Ruben Studdard, that big cuddly teddy bear of a tub of lard winner of Season 5, made big Tvgasm news last week with plans to put on a Fat Elvis Hawaiian concert on New Year's Eve. Now Ruben is bringin' it all back home, leading a campaign to slim down his fellow fat Alabamans. Ruben lost 100 pounds in the past year, and he's asking the 25 percent of Alabama's population that's overweight to lose ten pounds in eight weeks. If it works, the state's "Scale Back Alabama" campaign would cut 10 million pounds of fat. But then they'd all go to McDonalds to celebrate and gain it all back.
If you can catch a red eye from Hawaii in time for the Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena, last season's sexy Idol loser Katherine McPhee (whom the late Howard Stern had suggested would been even sexier had she dropped a few pounds from the caboose) will make history on New Year's Day. She'll be singing on the LifeSource Water Systems parade float, standing between a giant leaping frog and a working faucet gushing 400 gallons-a-minute of water (we're still thinking about her crawling around the stage to that KT Tunstall song).
But that's not the historic part.
The water people say she'll be singing live-- the very "first live vocal performance from an entertainment float in Rose Parade history."
And in the Great White North, there are big changes ahead in the fifth season of Canadian Idol. CTV has announced that hopefuls can play instruments during their auditions, which begin January 27 in Vancouver. The instruments may also show up in the actual competition when the series airs next summer.
Singers on both sides of the border usually go into auditions armed only their voices. Producers say the a cappella competitors will be judged the same as those who wield their axes.
Someone's been watching Rock Star: Supernova.