Careful readers might have noticed that we have a horse in the race during tonight's finale of American Idol. We have, in the past, expressed a slight preference for David Archuleta over David Cook, referring to the former as "bigger than Jesus" while frequently mentioning the latter's male-pattern baldness as well as his "husky caterwauling and mitten-handed guitar-playing." So we watched last night's episode with a rich sense of accomplishment, as Archuleta knocked songs both good and idiotic out of the park. But could all our chart-based invective be for naught? Could David Archuleta possibly lose tonight? One Website thinks so. And they have science!

DialIdol.com, a site that tracks the likely results for Idol by tallying the number of busy signals received by callers for each candidate, is forecasting that David Cook will win American Idol tonight. This scares the hell out of us, because DialIdol.com has been right nearly every week this season about who is safe and who is in danger of being voted off. On the other hand, one week they did have Kristy Lee Cook predicted as safe even though the sorriest moron knew she was going to get kicked off, so we're still hopeful. Also, we hate and fear science!

After all, how could any reasonable person listen to the angelic voice of David Archuleta, the exultant cries of all three judges, or the producer-dampened screams of countless preteen girls and not bet, say, his children's college-tuition funds and a 1999 Volkswagen Passat station wagon on a David Archuleta win?

This week's predicted results [DialIdol.com]