World of Warcraft has become the first truly global video-game hit since Pac-Man in the early 80’s.
LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Fashion icon and award-winning singer and actress Cher is clearing her Malibu home of its Gothic contents and reshaping her life in a giant garage sale.
Following a trend set by rock star Elton John, Cher is selling off nearly 800 items from stage costumes to gem encrusted jewelry, works of art, furniture and even a huge Hummer car in an auction expected to raise more than $1 million.
"This is a lot more than a garage sale. Apart from the dresses and jewels there are Old Masters and architectural drawings," said Darren Julien of Julien's auctions.
"She has a huge following. She is an icon. Her career in song, stage and screen has spanned nearly four decades," he told Reuters as some of the items went on show in London on Monday ahead of the sale in Los Angeles on October 3-4.
The sale is being jointly organized by Sotheby's New York office and Julien's of the United States.
Among the items on show are several dresses by star designer Bob Mackie, white and yellow gold rings and necklaces and a book of architectural drawings by 19th century Gothic Revivalist Augustus Pugin.
Cher, born Cherylin Sarkisian in May 1946, first hit fame alongside Sonny Bono with the 1965 hit "I got you babe", and her roller-coaster career has been echoed by her turbulent and often front-page private life.
Apple is to start selling feature films through its iTunes media store by mid-September, according to a report in Business Week citing anonymous sources.
Movie downloads are expected to cost $14.99 for new releases and $9.99 for older films. Business Week claims that Apple will pay $14 to the movie studio for each download.
Disney is a likely launch partner. Apple chief executive Steve Jobs is the largest single shareholder in Disney, and holds a position on the company's board after the entertainment giant acquired his Pixar animation studio last year.
Apple currently sells video downloads of several television shows at $1.99 per download.
The company is facing competition from services like Google Video and AOL Video, where viewers can watch archived television shows free of charge.
The launch of Apple's movie download service is said to coincide with new iPod models featuring widescreens that offer a better viewing experience than current video iPods.
Apple has not commented on its movie download plans. The company has scheduled a launch event on 12 September in San Francisco.
The social networking website, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, has signed a deal with Snocap, which provides back-end services for selling music online.
Details of the deal were not made public, but it is possible that News Corp could end up taking a minority stake in Snocap.
Earlier this year, Nokia acquired digital music download company Loudeye for $60m (£32m) as part of a move into the market.
When the MySpace online store opens later this year, it will allow bands and labels of any size to sell songs.
With more than 100 million registered profiles, and in excess of 60 million active monthly users, MySpace has the critical mass of users to potentially pose a viable alternative to Apple's dominance in the online music download market.
MySpace has already secured an important position in the music world - for independent label bands, unsigned artists and well-known acts alike - as an inexpensive, yet effective, marketing platform.
The website, which generates the majority of its revenue from advertising, sees music sales as an obvious new source of income.
A number of companies have entered, or are about to enter, the legal music download market.
MTV has launched a service in conjunction with Microsoft called Urge, which is not yet available in the UK.
Microsoft also recently announced it was to launch Zune, a competitor to the iPod, as well as a deal with EMI to pre-load music videos on to the device.
Last week, new online outfit SpiralFrog.com signed a deal with Vivendi Universal to give away music downloads by using advertising to generate revenue.
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Andre Agassi is 36 years old, and wakes up today as a retired man. In his 21st and final U.S. Open, he delivered two stirring nights and heroic battles, before succumbing to the combination of unrelenting back pain and the backcourt firepower of a German qualifier and Open rookie with a familiar name but an unknown game.
The name is Benjamin Becker, and he belted a 133 mph ace on match point. The final score was 7-5, 6-7 (4), 6-4, 7-5, and before the chair umpire could announce the 25-year-old Becker's triumph, the crowd was bathing Agassi, blow-dried renegade turned white-clad icon, in a four-minute standing ovation.
"It just felt amazing out there," Agassi said. "(I was) overwhelmed with how they embraced me at the end."
He said this a few minutes after he told the crowd, "The scoreboard said I lost today, but what the scoreboard doesn't say is what it is I have found," and then he thanked everyone for their loyalty and generosity and inspiration.
Gil Reyes, Agassi's trainer and spiritual beacon, had watched his friend get turned into a human pin cushion over the previous days, taking a cortisone shot and three shots of Toradol, an anti-inflammatory, to be able to play through searing nerve pain in his lower back.
