have to respond to these affronts to constitutional law.

13. A better test of activism is how often the Court overrules a case, he says, because it's here that the Court is never forced to act. And the Burger and Warren Courts overruled cases about twice as often as the Rehnquist Court.

14. Accusations of activism, he says, are a "thinly veiled" way of saying you don't like the outcome.

15. He thinks the notion that the Constitution's meaning evolves doesn't work because it's too undefinable -- unlike originalism, which is neutral, he says (in what I judge to be his least believable assertion). He likes that originalism is catching on across the whole spectrum of the Court and says: "Bad originalism is better than no originalism at all."

16. He gets stuck trying to remember the name of that Commerce Clause case last term or even what it was about. The audience cues him: Raich, medical marijuana. Strange to forget that.

17. He mispronounces the word "desuetude." He mispronounces it the same way I did for a long time: de-SUE-i-tude. It's a lawyerish thing -- isn't it? -- to fixate on "sue."

18. Thanks to the Federalist Society (and the Bradley Foundation) for hosting a nice event.

Conference..

Today is the Federalist Society conference, "The Legacy of the Rehnquist Court." I'm on the second panel, but I certainly don't want to miss the Solicitors General roundtable on the structural Constitution, which starts at 9. It's a bit of a drive to Milwaukee, so blogging will be light for now. Whether I'll have a chance to blog from the conference, I'm not sure. But I'll take notes and have something to say about it all at some point.

"Why the cutthroat thing?

Says Daniel Franco to Santino on the "Project Runway" reunion show. Santino: "It's just straight shit talking. There's a part of this competition that's like a basketball game. It's like: you suck... It didn't come from an evil place... I doesn't matter." Did Santino justify himself enough? Did he verbosely excuse enough bad behavior?

Anyway, great show. I mean, it was a relaxing interlude in the competition, but it was nice. I especially liked the montage of Andrae's expressiveness. And of all the singing, especially about Daniel -- he's straight! -- Franco, with the suggestion that he'll come back again for Season 3. Yeah, he should! We never quite get enough of DF.

"American Idol" -- the guys!

Oh, yeah, I am here, ready to blog the guys. Sorry, I had to talk on the telephone. Now, to the TiVo. Patrick Hall. "Come to My Window." Relaxed and elegant, I think. But Randy accuses him of being nervous, and he concedes it. Paula says something incoherent. Then we see a shot of a man and a woman in the audience. I assume these are his parents. But, oh my lord, the woman has the largest artificially inflated lips I have ever seen! I rewind and pause. I'm looking at them now. I'm shocked and appalled.... and yet, I cannot look away! David Radford. He's trying to be Frank Sinatra. And he's 17. "A Crazy Little Thing Called Love." He's a kid, acting the role of an adult. Is there something wrong with that? It's a crazy little thing. But I'm sympathetic. Is there some other way to become a man? Randy thinks it's phony and terrible: "This is like some kind of act." Paula feels the womanly feeling. We like him! Simon sees it as "a bit of a joke," but he thinks "the audience at home" -- my translation: women! -- will like him. Woozy and southern, it's Bucky Covington. We here in Wisconsin kinda like your first name. Ooh! He's the new Bo! He sings Skynyrd. But it's so cheesy and gutteral. I don't see how a guy can do this out in the bright lights, without a band all around him. Randy: "Cool." Paula: "You're growing. It's like a whole journey for you." Simon: "I like the fact that you're just very raw... Having said that..." Ryan: "This is a real guy right here." Will Makar. He's 16. I love this boy. Don't hurt him! He's singing a Jackson 5 song, "I Want You Back." Great song! Very karaoke. You feel the intense voice of Michael Jackson that is missing here. Randy: "I was like, yeah, all right." Paula: "You remind me of Bobby Brady. It was Bobby Brady." Simon: "Okay. The reality check.... Unfortunately, vocally, it was completely and utterly average." Can we accept a bald contestant? It's Sway (Jose Penala). He's singing the Earth, Wind and Fire song that his parents fell in love to. We see his parents grooving. It's all falsetto, horrifyingly so, then mellow, and I almost want to like him. Randy: "Dude!" Paula: "Amazing!" They like the falsetto. Simon: "We're really on a different page tonight. I thought it was a really pimpy..." Paula screams. Chris Daughtrey. He's bald too. They use the fire background for him, which is always bad luck. "Wanted, Dead or Alive." He belts it with a nice raspiness. Paula gives him a standing O. Randy: "Great recording voice." Paula: "I've been wowed by you from day one." Simon: "Now, I'm hearing somebody with potential." Ryan: "Simon's starting to go to the happy place." Kevin Corvais. He's 16. And nerdy. Really, really nerdy. Maybe this is what Karl Maulden looked like when he was a boy. Singing, he looks 5. We see his mother. I know exactly how she feels: an intense, deep joy. "I guess I'm down to my last cry." Randy: "You're such an honest, real kid." Paula: "You know how I feel about you: squish." His response: a Gomer smile and a readjustment of his glasses. Simon: "I apologize America. Kevin, I like you, but..." Gedeon McKinney. He announces the song, "Shout," in a weirdly theatrical way. "Come on now. Don't forget to say you will." Hey, he's great, with great pop feeling. "You've been good, better than I've been to myself." The way he sings that, I interpret the lyric in a way that I never did before. Randy: "Good.... I was absolutely entertained." Paula: "I totally was thrown for a loop." Simon: "It was as if I was watching the warm-up for the Chippendales." Elliot Yamin. I'm sorry. Beard without a mustache? No, no, no, no, no. Is that belt buckle an audio cassette? He admits he's karaoke, doing the Stevie Wonder song that the karaoke kids back home request. But he's clean and good. Still, he's the least attractive of the guys. And that's including Kevin! Randy: "Another hot one." Paula: "Effortless. You just have fun." Simon: "Potentially, you are the best male voalist we've ever had." Bobby Bennett. He's singing "Copa Cabana." No, it's not possible. No. Look away! Ace Young. He's singing "Father Figure." He likes George Michael. Apparently, this man sees something sacred in my eyes! I will be your father figure ≈ I will be your Constantine. Randy: "Star. And can sing." Paula: "All of the girls, and a lot of my guy friends too..." Simon: "Really, really good." And for last, they've saved Taylor Hicks. He's singing "Levon." Beautiful! "He calls his child Jesus, because he likes the name." Paula: "Everything just exudes from you." Paula's all passionate, professing her love. Randy chimes in: "There's never been anyone on the show in five years like you." Simon: "I said in the beginning.. that I didn't think you should make the finals. I was wrong." Can I go back to the lyrics? "Alvin Tostig has a son today." What's with that name? Tostig? My grandmother's maiden name was Tausig, so I always heard Tausig. But Tausig/Tostig -- it's such a specific name, in a song where Jesus is highlighted as a good name. What's with that? I've been wondering for decades! But back to generalities: The guys!