[texasflower]

Hi kevkrom. I just wanted to jump in here so just a second.

Yes, we have picked our favorites, but in most cases, at least in mine, we pick who WE think is the best or has the most potential, or whose style personally appeals to IS the most.

That's very subjective and it is different for each and every one of us.

So while we have our favorites, it's not necessarily based on who is the cutest or the popular kid etc.

It's who musically appeals to us and with the acknowledgment that even our favorites have good days and bad days. Each of them have talent and voting based on one song seems unfair in a way. At least for me. I wouldn't vote against one of my favorites, just because they sang one song poorly.

Remember, most of us don't have your educated ear for music. (Especially me.)

I just vote for who touches me personally.

You mentioned the prejudices that are present no matter how a singer might sound on any given night.

That's true to some extent. Scott Savol suffered the very worst from that sort of thing though. I don't remember if you ever said any of those things about Scott or not, but many, many people here did.

Lots of people never actually heard Scott's voice because of that.

[kevkrom]

I absolutely have my favorites too, but I try (with varying degrees of success) to put that aside and judge each week on its own merits. I understand that others may look more at an "overall" picture, with each specific week weighing less than the total picture to date, but it's still a little disheartening to see people gearing up to vote dozens (or hundreds) of times for someone regardless of how well or poorly they do. It's almost as if Carrie (for example) could hum aimlessly and tunelessly in the microphone for 2 minutes, and still have people wearing out the "redial" button.

In my mind, the narrower the field gets, the more consequences there should be for a bad performance (in this respect, even though Vonzelle has been a favorite of mine, I thought she should go this week). I look for first consistency, and then improvement -- and here's my problem with Carrie and Bo: I haven't seen improvement. They both seem to be coasting on their earlier performances and obvious popularity. In Bo's case, I doubt there is significant room for improvement, which is why he's still an "undiscovered" 29-year old. Carrie, on the other hand, has much more singing talent, but seems to be content with the status quo (and I was very much a Carrie fan until she started mailing in peformances and making poor song selections). At this point, unless someone steps it up, I honestly can't say who deserves to win the competition, because each of the remaining contestants is dealing with one or more major problems.

BTW, any negative comments I had about Scott were restricted to his peformance and stage personality.