"I love you Barack Obama!" exclaims Stevie Wonder...

... in the middle of a cool medley on "American Idol." He also exclaims: "I love you 'American Idol!'" What song was that? Need to Google some words. Something about taking a pill that would make us sisters and brothers? I find this Popular Science "Geek Musician" interview:

I have this song that I wrote which is called All About the Love Again… And it says:

What if someone made a soda that caused everyone to love each other.
Ummm, oh yeah, sounds good, so good to me
And if just a tiny pill would make us see that we're all truly sisters and brothers
Ummm, oh yeah that sounds so nice to me

POPSCI: Is there anything you would ask president Obama to make a priority?

WONDER: You know, obviously there are so many things going on in the world and so many people coming at him about everything, because they think that it can all happen just like that.

So I'm just taking a low profile…And at the right time, I will give him the information that I have to share and introduce him to the people who reaching out to make a better condition for those who are physically challenged--whether they are blind, deaf or paraplegic or quadriplegic or whatever that might be.

"I know that for me, I need to get over the fear..."

Says Melinda Doolittle, auditioning for "American Idol." She's a background singer, taking a chance, stepping forward, and they reach out and offer her a hand, as she sings Stevie Wonder, "For Once in My Life." "You walk in," Simon says, "with no confidence, no attitude, and yet you are... a brilliant singer... You are... what it's all about."

Yes, there was a whole hour show, and, in fact, I did watch it, but I'm just going to leave this little message for Melinda. We're looking for someone to love. And we love you.

TiVo-blogging the Emmys.

The Emmy show gets off to a spectacularly bad beginning with a prerecorded comedy sketch. We see Conan O'Brien on a plane, asked by a flight attendant if he's nervous, and he says, "What could possibly go wrong?" There's an explosion that rocks the plane, and then there's a cut to a beach, with Conan crawling out of the surf and the plane, in the background, sinking into the ocean. The folks on the laugh track are yukking it up. That would have been pushing it, considering the recent foiled terrorist plot, but with a plane crash in the news today -- 49 people were killed -- it's just atrocious. Don't they have the sense to pull it? The message is, we've got this preprogrammed, and there's nobody here with a brain.

Well, they worked so hard on it. It's a play on "Lost," and Conan finds a hatch. Descending, he's in the set of "The Office." This leads into a "24" sequence. Am I forgiving them? No! He encounters "House," then he enters the "South Park" trapped-in-a-closet closet. And then on to a "Dateline" exposé about child predators.

Man, they put a lot of effort into this. They should have thought of the air crash problem when they planned it.

Okay, Althouse. Settle down. Your censoriousness will only drive readers away.

Conan paces back and forth on the stage, spitting out his monologue jokes, interspersed with shots of the audience, seemingly enjoying it. There's lots of actress flesh on view, and it jiggles as they applaud the jokes. Whatever happened to anorexia? Everyone looks plump tonight. Are the jokes any good? He hands out rules for acceptance speeches. Sample: "Anyone who makes a heavy-handed political comment tonight will be forced to make out with Al Gore in a Prius."

He does a parody of "Trouble" (from "The Music Man"). It's about how bad NBC ratings are. Why should we care? Get to the awards! It's like they're desperate to prove to us that they're putting on a show. And it's a show on NBC. And if this is your idea of a show, well, maybe you deserve your bad ratings. Go cry about it in private somewhere.

One of the first presenters is Ellen Pompeo, wearing a long dark blue dress that she's clutching together with her hand at the right buttock. Is she just holding it up so she won't trip? No, she's at the mike, and she's still keeping her grip! Must be a wardrobe malfunction. The award is Best Supporting Actress. Megan Mullally wins. Doesn't she always win? She's in dark blue too. Sort of a bathrobe-like thing. She incites us to be all emotional about the end of "Will and Grace." Sorry. I don't care.

In the next presenter set, we've got Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and she's wearing a white dress that has a sparkly black "H" superimposed around the breasts. The award is Best Supporting Actor. The clip of William Shatner makes me laugh out loud so I switch my loyalty t0 him from Michael Imperioli. Alan Alda wins, and he's the only one not there. That's so wrong.

Dragging things out, Conan has a comedy bit about how the show won't go over three hours. They've got Bob Newhart sealed in a tube with only three hours of air. He's about 80 years old, so threatening to kill him is a little disturbing. But it's nice to see Bob again, albeit entubed.

Martin and Charlie Sheen. They awkwardly read the cue cards. Best Supporting Actress again? Oh, now it's in a drama. Sorry, those previous awards were limited to comedies. Emmys, I see, follow the Golden Globe, not the Oscars, approach. Blythe Danner wins. She's all actressily effusive, like it's not memorized. And her dress is yards of teal-colored fabric that looks like it was draped together in a 1-day challenge by the losing contestant on "Project Runway."

Supporting Actor in a Comedy. Oh, I see the previous supporting actor award was for the drama actor. They are not doing this in an orderly way. I will catch on. As you can see, I'm not a regular Emmy viewer. The winner is Jeremy Piven.

Oh, Heidi Klum is giving an award. Variety, Music or Comedy Series. "The Daily Show" beats "The Colbert Report" (and Conan O'Brien).

Ooh, Simon Cowell, with the neck of his shirt all open revealing his furry chest. It's a tribute to Dick Clark and "Bandstand." You know, I watched that show, even as far back as the 1950s. I remember seeing "Little" Stevie Wonder on the show doing "Fingertips" on his 13th birthday. I remember when the kids who danced on the show were celebrities, written about in the teen magazines. It was once necessary when talking about Dick Clark to make a joke about how he looked forever young. But that's not the way it is anymore. He looks very old. He can't walk out, and, recovering from a stroke, he can't speak clearly, and his voice is very deep. He introduces Barry Manilow who comes out dancing -- and he has hip problems -- and demonstrates that the "Bandstand" theme song has lyrics.

Variety or Musical Performance is the next award. Manilow is one of the nominees. And he wins! Beating Stephen Colbert and David Letterman.

Guest Actor? Oh, come on. Too many categories. But they speed through this, and I'm glad to see Patricia Clarkson won for "Six Feet Under." I'm skipping some of these awards. I'd be crazy not to.

Conan does a routine on TiVo fastforwarding using TiVo fastforwarding, which I discover while fastforwarding on TiVo. So it's double fastforwarded. That was freaky.

Lead Actor in a Comedy Series. Tony Shaloub. Doesn't he always win? I don't watch his show, so I was rooting for Steve Carell or Larry David, whose shows I do watch.

Candice Bergen is stuffed into a white shirt and teal-colored skirt and held together with a big bulky leather and metal belt. She says something about TV not being a vast wasteland, and it just draws more attention to her vast waist land. She's introducing a tribute to Aaron Spelling. He was, apparently, a veritable god.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert present the Reality show award, and Colbert throws a tantrum about losing to Barry Manilow. "Singing and dancing is not performing!" "The Amazing Race" wins. I've watched that a couple times. Don't enjoy it. Travel travails. Ugh! I wanted "Project Runway" to win. Did you notice they spotlighted Andrae in the little clip. What happened to Andrae?

In Memoriam: Shelley Winters. Don Knotts. Richard Pryor.

I love the look on Annette Bening's face when Helen Mirren beats her for Best Actress in a Miniseries or Movie. [ADDED: It's the look of no reaction at all, except that in that frozen expanse, there is an expression.] And I love the way Mirren says, "My great triumph is not falling ass over tit as I came up those stairs." It's all British, so it's not rude, right? Ahhss.

Lead Actress in a Drama. Ah, here's a big category. Mariska Hargitay wins. Another show I don't watch.... so I have no opinion.

Actress in a Comedy. Okay. This is actually the only thing I care about. I want Lisa Kudrow to win for "The Comeback." Not that I think she will. Julia Louis-Dreyfus wins. She's all weepy, like she can barely get through it.

Actor in a Drama. Kiefer Sutherland. He's the opposite of Julia. He's all calm and mature. Dignified.

Bob Newhart is released from his tube to do the award for Best Comedy Series. He's bizarrely short standing next to Conan O'Brien. "The Office" wins. That makes sense.

Annette Bening does the Drama Series award. I only watch "The Sopranos," but I don't think it should win. It wasn't that good this year. "24" wins.

