Off-Topic - Paul Potts Wins Britain's Got Talent

Cell phone salesman Paul Potts today won Britain's Got Talent. Our previous Paul Potts coverage is here


Federico Fellini only dreamed of being that Fellini-esque.

Shane Offering Show Mixes

So You Think You Can Dance choreographer/judge Shane Sparks is offering dance mixes from the show at his MySpace page.

Apparently, Shane isn't down with those of us who spell it "shawty". Does spelling properly count against your street cred?

MySpace blogger Doug rants about Ricky's elimination and comes up with an interesting proposal:

I do realize that the judges get involved in the elimination for the first few weeks of the competition to try to "be fair" to the competitors. As they've said on the show, America has no idea what every member of the Top 20 can do yet, so they allow America to vote and then try to insert some "reason" into the process by eliminating one of the bottom 3 vote-getters. Their point being: "America doesn't know what a good dancer is or how good each of these dancers are in their respective genres, so we judges have to make the final decision for them." The easiest way around it so the judges NEVER have to be involved once public voting starts? Have the first night of performances after the Top 20 are chosen be solos in their respective dance styles so the audience can SEE their strengths. Have a second night of performances where they do what they already do (draw a style out of a hat and perform with a randomly chosen partner). THEN allow the public to vote. If the public is aware of what each dancer's strengths are and THEN sees them do something randomly chosen, they've been educated. They've been given the tools to make a better judgement. And then, the judges/producers can't manipulate.

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Ricky's dismissal inspires thoughts of gendered normativity and Althusser's essay on ideology in another blogger:

So, to get back to So You Think…?, the same sort of ideological reproduction is happening when we see uneven height in ballroom dance and have that deep twitch, that deeply seated sense that Ricky being shorter than Ashlee isn’t quite right. It doesn’t work. We have that sense without any education whatsoever in dance. We just feel it. Now, learning about dance forms might give us another language for that sense - and one that, in part I’d argue, is purely about an aesthetic form (partly politicized too, of course) - but the immediate feeling “that doesn’t look right” is really something different. If we reject that feeling later, well, it is still rejecting it “later.” Because ideology is so familiar to us, we don’t see ideology itself, but rather have a fairly uniform set of immediate responses to what we see and hear. Becoming aware of how intimate we are with ideology is the first step - the biggest one, really - to imagining different sorts of relation to the world.

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Our proposal: Let 'em all dance for 10 weeks, THEN let us vote.

Sabra Confirms: She's Not From Boise

BuddyTV reports that So You Think You Can Dance finalist Sabra Johnson has confirmed she is not from Boise Id.

The confusion regarding Johnson’s residential history was caused by an article posted on the Fox network’s KTRV website. Part of the article read:
“On (So You Think You Can Dance), Sabra Johnson is said to be from Utah. The fact is Utah is where she learned to dance, but her family moved to Boise a few years ago and now she's well on her way to proving a small town girl can perform along side the best in the country.”

Jimmy Arguello fights to get the truth out.

Alysa at RealityTVCalendar writes about why she loves So You Think You Can Dance:

If you have never seen it and believe that it's just another run-of-the-mill "reality" dance show, you are mistaken.

It's funny, heartwarming and most of all, very beautiful and artistic.

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Miss Von

This article about Sara von Gillern doesn't give us much new on season 3's b-girl, except for a couple of photos provided by her mom.

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Arizona Represents

The Arizona Republic talks to 2 Az. natives, Season 3 finalist Lauren Gottlieb, and recently eliminated Ricky Palomino.

Dancing is only one of Palomino's skills. He left Phoenix five years ago for New York to focus on a music career. So far, he has released two indie albums under the moniker Marcelino Palomino.

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You can listen to samples from one of Ricky's CDs here. There's still hope we'll find out what kind of strange he is.