American Idol Finale is, well, final

American Idol is over. And apparently my girl Kat McPhee never stood a chance. DialIdol has been gathering statistics all season, and apparently Taylor Hicks was pretty much the front-runner from day one. While the previous round was fairly close (if a 300,000 vote delta can be considered close), Hicks was able to pick up enough of the fans of Elliot Yamin to win the whole shebang.

For those not familiar with DialIdol, they have a "wardialer" that pounds the American Idol phone lines with votes, but in a rather clever twist, reports back on the number of times a busy signal is heard. The busy signals are a good indicator of how many people are voting for a particular contestant, and apparently DialIdol has had 87.5% accuracy in predicting the next person to be voted off. (Ayla Brown, Melissa McGhee, and Kevin Covais were the only "surprises", but even they were low-ranked.) Fox was so pissed about them that they tried to shut them down, but all they cold do was get them to stop using trademarked logos.

As for the finale itself, I could have done with a lot less of the insipid awards to talentless hacks, but then there wouldn't have been a finale at all!

I kid, I kid.

Seriously, I didn't need to be reminded of the people I desperately tried to avoid by skipping the preliminary rounds in the first place. Not to mention that you got a fleeting glimpse of just how bad the other contestants were as they were trotted out to fulfill contractual obligations. Yeah, I think I'll skip the tour, thankyouverymuch. In fact, everyone sounded off, especially Dionne Warwick. Actually, that was kind of the nice moment during the show, as some bonafide music stars came out to perform with the Idol contestants, my favorite being Kat getting to perform a duet with Meatloaf. Brilliant.

So I guess the only thing left now is to see if Hicks can outsell McPhee. He may have won the whole thing, but that's no guarantee of success, and with McPhee free to record on her own, she might end up all the better for it.