Day 1.131: Every vote counted?

Just over a week ago I decided that a joke was worth more than my pride and on a whiteboard in our office on which some key sporting events had appeared to add to the all-important squash ladder - the Premiership, the Stanley Cup and today's Champions League final- I added an event close to my own heart also occurring today.

Like the Stanley Cup entry, it was still not clear at the time who would compete in the final, but we learned a week ago that this would be the archetypal David vs Goliath David battle. I am talking of course about the American Idol Season 7 Finale. Like the upcoming presidential elections we did not get to vote in this - although to be fair that is only because we got the engaged tone every time we tried.

The competition this year was very high quality and rather than trimming out the bad singers (with a few exceptions) it was a process of waiting for the talented ones to choke, stumble, choose terrible songs or otherwise self-destruct. It started before the live shows (and before we started watching with any regularity) with Josiah Leming - who stayed up all night trying to decide how to throw-away his sure-fire pass to the next stage of the competition. When the live shows started, we loved David Cook and Brooke White, but Brooke in turn proved herself not cut out for the competition by psyching herself out week by week and producing more and more shaky performances. Sad though we were to lose her, it was a relief in some ways to think that she could finally relax.

In the end, the from-day-one favourite-to-win David Archuleta met the Exiles' favourite David Cook in the final. In most of these competitions the interesting ones turn out to be a bit lacking in talent and rightly (but disappointingly) fall by the wayside. This year - the interesting one won. Hooray! (also, Simon Cowell got it wrong - for once).

Even though my vote didn't help the winner - the 50 million others that he received helped him squeak through! Some of you heard it here first (maybe!).