Bye Bye Sanjaya

Oh thank goodness. Ding dong Sanjaya is gone.

I thought that the bigger story of the night, though, was how Simon dealt with the fall out from his apparent reaction to Chris wishing the families at Virginia Tech well. If you didn't see it, Chris and Simon were arguing about singing nasaly, when Chris threw out a wish to those at Tech. When they shot back to Simon he was rolling his eyes. Apparently, Simon was actually reacting to what Paula said, and the producers did an amazing job of showing both Simon and Chris at the same time, split screen. They turned up the mics on the judges, and there's no question that Simon was right. Wow. I'm amazed at how quickly Idol was able to fix this, and the revelation that the judges aren't always hearing everything that goes on on stage. Very interesting.

So during the ridiculously drawn-out results show, we saw what was probably the best group number of the season, and that they did the same thing they did last year when they were down to seven - split them into two groups of three and make the last person choose which group to go with. This year's victim was Melinda, who wisely sat down in the center of the stage. Turns out that the bottom three was Blake, Lakisha, and Sanjaya, with Blake being sent back to safety. Not surprising at all. And finally, after so many long weeks, Sanjaya's going home.