"Like, I really -- what I want to do is experience the whole entertainment business because, I mean, I'm not just a musician, I'm an entertainer."

So says Sanjaya Malakar, a darling boy who deserves his own sitcom. Perhaps the story of a someone who wants to be a star, has a lot of heart, but isn't any good at all. (It worked for Lucy!)

Sanjaya was on Letterman last night, doing the Top Ten.



And look, here's Arianna Huffington gushing about sitting near Sanjaya on the plane to the White House Correspondents' Dinner:

[T]he woman across the aisle from me leaned over and asked if I was flying in for the dinner. I told her that I was and asked if she was too. "Yes," she said. "I'm Sanjaya's mom!" I glanced back, and there was the fallen-but-radiant Idol, seated next to a bodyguard hired to protect him from the mobs of well-wishers that now follow him wherever he goes (It was a good hire: Sanjaya's table was a hot destination throughout the Correspondents' dinner). Mrs. Malakar was a very charming woman. Our conversation ranged from the black-beaded dress she had bought for the occasion to her less than rosy assessment of the Bush administration. My mind flashed on how Simon Cowell might have assessed Alberto Gonzales' off-key testimony, and whether the AG would have won over Arlen Specter if he'd done his hair in a pony-hawk.

Eh, my mind just flashed on what a dull writer Arianna Huffington is. She's sitting with Sanjaya and mother and all she gives us is the insinuation that "Mrs. Malakar" agrees with Arianna's boring politics? It's an unsupported insinuation, of course, because who has a "rosy assessment of the Bush administration"? Probably not even Bush himself!

And, Arianna, not every woman latches on to her husband's name. You ought to know better than to call a woman by her child's last name with a "Mrs." in front of it! Just as my name isn't "Mrs. Cohen," Sanjaya's mother is not Mrs. Malakar, she's Jillian Recchi. (And Sanjaya is just as Italian as he is Indian.)