September 4, 2006 -- BARBARA Walters wants Rosie O'Don nell to stop blogging about "The View." "I didn't like the blog," Walters told Newsweek magazine this week.
"I'm counting on Rosie's intelligence and sensitivity and humor," says the beleaguered show host.
"This is, after all, an entertainment show. It is based on people who like each other and are having a good time, not on people who are arguing and unhappy."
O'Donnell, who joins the cast of the crazy, dysfunctional morning chat show tomorrow, got into trouble when she wrote on her Rosie.com Web site two weeks ago that she wishes she were the boss of "The View."
"I saw the new view promos," she wrote in the idiosyncratic, all-lower case style. "found myself/in the position/i loathe the most/powerless."
Walters said Rosie had sent her flowers and an apology when her complaints about the show hit the newspapers.
Still, given her habit of starting feuds, it will be a miracle if O'Donnell makes it all the way through her one-year, multimillion dollar deal with "The View"
This week, the world will find out if Katie Couric has what it takes to anchor the “CBS Evening News.”The world should keep in mind that it doesn’t take much.
Couric’s worthiness to sit in the same chair as Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and yes, the distinguished and underrated Bob Schieffer, will not be determined in the first few nights of reading the news. That task can be handled by any reasonably articulate human who is professionally coiffed, meticulously made-up and smartly attired.
Couric’s performance — as well as that of any evening news anchor — will be more accurately assessed over time, as events unfold and her skills as a reporter and interviewer become more apparent to those outside the “Today” show universe.
The job has two main requirements: 1) An anchor should have enough journalistic gravitas to make viewers feel as if they’re being informed by someone who holds a place of distinction in his or her field, and 2) He or she should have a personality that projects an image of trust and likeability.
The prognosis on Couric is promising on both counts, but by no means assured.
When Couric begins her first broadcast, she would be well advised to make a passing reference to how privileged and honored she feels about being there. But dwelling on it to the point of obsequiousness would be a mistake. It would call attention to the ballyhoo around her appointment and distract from the job at hand, which is to pick up seamlessly where Schieffer left off. She should simply touch on the hoopla, acknowledge it, then get to the news.
Cypriot Marcos Baghdatis and veteran Andre Agassi greet each other after their second round tussle.Andre Agassi kept his US Open campaign alive and staved off retirement again with a 6-4 6-4 3-6 5-7 7-5 victory over a battling Marcos Baghdatis of Cyprus to reach the third round on Thursday.
Agassi, ending his illustrious career after this 21st successive trip to the Open, extended his Open run by closing out an extraordinary fifth set against a cramping Baghdatis with a service break to finish the three-hour 48 minute contest.
The 36-year-old American squandered a 4-0 lead in the fourth set as the 21-year-old eighth seed slugged his way back on serve with two service breaks and added another to force a fifth set.
Eight-times grand slam winner and double U.S. champion Agassi will next play 112th-ranked German qualifier Benjamin Becker, a straight-sets winner over 30th seed Sebastien Grosjean of France.
September 3, 2006 -- TALK about parental pressure! Andre Agassi's dad, Mike, was tougher on his prodigy son than most. Former rival Jim Courier remembers watching an 11-year-old Agassi fail to meet his father's expectations in a tournament. "He came in fourth. His father took the trophy from him and threw it away," Courier tells Best Life magazine. "That was eye-opening for me." Now the tennis great is ready to redefine what being a dad means. "One of the great things about having children is, you start looking at life through their lens . . . I've never looked at a beach through the lens of a 4-and-a-half-year-old," says the papa of two.
relation), star of the 1950s TV show "The Adventures of Superman." This Friday, Ben Affleck plays Reeves in "Hollywoodland," a film noir look at the mystery of how, and why, the 45-year-old actor wound up with a bullet in his head.
Reeves' 1959 death in his bedroom was ruled a suicide by police - a verdict that, on the surface, made sense, given the actor's despondency over being trapped by the blue-and-red suit.
The Superman role was at first a boon for Reeves, who struggled to find work after a brief but promising role in "Gone With the Wind" (he's in the opening scene).
When he did land the TV series in 1952, Reeves was happy - if a little embarrassed to be parading around in glorified long underwear.
But as time went on, the actor found himself pigeonholed by the part, unable to get other film roles, or separate his onscreen persona from his personal life.
