Tribune bloggers Jeanne DePaul and Susie Engle give their thoughts about “American Idol” from Feb. 17.

Susan Engle: I usually don’t get bored with American Idol until mid-April, when the Top 10 is being winnowed down, the “don’t have a chancers” get the boot and the endless commercial that is AI ramps into full gear.

Hollywood Week (or in this case, Hollywood 2 Weeks) is usually the best part of Idol. By that time, Idol has finished torturing us with endless bad auditions by reality fame whores and heartstring-tugging sob stories that make up the bulk of the audition shows. Hollywood Week is usually when they trot out the folks who can actually sing and give viewers a chance to start identifying favorites to follow.

Not this year. Hollywood Week has been an interminable string of judgetalk, torture-the-contestants images and Ryan Seacrestisms, interspersed with tiny little snippets of actual songs.

Let’s face it. American Idol has lost its mojo. It isn’t the loss of Paula. It’s not the addition of Kara (although she contains to suck in oh-so-many ways). It’s not the addition of Ellen DeGeneres, who I like and think is actually adding a certain something to the show. It’s like I’m skipping down the Yellow Brick Road and see Oz in the distance and hovering over the Emerald City is a giant Wizard pulling strings and manipulating everything. I always knew I was being manipulated before, but it was subtle enough I could enjoy the show anyway.

Not so, anymore. Not for me, at least.

Jeanne DePaul: I used to enjoy Hollywood week as the time when we’d leave the freaks behind and we’d finally get to see some good singers. But what producers are giving us now is so fragmented, we never get to see someone sing an entire song.

The groups used to be amazingly good, as the hopefuls would stay up all night, and come up with great harmonies and dance moves. Now we get to see so little of them, instead spending most of our time watching the judges shuffle through photos of the contestants.

The show isn’t about singing anymore. It’s more about the most interesting or saddest or most triumphant backstory. If you don’t have at least something to offer — like a dead parent or a handicapped sibling or you lost all your belongings in a horrible house fire or you suffer from a debilitating disease — forget about it.

You may have pipes like Aretha Franklin but you are not getting any Idol facetime.

Wednesday’s show was a good example and it’s what made it easy for the Olympics broadcast, fragmented and tape delayed as it is, to blow past Idol in the ratings. The entire show was watching hopeful after hopeful be called onto a stage to be tortured by the judges.

I don’t know who suffers more, us or them, but watching that coy dance the judges do where they draw out the drama of whether the Idol hopeful is in or out is nauseating. I wish they’d just post a list on the wall of who’s in, so we could spend more time listening and less time squirming in discomfort.

Remember Michael Johns from Season 8? His rendition of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” is still one of the best performances ever during Hollywood week. The way things are now, we’ll never see another like it. In fact, we’ll never even see another Hollywood week song.

Engle: With what little they’ve shown of the contestants, it’s hard to get a handle on who’s really good and who are sacrificial lambs chosen as “ringers” for the home audience to vote out.

My favorites, so far, are:

Crystal Bowersox, whose 30 seconds of “Natural Woman” wowed the judges. There’s lots of talk online about her bad teeth, which look as if they’ve been damaged by antibiotic use.

Haeley Vaughn, who we haven’t seen too much of during Hollywood Week, but who blew me away with her country-tinged vocals during the audition. It’s hard to tell if she can maintain the quality, or if she’s a one-audition wonder.

Siobhan Magnus, she of the cool name and big voice.

Not one of the guys has blown me away and the remainder of the women have underwhelmed as well. Guess we’ll find out next week.

DePaul: I’m glad you remember the names. I can only put one name with a face and that’s Siobhan Magnus, for some reason. Maybe it’s because her name and look is so distinctive. I like the way she sounds, and I like several others, including the one who played harmonica and guitar. There are a couple of the men who I think have what it takes, including the dark-haired guy with glasses and the guy with the long blond hair who took off his shirt during his audition.

At any rate, when the live shows start Tuesday (Feb. 23), we’ll finally get to see them sing an entire song and we can really judge for ourselves.

Not that I’ll ever vote or anything like that.

A school district in Pennsylvania is being sued for secretly spying on students via webcams on district-issued laptops.

Yeah, you read that right. They generously gave every student a laptop, to which they allegedly (secretly) added webcams and microphones, which could be activated remotely. Which they allegedly did. A school official then took photos and confronted a teenager about “inappropriate behavior at home.”

Holy expletive. How stupid can you be?

If it’s true, it’s more than an actionable offense. It’s time for some firings. More troubling to me, though, is not whether the laptops were outfitted with webcams and microphones. It’s not even whether they were able to be activated remotely. It’s the notion that what a student does at home, in the privacy of his own home and not disseminated via a Web site or Twitter account, is something that is any of the school’s business.

Suit: Pa. school spied on students via laptops

By MARYCLAIRE DALE
Associated Press Writer

PHILADELPHIA — A suburban Philadelphia school district used school-issued laptop webcams to spy on students at home, potentially catching them and their families in compromising situations, a family claims in a federal lawsuit.

Lower Merion School District officials can activate the webcams without students’ knowledge or permission, the suit said. Plaintiffs Michael and Holly Robbins suspect the cameras captured students and family members as they undressed and in other embarrassing situations, according to the suit.

