For the most part, Neil Diamond Night gave me more entertainment coming up with the Worst Neil Diamond Song ever – so many to choose from! We argued all night! – than listening the Idolettes plow through 10 of them.

Once again, it seems like we're at the point in the season when we ask: How did these five end up as the final five? The Big David and Little David make sense, but how can the rest of American endure Brooke and Jordan week after week? (Syesha, to me, is simply forgettable.)

My otherwise busy schedule kept me from weighing in on last week's hilarious show with that Botoxed troll Andrew Lloyd Weber as mentor. I consider his sort of musicals torture, but I'll give him props as one of the few mentors who dared to suggest that these kids couldn't sing his songs properly. (It was all couched in that peculiar sort of British polite phrasing, but the digs were there.)

The meetings-with-Neil bits looked hastily shoehorned in, as if they've taken up less than an hour in their entirety. And in the opening pimp-reel for Diamond we hear of his "performance artistry," while, apparently without irony, we see footage of a middle-aged man clumping around stage in a low-cut shirt with sparkly arm-fringe. Art.

Like I said, I found all the performances uninspiring, and not just because nobody did "Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show."

Jordan: Wow, this guy just truly doesn't seem to give a shit about sounding good. It might be kinda cool, if I knew the right snark or bad attitude was behind it. 

Brooke: Go. Away. And her home-state switch-up on NYC vs. L.A. "I Am ... I Said" made zero sense. 

Big David: I didn't know either of these songs. Liked the first one better, since it had a hook; the second one sounded like all those other post-grunge dirge tunes you hear on "alternative" radio stations. (Why didn't he rip-off Urge Overkill's version of the creepy "Girl, You'll be a Woman Soon"?)

Little David: The bloom is off this kid. He can sing, but he's not getting more star-like. And I cringed during "America" -- I think he made it sound even more cheesy than Diamond's version. ("Today!') A little leering, hip-grinding "Cherry, Cherry" would have made my night, and had the tweener babies shrieking.

Syesha: Treading water. She can't win, so it's just a matter of when does she lose. All I can hope is she bests Brooke. 

Of course, the highlight of the show was the disaster that was the double-judging. How hard can it be? Contestants will sing two songs; judges will issue comments once.

 But at the end of the first round, Ryan called for comments and Paula melted down like a bad robot, babbling her usual inanities before plowing into a garbled analysis of Jordan's second song ... while everybody else on the planet scratched their heads, knowing that Jordan had only sung one song.

Ryan gamely went for the save -- "Paula's in the future" -- but the malfunctioning Robo-Paula just babbled on. Seriously, the only bright spot in a dull show, and Simon was crass enough to say as much.

My guess for no more "Beautiful Noise": Syesha or Jordan.