The rest

Who in the balls had the nerve to consign jug-eared Elliot Yamin to the bottom three last night? Motherfuck! It was almost made up for in the overdue expulsion of Go-ey Home-ington from the show, leaving seven standing.

I thought the effete Ace Young was going to take a dive, and I'll wager that most of the viewing audience had that same idea, because he sucks at everything he does. Especially when he sings "We Will Rock You." If Ace goes into the kitchen and tries to pan-fry an egg, I bet he'd screw that that up too; because he sucks, I'm saying. But I'm not going to complain that Bucky is on his way back to his rapidly-imploding stinkburgh of Rockingham, N.C., so he can continue developing cirrhosis on the same barstool that his dad did.

The Yamin thing is hard to understand. His version of "Somebody to Love" was crazilous in its gooditude. The Diabetic Slugger from Virginia is at his best when he's veering across chord-changes like Lindsay Lohan after a peach daiquiri in a Maybach on Ivar Ave. This week's song was his best go since Stevie Wonder week, when he handled "Knocks Me off My Feet" quite adroitly.

The only other performance worth noting was my man Taylor Hicks doing "Crazy Little Thing Called Love," a cop-out after we were teased with "We Are the Champions," but an exciting performance nonetheless. He's still my canine in the combat.

After the scabrous Kellie Pickler goes, any cut to the remaining five will be hard... this is as juiced a top seven as there has ever been, in my estimation. But I do have a friendly wager with the Bossbomb about Pickler -- I say she's gonna take this thing because every little white girl in the not-so-dirty south is going to text message her all the way through, deserving or not. And she's certainly not.