Tom Halperin, a 15-year-old sophomore from Wynnewood, said students are “pretty disgusted” and have started putting masking tape over their computer webcams and microphones. He noted that his class recently read “1984,” the George Orwell classic that coined the term “Big Brother.”

“This is just bogus,” Halperin said. “I just think it’s really despicable that they have the ability to just watch me all the time.”

The accusations amount to potentially illegal electronic wiretapping, said Witold J. Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which is not involved in the case.

“School officials cannot, any more than police, enter into the home either electronically or physically without an invitation or a warrant,” Walczak said.

The school district could not immediately confirm whether it has the ability to activate the webcams remotely, a spokesman said.

“We can categorically state that we are and have always been committed to protecting the privacy of our students,” said the spokesman, Doug Young.

The affluent district prides itself on its technology initiatives, which include giving laptops to each of the approximately 2,300 students at its two high schools.
“It is no accident that we arrived ahead of the curve; in Lower Merion, our responsibility is to lead,” Superintendent Christopher W. McGinley wrote on the district Web site. McGinley did not immediately return a message left Thursday by The Associated Press.

The Robbinses said they learned of the alleged webcam images when Lindy Matsko, an assistant principal at Harriton High School, told their son that school officials thought he had engaged in improper behavior at home. The behavior was not specified in the suit.

“(Matsko) cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in minor plaintiff’s personal laptop issued by the school district,” the suit states.

Matsko later confirmed to Michael Robbins that the school had the ability to activate the webcams remotely, according to the suit, which was filed Tuesday and which seeks class-action status.

Neither the Robbinses nor their lawyer, Mark S. Haltzman, returned messages left Thursday by The Associated Press.

In 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed the privacy of the home in a case that said police could not permeate a home with infrared lights to see if a suspect was using heat lamps to grow marijuana. Technology or no, Supreme Court precedents “draw a firm line at the entrance to the house,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote.

“This isn’t just them spying on the kids, this is them intruding on the parents’ home. Who knows what they are seeing?” Walczak said. “The courts for 80 years have said there’s no greater sanctuary than a person’s own home.”
Halperin said, “School ends at the end of the school property, so they shouldn’t really be in our business at home.”

I stumbled across a nifty gift for someone who has a fireplace and a newspaper subscription.

The newspaper log roller looks a little like an old-fashioned printing press, which is apropos. Just feed your newspapers from the recyling pile into the roller and it creates tight rolls suitable for use as kindling. It’s one of those ideas that makes you say, “Now why didn’t I think of that?”

I’ve only found the roller online through Duluth Trading Co., but it wouldn’t hurt to check with a local merchant like Erb’s Hardware to see if they can get it in. It retails for $49.99.

Stephen King may have started his newest epic, “Under the Dome” in 1979, but he clearly needed the events of the past eight years in order to flesh it out and finish it. For “Dome” is a microcosm of the United States after 9/11.

I’m about three-quarters of the way through the 1,075-page novel, having absorbed most of it via audiobook to give my eyes a rest in the evening. It took about 200 pages to begin seeing the pattern of the various threads King weaves into the tapestry of exploitation of fear.

All the characters, as interpreted by King, are there:

Andy Sanders, the first selectman of Chester’s Mill, is George W. Bush thinly disguised — a good-hearted, if slightly befuddled figurehead cajoled, controlled and bullied into unspeakable acts by his second-in-command.

Big Jim Rennie, the second selectman of Chester’s Mill, is Dick Cheney, barely disguised at all. Big Jim is sanctimonious, hypocritcal and a world-class crook, with a grasping need for power and avarice. He even has a bum ticker, a la Cheney.

Police Chief Pete Randolph, a dunderhead way out of his league and also controlled by Big Jim Rennie/Cheney, is an amalgamation of several Bush administration officials, mostly Donald Rumsfeld. He steps into power when the fair-minded, well-liked police chief dies within minutes of the dome’s descent. At least in real life Colin Powell didn’t have to die for Randolph/Rumsfeld to gain his position.

The white hats include a Republican newspaper editor and an Iraq war hero whose distaste for the Army and the powers that be solidified during a stint that saw him participating in torture and other actions that turned his stomach.

The body count is large, but the political commentary trumps it. King was clearly deeply affected, if not sickened, by the actions of the Bush administration and its war on terror. His use of his indomitable bully pulpit — a huge readership and worldwide audience — is perhaps an attempt to work out his angst. Readers, particularly those who don’t lean to the left, may find the political commentary a little tough to swallow, but may also find themselves powerless to put down the book, because it is immensely entertaining.

Some have called this Stephen King’s “The Stand” for the 21st century. I don’t agree. “The Stand” was, at its heart, a battle between good and evil. “Under the Dome” is about fear — indidividual, group and societal — and how it can be used to control and manipulate even good people into doing terrible things.

King calls this novel “Under the Dome.” He might as well have named it “After the Towers Fell.”

I sent Veteran’s Day regards to some veterans I know on a personal basis today. This is for those I don’t know personally, but for whom I feel a tremendous sense of gratitude.

For veterans and their families: