I failed in the task of actually being at the later auditions on time at the Georgia International Convention Center though part of it had to do with the fact I wasn’t around most of the time. I did get back from vacation on Wednesday, the day Randy, Paula and Simon actually worked but I thought they’d do their work over two days rather than one. So I visited the center Thursday. It was empty and the janitors had cleaned the place up thoroughly. The only evidence I could find of “Idol” was a lone sticker in a garbage can.

Fortunately, my colleague Richard Eldredge in Peach Buzz got some scoop from his sources, including a hairdresser for Paula Abdul. There was also a nice scoop about Abdul being wooed by a partner of the Dolce Group. (Abdul had been here at least since the weekend.)

Though I’ve heard typically Randy, Simon and Paula in the past have screened 75 to 150 people per city, they ended up seeing only 49 over 12 hours Wednesday, or about four people per hour, according to the Buzz item. Since Ryan Seacrest did his L.A. radio show live that day from the Star 94 studios from 9 to at least noon EST, that meant they started around lunch hour at the earliest and worked til past midnight. Nigel & Ken, the executive producers really trimmed the pool down big time or perhaps the talent pool wasn’t as deep as they expected. I may have to ask Nigel a question about that Tuesday when Fox holds a phone press conference about the “Idol” sister show “The Next Great American Band,” debuting next Friday. I’m not sure how many even got to see Nigel and Ken.

I can do a rough calculation on the pure odds of even getting to this point. If say 10,000 people tried out in Atlanta (and I never got a concrete number), fewer than 1/2 of 1 percent got to see the judges. Wow. That’s tough! And you have to think that of those 49, at least 1/3 were bad singers so maybe 30 potentially talented people were screened. In the past, typically 12 to 25 would go to Hollywood. We’ll see how well Atlanta did sometime in January, 2008. (And probably half if not more of the people who tried out weren’t from metro Altanta.)

Fox held auditions for “So You Think You Can Dance” this past spring and not a single Georgian made it into the final 20. (But the cool robot dancer from Kennesaw State did make an impact.)