And that's it for a night at the Emmys!

Dylanology.

A roomful of Bob Dylan fans talk about Bob Dylan at the top level of "Dylan geekiness."

One theme running through the evening was Mr. Dylan's aversion to pleasing. The panelists agreed that in the 1980's, in particular, the singer seemed bent on distancing himself from fans, musicians, even his own music. Mr. Hultkrans compared him to Kafka - hiding his best work in drawers.

There was also the question of whether Mr. Dylan is in decline. The writer Luc Sante, who had been a scheduled panelist, apparently held that the period of 1965 to 1967 was the high-water mark, but Mr. Lethem disagreed. "I see" his genius "arising, with equal uncanniness, however fugitive," he said. "There are songs and performances that are as much of the part of the Godhead now as ever."

I agree with Luc Sante. The albums in those years -- "Bringing It All Back Home," "Highway 61 Revisited," and "Blonde On Blonde" -- are the ones I really care about. They seem to be the essence of Dylan, the reason Dylan matters so much. But why? When I read the words to the songs on later albums, many of them seem just as good. I note that it was on the album after "Blonde On Blonde" that Dylan stopped singing in that distinctive voice, that voice we all want to use when we do our Dylan imitations. It seemed like such a ridiculous way to sing.

(Remember the video of the making of "We Are the World," when Dylan didn't know how to sing his lines, and Stevie Wonder sang them for him, using the mid-60s Dylan singing style?)

But there was something mystical about that crazy way to sing that we all lost when Dylan came back after his motorcycle accident with "John Wesley Harding."

The world has never been the same.

UPDATE: Interestingly -- I'm just noticing this -- my ex-husband Richard Cohen was up and blogging about Bob Dylan before I was. His is a dream, analyzed, about Dylan. I'm a little unnerved that Richard ends his post:

A weird phenomenon that often happens when I dream: waking up, I realize that the whole dream was a code for the title of a song or a line for a song. In this case, “All I really want to do is baby be friends with you.”

The weird thing about that is that most of the time I was writing this post, I was planning on titling it with a line from "All I Really Want To Do." I started writing my post because of the line in the article, "One theme running through the evening was Mr. Dylan's aversion to pleasing," which I thought would go well with the song line "I don't want to satisfy you." When I finally got around to searching for "satisfy" on bobdylan.com, where was that line I remembered? I saw I was only imagining it. There are two other "-ify" words-- "simplify" and "classify" -- but not "satisfy." Was there some other line about refusing to please that I could substitute? No. That's just not the way the words of the song go at all. It's good not to be simplified and classified. Why did I transform that into something that would be bad to be denied: you do want to be satisfied. Still, in some way, refusing to please is the unspoken theme of the song. Dylan is saying don't expect me to be your conventional boyfriend -- "I don't want to meet your kin." I will define a new male-female relationship, and it's not all the things you come to me believing you want.

So I ended up thinking about that song a lot this morning -- and damned if my ex-husband isn't mulling it over too. That's just eerie! And weirdly, his "realization" that that song fits that dream seems off, at least if we're to believe his analysis of the dream. But "I ain't lookin' to compete with you" and "I ain't lookin' to... Analyze you." So I'll end this already excessively revealing update right here. Or should I add a Dylan quote? "Nothing is revealed."

The night "Broadway" was not an insult.

After three seasons of using "Broadway" as an insult, "American Idol" makes Broadway show tunes the theme. I've got to assume this is a reaction to Ben Brantley's New York Times piece "Has Broadway Lost Its Voice to 'American Idol?'" (which blamed the TV show for things he doesn't like these days on Broadway). (Here's my blog post about Brantley's piece.) Before they announced the theme and right after Ryan Seacrest made a point of the fact that so far only female contestants have been voted off, I guessed that they would have a theme tonight that would disadvantage males, especially when the first shot of the contestants featured their favorites of the women left, Carrie and Nadia. And I think I was right.

