Bogus Gold

After an American Idol performance broadcast, thousands of viewers rush to Dial Idol to try to get a sense of who's going home well before the results are broadcast. Dial Idol made its name a few years back, when it proved uncannily correct in some of the more shocking results predictions.

However, few seem to have noticed it's been giving itself a wider and wider margin of error lately, until it has finally hit the point of farce.

The way Dial Idol performs its predictions is by "measuring the busy signal" when trying to call in to vote for all the Idol contestants. The ones with the most busy signal time are the safest. The ones with the least are most likely to go home. Then they display their busy signal measuring results in sequential order in a friendly brightly colored bar graph on their site. But their prediction isn't quite as precise as that.

You see at the end of the bar graph they display a helpful "range," which is their actual prediction for where the contestants respectively place, and subsequently who is safe and who is at risk to go home. This has become quite a hedge in recent seasons, but especially this one.

Last night Dial Idol predicted, I kid you not, that any one of the contestants might go home. Lil Rounds had the highest score, meaning she should have had the MOST busy signal time, rendering her the safest from elimination. But in that "range" they predicted she would finish anywhere from first to sixth. And since the sixth and seventh highest vote getters would go home, Dial Idol technically predicted that she could go home. And on that basis today they displayed this happy little icon next to their "prediction":

That's the graphic showing how incredibly accurate their predictions are. When they get it right they give themselves a thumbs up. Isn't that cute?

But since last night they predicted that every single contestant might go home, they "earned" a happy thumbs up for their flawless predictive skills. As far as they reckon.

They actually gave themselves three of them:

Because Lil Rounds went home, which could mean she came in sixth. And even though she has the most busy signal time, they said she could finish from first to sixth.

And then because Anoop Desai went home, which could mean he came in seventh. And even though he had the fourth most busy signal time, they said he could finish from first to seventh.Got that? They predicted that one of seven contestants could finish from first to seventh. That isn't a prediction at all, but they decided they earned another...

And then, because Allison Iraheta finished in the bottom three, and even though she had the least amount of busy signal time, they said she could finish from third to seventh that earned another...


Here's the screen cap to capture their moment of uncanny prediction for posterity:



Meanwhile, without measuring anything at all, I predicted Lil Rounds and Anoop Desai would go home. And I didn't hedge that in any way by saying "or maybe one or two of the five others" or any stupidity like that. So I guess I earned myself something a bit bigger than...