Florida tap water tastes better than Dasani

The second episode (or Part II of the first, two-evening, four-hour-long episode) of American Idol aired tonight from 8 to 10 p.m. You'll notice that the time right now is 10:01 p.m.

I know that this will brand me as hopelessly out of touch with pop culture, but I had never in my life seen an episode of American Idol until tonight. The only reason that I even knew to watch it tonight was because CNN.com had a feature article on the show's increasing popularity, and I read CNN.com when I'm trying to avoid doing work at the office.

I suspect that since this is, apparently, the sixth season of American Idol, anything I said about the show as a whole would be little more than an exercise in repeating what millions of others said five years before me. So I won't even try. Nor will I bother going through my opinions of most of the contestants, since someone much more pop culture- and music-savvy than I would definitely have more interesting and relevant responses to the auditions.

But I will say that watching that show made me feel like a lesser person, and that I intend to tune in next week (though I won't go as far as taping it if I'm not home when it airs).

And I will also say that it's mildly upsetting that when a contestant took a sip of her water during her audition, the bottle she was drinking from was blurred out on-camera so as to prevent the viewer from being exposed to a brand of drinking water other than Dasani.

And really, her singing was terrible and so was her image, so I would think that Coca Cola would want their registered trademarks to be as far removed from her as possible.