Scott Savol (one of the contestants I believe the Powers That Be want to fail) goes first (suggesting he'll be good) and sings "The Impossible Dream," which his mom told him to sing. He liked it because the words applied to him, he says. He doesn't specify that it actually is virtually impossible for him to win the show. The judges have already taken up lying about him (saying he's off key when he's not and saying he's like the worst singer at a karaoke bar). He does a great job. So do the judges lie? Randy finds pitch problems again and says "ah - ight." Paula is good to him, calling it "heartfelt." Simon sneers and calls it "ordinary." They are just flat out lying because he's fat and weird.

Constantine Maroulis totally comes out as an actor who's studied Broadway -- and loves Frank Sinatra. It's "My Funny Valentine." He's shackled by a crazy, busy arrangement that fights against him. But he's just darling. Paula standing Os. Randy loves him: "This is what you should be doing, dude." Get in that box, Con! Paula: "I admit I'm falling in love with you." Simon: "The best pouting performance I have ever seen on 'American Idol.'" Translation: they know they've found a sexy, sensitive-yet-masculine guy. "Who is the real Constantine?" Ryan asks, and Constantine answers: "The real Constine is..." Wait a minute! Mispronouncing your own name? Who does that?

Carrie Underwood. Full disclosure: I have an irrational dislike for her. It's not so much about her but about they way they like her. She's got Carmenosity on her. So take this with a grain of salt... but ... ick! Tasteless, tawdry, harsh. "Hello Young Lovers." Vote her off! That was just ugly. But they won't criticize her. Just watch. They all lie. I like Paula's awkward "You're a well-oiled machine" -- which was intended as a compliment. Simon: "Too old fashioned." Yes. She's hopelessly square. It's NOT cute anymore.

Vonzell Solomon. She's singing "People." I find it kind of ugly. Paula's standing again. Randy's "wow"-ing. Paula: "You hit that high E flat that Barbra doesn't even go for." Maybe that's because Barbra has some subtlety. (The reference is to that trick, used constantly by show-offs singing the national anthem, of taking a high note up to an unscripted higher note.) Simon doesn't lie: "left me a little cold."

Anthony Federov sings a song associated with a nun: "Climb Every Rainbow." [ADDED: I mean, "Climb Every Mountain." My mistake amuses me an awful lot.] He starts out with weak low notes, which usually means there will be some strong high notes later on that are supposed to wipe out our memory of the beginning of the song. I note that the words of this song are very similar to the words of the crap songs they make "Idol" winners do on finale night. Follow your dreams blah blah blah. Simon: "Hideous."

Nikko Smith does "One Hand, One Heart" from "West Side Story." He tries to Stevie Wonderize it. His final high note is very unpleasant, so I don't think the "end strong" strategy, which has worked for him in the past, is going to work now. Simon makes exactly my point: everyone is trying to end with a big note that is supposed to make us forget all the other crap, and he didn't even nail the note.

Anwar Robinson is going to do the Sir Lancelot piece "If Ever I Would Leave You." He does great! Randy: "Welcome back, baby!" Paula: "Brilliant." Simon: "You seemed very comfortable." Translation: you are Broadway, and that's bad!

Bo Bice. I'm distracted by his dark red shirt-like garment which seems to be made of some odd shiny rubber. He's singing some crap from "Pippin." Bleccchhhh!

Nadia Turner. She's singing the ultimate abused woman song, "As Long as He Needs Me." She's got a cool white gown. Every time she sings the word "as," she pronounces it "has." In fact, every time she sings the word "or," she pronounces it "whore." The tone and the style are actually quite ugly, but watch them lay on the praise. At least Simon holds back a little. (Really, without Simon, the show would be intolerable.)

Conclusion: The theme was awful! I don't hate show tunes. But for these people? Yuck!

Bottom three: Anthony, Nikko, Carrie. Anthony leaves.

UPDATE: The Aspirant, who has a lot of interesting things to say about all the contestants, thinks I'm wrong about Scott -- though not wrong about the "fat and weird" part. I can see, but I admit I'm not good at hearing technical musical things like pitch. There has been some disagreement among the judges over the weeks about whether Scott sings on pitch or not. I used to get the feeling he was off pitch -- it is just a feeling with me -- but then something made me think he wasn't.

Let me add something about Nikko. He was praised for bringing a Broadway show tune up to date. Can someone remind the judges that Stevie Wonder was at his height over thirty years ago? Why do they keep acting like Stevie Wonder is the biggest thing going today?