Last night on American Idol, Paula Abdul judged two songs when contestant Jason Castro had only sung one. Clearly this one was of the strangest — or most revealing? — moments of the program’s history.

….[Paula Abdul’s] gaffe on Tuesday night’s episode was either the “Kookiest Paula Moment Ever” or a sign of the judges’ apparently not-so-spontaneous evaluations of contestants’ performances.

It was Neil Diamond night, and after each of the show’s five remaining contestants sang their first of two songs for the evening, the judges were asked to comment on their performances.

Randy Jackson quickly rattled off his impressions, and then Abdul launched into a lengthy analysis of contestant Jason Castro’s two performances. Yes, that’s right. Abdul remembered TWO performances. When Castro, and all of the other contestants, had only performed ONCE.

“Oh my God, I thought you sang twice,” a flustered Abdul said when Jackson gently pointed out that Castro had only performed one song so far. She added: “This is hard!”

“You’re seein’ the future baby, you’re seein’ the future!” host Ryan Seacrest said.

Abdul tried to cover for the mistake by saying she had been reading her notes from both Castro’s performance and contestant David Cook’s performances.

The flub was enough to convince some fans that Abdul must have prepared her notes on both songs before the live performance.

Source: “American Idol”: What was UP with Paula?

Reading from her notes, Abdul confidently had this to say about the song she had not heard:

The second song, I felt like your usual charm was missing for me. And the two songs made me feel like you’re not fighting hard enough to get into the top four.” When Seacrest pointed out her mistake, she claimed that she’d been looking at her notes for David Cook — but then told Cook, “You’re fantastic.”

Source: Either ‘American Idol’ Is Fixed or Paula Abdul Is Divinely Omniscient

We have to wonder if this reveals that the program is fixed. It would not be the first time. In the Golden Age of television, in the 1950s, the rigging of the game show “Twenty-One” became a national scandal and led to Congressional hearings and new laws making game show rigging a Federal crime.