"He had been in a car crash once, and kind of fainted," says Affleck, who researched Reeves. "The newspapers then said, 'Superman Faints at Sight of Own Blood.' People were very flip and snide about him. It was demeaning."
The charismatic Reeves had also been in a longtime affair with the married Toni Mannix, wife of MGM general manager Eddie Mannix.
After Reeves left Toni, "things started to go wrong," says Laurie Jacobson, author of "Dishing Hollywood: The Real Scoop on Tinseltown's Most Nororious Scandals."
"First the brakes go out in his Jaguar - not once, but twice. And once he had parked the car and left his beloved Schnauzer inside. When he came back, the dog had been stolen."
He was also getting up to 20 hang-ups a day, which he called the police about, thinking it was Toni. But when they questioned her, she said she'd been getting the same calls.
Could the instigator have been George's new girl?
Reeves had left Toni for a brash New York ex-showgirl named Lenore Lemmon, and they were planning to get married shortly. "I'm thinking, George looked around and thought, 'I'm making a big mistake,'" says Jacobson.
"He was due to marry Lenore at the end of the week, and still hadn't changed his will. He sure hadn't taken any steps to see that his fiancé would be taken care of."
Jim Nolt, creator of the George Reeves fansite "The Adventures Continue," agrees. After researching Reeves for many years, he concludes that the actor's death was an accidental murder, not suicide.
"I think it was an unfortunate accident," he says. "I think he argued with Lenore. We knew they were arguing earlier at a restaurant."
The short-tempered Lemmon could have picked up the gun Reeves kept in the bedside table and fired it during a struggle, say the murder theorists.
So why did police conclude otherwise?
Jacobson theorizes that Eddie Mannix paid off cops to protect his innocent wife from interrogation.
But officials claim there was never conclusive evidence to support the murder theories. And maybe the actor was suicidal; Jack Larsen, who played Jimmy Olsen on the show, thinks so.
We won't reveal which side the new film takes - but it seems the Reeves case is far from closed.
DEATH OF A SUPERMANA FILM CONTINUES THE QUEST TO SOLVE MYSTERIOUSGorgeous Beyonce might be smarter than her dyed blond locks suggest. On "B'day," her second solo CD, the Destiny's Child diva chooses to cut heads with hard-edged hip-hop honeys rather than further her reputation as a Mariah-Whitney, note-stretching, saccharine R&B diva.
This 11-song album only embraces mushy R&B for the last two tracks. The rest is devoted to upbeat tempos and staccato vocals that would be harsh if the singer had less skill at octave-ripping acrobatics.
One of the big criticisms of Miss B is that she's a one- trick pony, but here she expands her stylistic reach, hustling into Missy Elliott and Mary J. Blige territory. No doubt this will disturb many fan who'll boo-hoo about the dearth of slow-mo wimp ballads. Yeah, we like our pop tarts sweet - you know like the old Beyoncé, who made "Dangerously in Love."
Beyoncé actually sounds dangerously in love, especially on the standout "Ring the Alarm" - a don't-mess-with-this-bitch rant where she half-raps and half-sings as sirens scream and ominous strings moan in the background.
It's a song you can read as a warning to other girls to keep away from her reluctant fiancé, Jay-Z. Speaking of the nuptial-dodging rap mogul, he assists his girl on a pair of songs, "Deja Vu" and "Upgrade U." Both are fast tracks in the vein of her megahit "Crazy in Love."
In addition to the driving hip-hop beats, there's a funk undercurrent that nicely surfaces in "Suga Mama" and "Green Light."
Most people watch The Apprentice USA to see Donald Trump bellow at some hateful morons in a bad voiceover, but for us the fun comes from seeing the sheer contempt that Trump sidekick Carolyn Kepcher has for every other human she meets.
Sadly, though, we won't be seeing any more of Carolyn Kepcher on The Apprentice, because it's being reported that Donald Trump has just fired her for being a bit too starry. Well, anyone watching The Apprentice in Britain will still get to see Carolyn Kepcher on The Apprentice, so long as they can stay up until 2am watching whatever hopelessly out-of-date episode the BBC decide to show us. But you get the idea.
Some non-insomniac British TV readers might not understand the significance of Donald Trump firing Carolyn Kepcher from The Apprentice and his corporation, so here's a British comparison; imagine Alan Sugar firing that meek, slightly anonymous old lady that sits next to him in the boardroom on The Apprentice. Yes, this story is that big.
