Last Wednesday on American Idol, raspy-voiced siren Amanda Overmyer was cruelly dismissed from the singing competition. On Saturday, I celebrated my 38th birthday with the neighborhood dudes/mourned Amanda's vicious fate by doing very bad things for 13 hours. I'm not entirely sure, but I think the ghost of Jessica Tandy tried to seduce me during Hour 12. In all fairness, that might have been a hallucination. I'll get back to you.

Anyway, on Sunday, I woke up without a voice...and with the Forever Fiancee really ticked off. When I tried to speak, I sounded not unlike Froggy, that bespectacled Our Gang rapscallion. I also sounded a little like my girl Overmyer shrieking Back in the USSR. Indeed, a strange convergence of events. My voice is still shot.

Of course, friends and family are rather delighted by my inability to parlez some. For the first time in my life, I'm letting others get a word in. I imagine my voice was ultimately taken from me by a divine power, a Greater Good (perhaps Tandy's ghost or at least Paula Abdul) who didn't want me spending tonight screaming at the TV screen, blaming asexual smirker David Archuleta or barefoot hippie Brooke White for my Overmyer loss.

Idol starts tonight at 8 p.m. The Top 10 contestants will be singing songs from the year they were born, which means 1979 through 1991 (basically the '80s revisited). The Pop Life Idol Chat will be open at 7:45 p.m., although we will be serving coffee and donuts in lieu of the typical open bar. I hope you understand. See you tonight...