I’ll be posting a recap from Wednesday night’s show soon. But in the meantime, a little bit of news and gossip.
The Top 24 left their homes today for Hollywood. There are two days of press, and then rehearsals. Taping begins on Saturday February 18th, with the guys. The first show will air Tuesday February 21st.
A sharp eyed reader, Taylor, has discovered non-Top44 Hollywood contestants whose domain names have been recently registered. Here is an incomplete list of names registered on February 6 through NetNames:
matthewbuckstein.com
melissalucas.com
meganzieger.com
laurawrightofficial.com
garetjohnsonofficial.com (thanks Kristen!)
tyraschwartzofficial.com
KendallPhillipsofficial.com
JayneSantayanaofficial.com
JenniferSieminski.com
TatianaWardofficial.com
Well, you get the idea.
So, last night I contacted Chris Cambler, from Camblerlivejournal. He works for the Internet registrar eNom, and using their data, managed to track down the 46/48 contestants whose names were registered on December 9th after the Hollywood Rounds. Since Chris is an expert on domain registrations, I was curious to know what HE thought was going on with the newly registered names. According to Chris, although the addresses for both sets of registrations are identical, they aren’t necessarily the same registrant. Apparently, the address is a NetNames Proxy address–used when a registrant wants to keep their actual address private.
So, anybody could have registered those names using the NetNames proxy address.
Some theories: After the contestants appeared on TV, some enterprising person thought to register them. Or, Idol decided they needed a few alternates. Or, Idol decided to register the Hollywood contestants, in case some of them became famous due to the TV exposure. At any rate, I don’t think it necessarily means that something happened within the ranks of the original Top 24, who were chosen mid-January.
More news on Tora, the Hollywood contestant who was cut by phone four days before the Hollywood rounds began. Here’s an interview she did with Fox News Tuscon where she talks about being cut right before Hollywood. Fox representatives claim she was dis-invited from the Hollywood Rounds because her name was flagged during a background check. According to folks who know Tora, when the producers cut her, they would not tell her why, and she can’t think of anything in her background that was not disclosed to the producers ahead of time.
I still maintain that if Tora was a contestant the producers were interested in, a spotty background check would not have mattered. The obvious question is why the Brittenum twins with their obvious problems got through, all the way to the Top 48 and Tora did not? And you’d think, once Tora was chosen to advance, the producers would have found problems fairly quickly after that. Things that make you go hmmmm….. Thanks to crazymary and spoilerai, who dropped the info.
Sidenote:
American Idol pwned the Grammys. The Grammy Telecast attracted the smallest audience in the 33 years that the event has been broadcast, attracting an average 17 million viewers. This number is smaller than 1995’s record-low audience of 17.3 million, according to Nielsen Media Research. It will be interesting to see how Idol performs when it competes for 5 nights against the Winter Olympics, which is taking place in Turin, Italy right now.
Look for a Hollywood Pt 1 recap very soon….
