Who is Renaldo Lapuz???

I have just finished watching the first two airing of American Idol Season 7 tonight over Star World and as expected, the audition was filled with bizarre people as usual. But then, I didn't expect that tonight's finale was going to be a history-in-the-making (again) just like a couple of seasons ago where William Hung was "discovered" and become a worldwide phenomenon.

Throughout the show, they keep on advertising this "winged-hat (with Simon's name on it) and with a cape" guy and I thought that he was just one of the "ordinary" untalented people who just need a "one-minute" exposure for hopes of becoming famous. But then, when he was interviewed by Ryan, I have noticed that he had a Filipino accent (with a common Pinoy-style carabao english). So I thought to myself, "Is this guy a Filipino or what?". His name sounds Filipino anyway and he sings like a Filipino (He has a voice of a true karaoke star!) . He did add some spice to tonight's show though and now, he's all over the internet! Somebody even built a site especially for him!

Ok wait, talking about American Idol, I hope another Filipino will be in the top 20 again. Filipinos are just good singers (excluding me). It was just so sad that the first Asian Idol was not a Filipino (Mau). And who would expect it would be Hady of Singapore to win the title? He wasn't even that good compared to the Indonesian or Malaysian Idol! The way I see it, Hady won because of the policy of voting for 2 countries per SMS wherein (I think) most of the voters from the populated countries (like the Philippines) would vote Singapore as a second choice since voters from these populated counties would think that Singapore have a few population and therefore will also have few voters only (include me in the list!). But it turned out that we were dead wrong!
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Added 31 January 2008

It turned out to be that he is a Filipino (I knew it!). I made a list of links I found in the Internet below for updates about Renaldo Lapuz:

Inquirer.Net (RL Unplugged)
YouTube.com (The Audition)
YouTube.com (Fox News Interview)
YouTube.com (Funny Tribute)