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American Idol: They Got Rid of Latoya?!

Music, Movies, TV Shows362 words2 minutes to read

First off, I don’t watch a lot of TV. The only show I even really care about is Alias. My wife watches Alias, 24, and American Idol.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve gotten more and more into American Idol. After the auditions (where we all saw William Hung for the first time), I watched the very first group perform, and Diana DeGarmo and Fantasia Barrino were part of that group. They make up two of the three finalists! I remember saying to my wife and her friend that these two would be in the final three or four, and I was right.

After the final 12 were chosen, I said “Fantasia is gonna win this competition.” I haven’t been proven wrong yet. However, one thing that bothers me is how America has voted this season. Instead of voting for the best singers/performers, America has been voting for the contestants that they feel bad for. John Stevens was the first one to stay way longer than he should have. He should have been voted of a solid month before he was. Sure, he seems nice, but that’s not the point. The point is to vote for the better ones, so the worse ones have to leave.

The same thing happened this week. Jasmine did horribly, and began to cry on National Television because she knew she did poorly. So what happened? The person who went last (Diana) was still fresh in everyone’s mind, so she got more votes. People felt bad for Jasmine, so they voted for her too — thinking that most people wouldn’t vote for her. What happened? Jasmine stayed, LaToya left.

Now, this might not have been too big of a deal, since I think LaToya would probably have left this upcoming week anyways, but it still sucks that the people watching American Idol — the ones who are voting — are voting so poorly. I think that they should cut it down to one vote per telephone. Thay way, Hawaiians (and anybody else) can’t “stuff the ballot box”.

Anyways, I really like Diana and Fantasia both, but if I had to pick one, I’d say “Go Fantasia!”

Ryan Parman

is an engineering manager with over 20 years of experience across software development, site reliability engineering, and security. He is the creator of SimplePie and AWS SDK for PHP, patented multifactor-authentication-as-a-service at WePay, defined much of the CI/CD and SRE disciplines at McGraw-Hill Education, and came up with the idea of “serverless, event-driven, responsive functions in the cloud” while at Amazon Web Services in 2010. Ryan's aptly-named blog, , is where he writes about ideas longer than . Ambivert. Curious. Not a coffee drinker.