American Idol judge Paula Abdul—on whom we rely to pull browbeaten contestants into her addled embrace, showering them with slurred words of encouragement—made a gaffe for the ages on last night's all-Neil Diamond-cover show. In her defense, producers made a radical change to the show's familiar format, holding all the judging until after the final five had performed two songs. This introduced a complicated new element to the karoake-appraising procedure: taking notes. But no sooner had Paula accepted her fate, and begun to get the hang of scribbling things like "David C.: Shining star, authentic, love the pants," on an index card, sniveling Idol homeroom Poindexter Ryan Seacrest changed the rules once again, demanding to know where Randy, Paula, and Simon stood on the performances at the half-way mark.

A clearly agitated and disoriented Paula then went on to critique both of Jason Castro's songs, despite the fact that he had only performed one. (Perhaps the rehearsal, actual taping, and that afternoon's Extremely Happy Hour lunch at Maggiano's had combined into a sort of colorful fruit-salad in her head.) While the mistake is a doozy, it's really the moments immediately following it that offered the most entertainment value: First, a hush fell, the likes of which the Karoakedome has never seen. Then, confused audience members, having determined that it was not they who were experiencing the pleasant side-effects of a Baja Fresh chicken salad with extra taco chips and Klonopin, began to whisper among themselves. It was Randy, God bless him, who finally broke the news, at which point Abdul readily copped to the fact that she had been seeing and hearing double. It's moments like these that lift Idol from the realm of the reality mundane, to those blissful, zonked-out heights we know it's capable of achieving. To infinity and beyond, Paula.