BOP Daily News
February 17, 2006
The spirit of BOP News lives on in
This is So Last Week,
our pop culture week-in-review,
presented in a pleasing quiz form.
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We're not sure if this qualifies as "Yet Another Sign the Apocalypse is Upon Us" or not, but ... it's close enough. American Idol, the generation-defining Fox Television hit, rolled over NBC's Tuesday night Winter Olympics broadcast like a monster truck crushing a Fiat. In head-to-head competition, Idol came close to doubling the Olympics audience at 27 million viewers to 16 million viewers (according to Nielsen Media Research). The games from Torino, Italy, have been less popular than the Salt Lake City games of four years ago, but NBC execs are reportedly worried about the anemic ratings. And the rest of the week doesn't look any better. Ratings for last night's viewership (in the face of ABC's Lost) weren't available at press time, but we're betting NBC won't be much happier at happy hour tonight. And tomorrow only looks worse for Bob Costas and crew -- they're going up against Survivor and CSI. Maybe NBC can start just put all the figure skating judges on the island of Sicily and have the biathalon competitors chase them around for a while.
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You can throw away that collection of Cliff's Notes on The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and other Ernest Hemingway works -- now you can pursue that English major just by listening! Simon & Schuster announced yesterday that they will soon start selling audiobook editions of Hemingway's classics to the general public, rather than just making them available only to libraries. The full-length audio tracks will be available for download after purchase and sold in various bookstores. Simon & Schuster, which controls the print editions of Hemingway's works, acquired the audio rights after they became available last year. All of the classics will be released beginning in May (A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, A Moveable Feast, and Death in the Afternoon), though readers have not yet been announced.
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We always knew that Willie Nelson was a country music genius. Listen to Shotgun Willie, Phases and Stages, and his work with The Highwaymen and The Outlaws and you'll see what we mean. But now we have to add "cultural futurist" to our list of accolades. Seems the outlaw country icon helped inspire a song about gay cowboys decades before Brokeback Mountain was even a short story. Songwriter and Texas native Ned Sublette wrote "Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly (Fond of Each Other)" in 1981 after seeing the movie Urban Cowboy. Sublette had always imagined Willie would be the man to record the song, which he did ... live on Howard Stern's radio show last Tuesday. It is now available exclusively on iTunes. Lyrics to the song include such lines as "What did you think all them saddles and boots was about?" and "Inside every cowboy there's a lady who'd love to slip out," which makes it a bit more direct than Nelson's recording of "He Was a Friend of Mine" on the Brokeback Mountain soundtrack.
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""You don't just camp, do you?""
Box Office Prophets offers quality, reliable news about the entertainment industry. BOP is also entertaining. To that end, please be advised that some content in this column is intended to be humorous and should not be considered factual.
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