Four reasons to love Sanjaya

Sanjaya has been getting a lot of flack lately, merely because he is wining a talent competition and happens to be less talented than the competition. Here's why we should stop whining about his lack of talent and the pointlessness of American Idol:

1. It irritates the heck out of Simon to see and hear Sanjaya perform each week.

2. I think he knows he sucks, yet he gets up there every week and sings his heart out. You gotta admire that kind of self-awareness and self-confidence.

3. Sanjaya is doing a lot for the feminist movement. It used to be that women just wasted hours of their time working on and fretting about their hair. Now hair is becoming an equal-opportunity distraction.

4. It makes you re-think the ideal of democracy. When you really think about it, do you want the same people voting for Sanjaya to also elect the people running our country? Why do we wish this fate on Iraq?

My Tip for American Idols

Today I found myself at the chapel service without a program or a hymnal. As many potential American Idols found out last week, it's hard to sing when you don't know the words. And as a faculty member, I'm supposed to be setting a good example for these young people. Ooops. Well, luckily I had a couple of years experience of faking singing in the church choir.

I wasn't always so adept at faking. One of my first performances was on Christmas Eve, and I was terrified that I couldn't sing one of the hymns. I suppose I should have been more concerned about fact that I was seldom hitting the high notes in any of the songs, but as a budding writer the lyrics seemed most important. And one of the hymns was entirely in Latin.

Trying to learn the Latin lyrics to this hymn totally freaked me out. In fact, Latin still freaks me out. I try not to cringe every time I have to botch the pronunciation of a Latin name for a plant or animal while teaching biology. (I'll let you in on the secret to Latin for biology teachers- act confident. It's not like anyone is going to correct you.)

My dear Auntie taught me a similar lesson- the secret to Latin for choir girls- as we drove to that Christmas Eve service many years ago.

"Just sing 'vacuum cleaner' through the entire song, " she advised. "I heard once that the phrase 'vacuum cleaner' requires all the possible mouth movements in the English language, so it will look convincing."

Thanks Auntie!

Today, I remembered your advice and belted out many verses of "vacuum cleaner" to the tune of Hymn #213.

Carrot stains on your toes?

When I took her to the doctor last month, he asked me if she was sucking her toes yet. Perhaps this is an important developmental milestone, or perhaps he was just making conversation. Anyway, my baby managed to put her foot in her mouth today, and while eating carrots no less. Time to get out the Shout refill...

Hacking American Idol

At first, I could not believe that certain people who sing way better than me, yet way worse than AJ, Rudy, and Leslie, made the cut yet again this week on American Idol. Then I figured out how Antonella and Sanyaya did it.

Antonella's family hired the employees of 3,453 major call centers in India to vote in their off hours. Meanwhile, Sanyaya's best friend is an accomplished hacker and changed the call records. There can be no other explanation.