I don’t have much time motivation for taking new pictures during this period of transition, but there’s always time for a stupidly captioned kitty picture …

I know a lot of people don’t like this show for principle reasons (it’s “ruining” the music industry or whatever) but after finally seeing it last year, I’ve become an avid watcher of the show. I wouldn’t say I’m a huge fan, and I certainly don’t view it as an “undiscovered talent” show - it’s more akin to a slickly produced musical reality-TV show - but I definitely find it entertaining.

Anyway, the audition segment of the show is the “meanest” and obviously set up to be the “rubber neck at an accident” sort of section, where people who can’t sing but think they can are showcased for audience amusement, insults, and ratings. Once in a while there’s a segment where the American Idol wanna-be is not just amusingly entertaining or shockingly rude or whatever, but manages to catch the imagination or hearts of viewers. They may not be the next American Idol, but they’re endearing.

Renaldo Lapuz was that person this year. Too old to actually compete, the producers still let him through to “audition” for the judges for what I’m assuming was his potential-entertainment value, and he struck gold, so to speak. The images of the judges dancing around to Renaldo’s singing is memorable and had me LOL’ing. He even made Simon smile! As a result, the man has gotten a lot of attention both in the media and on sites like YouTube, where creative folks have taken his original composition song and turned it into various re-mixed music and videos. He has his own Official Fan Site, which showcases a lot of those fun videos, but my favorite vocal remix isn’t there. But it is here on YouTube.

GoGo Renaldo. Thanks for the smiles and here’s hoping all this attention gets you something.

Oh and … I hope that scruffy hunk Michael Johns isn’t voted off too quickly. He’s entertaining vocally, but mostly, he’s just hot. I think he has a chance of being in the Top3, maybe, but I don’t think he’ll actually win.

… albeit a short one. I wanted to briefly comment on couple things - not because it’s exciting or interesting, but because I can, and you the audience can’t do a thing to stop me! *cue evil laughter*

1 - If you don’t like spam-bots trying to add comment-spam to your blog entries, apparently you must not use the words flip and real estate in the same entry. For instance, now that I’ve used them in this post, I should get a bunch of bots trying to add their link-spam comments to this entry. Lucky for me, I foil such attempts with comment-moderation. Take that.

2 - We have bought a house. At least, that’s the theory. Could always fall apart in escrow somewhere. See how positive and optimistic I am? Seriously, I think it’s finally all over. Except for the packing part. I hate packing. Best of all, we managed to buy something in a fairly decent neighborhood. The house is smaller than the one we’ve been renting/living in for the past … uh … 14? years, but it does have 3 separate bedrooms. We’ll be all right. We’ll be very poor for a while, but all right.

Raindrops on a grass leaf. I rarely like the results of photos like these because of the depth-of-field issues in extreme macros, but this one came out ok. The grass is from our backyard - we have clumps of dried out old grass-weeds everywhere - and yes it was purple-ish in color to begin with.

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I admit it, I was a teeny-bopper once. I blame The Monkees and this blonde fella in the video below. I probably drove my older brother crazy playing such music at top volumes in my room. I also drove my brother nuts playing “My Sharona” but that’s another story.

The video is an old B&W clip from the Goldie Hawn show where Shaun sings “Do You Believe in Magic.” The sound quality is terrible but it’s a blast from the past.

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If only our necks were that flexible.
Another crop-instance of the little things you may notice within an otherwise trash-bin shot.