Well, that was more like it, no? After last week's horrifying — truly horrifying! — bloodbath eliminations, yesterday we saw three deserving singtestants shoved into the bottom three and the worst of the bunch was sent home.

I'm sure Lacey Brown is a perfectly nice person and all, but homegirl just did not have the chops to be among the Final 12 on America's most celebrated electoral process. Many brilliant scientists have gone mad trying to decipher just how the Idol voting really works, so I won't try to figure out why it was that Lacey and two deserving companions — Paige Miles and Whizzenpoof Spizzwinks — were in the bottom three this week and yet managed to squeak past three far more deserving contestants just seven days ago. But just know that it happened and that this is a good thing and hopefully things will progress in a similar fashion. It's not too late to save America!

Speaking of saving, they're bringing back the Judges' Save. Yeah, that old clam. The thing about the Judges' Save is that it's dumb. It's just plain dumb. And it's also kind of cruel to watch some never-gonna-be-rescued kid warble for their life while Simon and Randy and Ellen and that dung beetle pretend to seriously discuss whether or not they should keep her around. These people are judges on a reality show because they are not actors, so making them try to act once a week is an exercise in cruel futility. Mostly Simon just makes jokes and probably tells people little anecdotes about what Ryan did in the dressing rooms this morning, while Kara closes her eyes, squeezes them so so tight, and wishes that she was in the competition this year, she would do so well, just you see Mr. Fuller, just raise the age limit, just once, please Mr. Fuller?

So that was that. I'm sure that terrified legions of Teen Texterz will now circle the giggle-wagons around Whizzenpoof and he will be carried, Hercules-like, up to the golden thrones of Olympus, borne on the zitty backs of Mallory and all her friends. Or I don't know! Again, trying to find pattern or thread in American Idol voting is like searching for meaning in a Kara DioGuardi song. All you end up with is a bunch of mountains and stars and hopes and reaching and none of it makes much sense at all.

Your lesbian aunt Karen David Cook came back and sang yet another strangely dated ditty, so that was good. When I went to the Idols Live! concert in Worcester, MA two frittered-away summers ago, he was acting like he was Bono or something. Standing on railings and raising his hands in the air as if he controlled the whims and shrieks of the universe, not just those of a few hundred teen New Englanders and their about-to-shoot-themselves parents at the Worcester Centrum. (I was there strictly for research/ironic purposes, I promise you. Also: Jason Castroooooooooo.)

Anyway! Somebody named Orpheus or Orkin or something came out and screeched something at as for a while, so that was really unpleasant. And then with a great thudding and falling down the stairs came Ke$ha, stumbling like a bargain basement homemade drag Lady Gaga around the stage, yelling about various things and continuing to shill for the Jack Daniels corporation. Then people with giant TVs for heads came out and did a dance with her and if any parents were watching with their kids, they probably sighed and looked down at their daughter and her weird friend Mallory clasping their hands and swaying back and forth in delight and they felt the weary press of years and tastes and they thought about September girls and December boys, and somewhere up in the night sky a star fizzed and winked and the world was, as miraculously as ever, room enough for all of it.