The Couch Potato Report
The Report will appear this week on Thursday and it will contain Dan's Oscar prediction.
Hurley Chased To Star in 'Harry Potter V'
Movie bosses are pursuing Elizabeth Hurley to play a wicked witch in forthcoming sequel Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix. The 39-year-old British beauty is being lined up to play evil Bellatrix Lestrange, a member of Potter nemesis Voldemort's gang, in the fifth film of the popular wizard series. A source says, "The producers have tried to keep details of the cast under wraps but they have always wanted someone beautiful and mystical to play Bellatrix and they reckon Liz can pull it off." Before Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix hits screens audiences will first be treated to fourth film Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, due for release in November.
Having trouble keeping up with all the "Law & Orders"?
Well, a new Web site popped up last week that keeps track of all — and we mean all — the versions of "L&O" that are on every day.
Original and repeats.
The site is called "When is Law & Order On?", and the answer to that question seems to be almost all the time.
From "Criminal Intent" to "SVU" to the original "L&O," the site shows that the series is on sometimes 10 hours a day across NBC, TNT and USA.
It is hard to tell if the site is purely practical — or something of a joke about how creator Dick Wolf's cops-and-courts franchise has taken over TV.
It is full of listings info — including synopses of each episode that will air over the next week.
It even provides a bar chart showing how many episodes a day are on the air. (For the record, there is no such thing as a day without "Law & Order.")
The creator of the bare-bones site gives little information about his identity — or what motivated him to provide this public service.
"My name is William, and one day I thought it would be neat to know when 'Law & Order' is on," he wrote on his site.
'Simpsons' character comes out of the closet
Marge Simpson's sister is out of there.
In a twist that shocked few, chain-smoking Patty revealed she's gay on last night's much-hyped episode of The Simpsons.
As Homer put it: "Big surprise! Here's another surprise -- I like beer!"
Last night's episode, There's Something About Marrying, saw Springfield legalize gay marriage to attract tourists. When Rev. Lovejoy refuses -- "I can't marry two people of the same sex any more than I can put a hamburger in a hot dog bun" -- Homer becomes a minister in the hopes of generating -- as the town's mayor put it "hot gobs of gay green."
In the end, Patty remains single since her bride-to-be turns out to be a man disguised as a woman.
"I like girls!" Patty declares before leaving him/her at the altar. Can a cameo by the ladies of The L Word be far behind?
'Gonzo' Godfather Hunter S. Thompson Kills Himself
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Hunter S. Thompson, a renegade journalist whose "gonzo" style threw out any pretense at objectivity and established the hard-living writer as a counter-culture icon, fatally shot himself at his Colorado home on Sunday night, police said. He was 67.
Thompson's son, Juan, released a statement saying he had found his father dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head at the writer's Owl Creek farm near Aspen.
Thompson, famed for such adrenaline-packed narratives as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," turned his drug and alcohol-fueled clashes with authority into a central theme of his work, challenging the quieter norms of established journalism in the process.
He also cultivated an aura of recklessness, starting with the blurb on his book "Hell's Angels," in which he called himself "an avid reader, a relentless drinker and a fine hand with a .44 Magnum."
A longtime gun enthusiast, Thompson had a shooting range on his property.
"Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family," said the statement released on behalf of Juan and Thompson's wife, Anita.
By his heyday in the 1970s, Thompson had distilled his style of invective-laced, outlaw journalism into a slogan: "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," adapted from a two-part article written for Rolling Stone magazine in late 1971, chronicled Thompson's drug-fueled misadventures in Las Vegas while ostensibly covering a motorcycle race in the desert.
'WRITER OF SIGNIFICANCE'
The book established Hunter as a cult celebrity and became the basis for a 1998 Hollywood adaptation, starring Johnny Depp as Thompson's alter-ego, Raoul Duke.
Thompson's refracted coverage of the Super Bowl and the 1972 presidential race also inspired the 1980 movie "Where the Buffalo Roam," with Bill Murray as the self-proclaimed doctor of gonzo journalism.
He was also caricatured as "Uncle Duke" in the comic strip Doonesbury, right down to his signature aviator glasses and cigarette holder.
Although Thompson's later work got mixed reviews, critics credited him with pioneering a style of invective-laced and hyperbolic political commentary that was uniquely American.
A 1994 essay in Rolling Stone written as an obituary for former President Richard Nixon was typical. At a time when many commentators offered a more generous re-assessment of Nixon's legacy, Thompson called him "a liar, a quitter and a bastard. A cheap crook and a merciless war criminal."
"I think Thompson has remained a writer of significance, because, essentially a satirist, he has displayed an utter contempt for power -- political power, financial power, even showbiz juice," novelist Paul Theroux wrote in 2003.
Raised in a middle-class family in Louisville, Kentucky, Thompson's father died when he was 14, and by 18 he had been jailed for his part in a robbery.
After a stint in the Air Force working as a sports editor, he became a foreign correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune in Puerto Rico.
In 1965, Thompson broke through with an article about the Hell's Angels that he turned into a critically hailed book.
It was his association with Rolling Stone that turned both into literary icons -- even though Thompson initially considered the upstart San Francisco-based magazine "a bunch of faggots and hippies."