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True, or not true?!?

Irish radio says Van Morrison denies baby report
DUBLIN (Reuters) ñ Irish state broadcaster RTE said on Thursday it had received a statement from Van Morrison denying widespread media reports that the singer had fathered a child with his manager.
The statement published on RTE’s website www.rte.ie says that reports which said Morrison had fathered a child with Gigi Lee were the result of a “hacking attack” on the 64-year-old Belfast-born singer’s website.
“The comments which appeared on my website did not come from me,” said the statement that RTE published as signed by Van Morrison. “They are completely and utterly without foundation.”
Van Morrison and his official representatives were not immediately available for comment.
The www.vanmorrison.com website on Thursday contained only links to his other sites on youtube.com, facebook.com and myspace.com and a note that a new website was coming soon.
Earlier on Thursday, John Saunders, a Dublin-based executive at public relations agency Fleishman-Hillard, told RTE radio and Reuters that Van Morrison had told him over the telephone the reports he had fathered a baby were false.
“He has said to me on the phone today, he has said it’s not true,” Saunders told Reuters. “He has never heard of this person Gigi, the name means nothing to him.”
Saunders said that Van Morrison was a long-time friend but not a client of his agency.
Newspapers and agencies reported on Monday that Morrison had become a father for the fourth time after his manager gave birth to a son described as “the spitting image of his daddy.”
“Gigi (Lee) and Van Morrison are proud to announce the birth of their first born son, George Ivan Morrison III,” said reports sourced to the website www.vanmorrison.com.
Asked why Morrison had waited several days to deny the statement, Saunders said that the singer was not good at handling his public relations.
“Van is a mystery man in many ways, his fans will testify to that,” Saunders told RTE.
Morrison, whose 45-year career spans soul, blues, jazz, R&B and country, has a 39-year-old daughter, singer-songwriter Shana Morrison, from his first marriage to Janet “Planet” Minto and two other children with Irish socialite Michelle Rocca.
“For the avoidance of all doubt and in the interests of clarity, I am very happily married to Michelle Morrison with whom I have two wonderful children,” said the statement attributed to Morrison on the RTE website.
Famed for such tunes as “Gloria” and “Brown Eyed Girl,” he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993 but declined to attend the ceremony.

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I like music!!

Stefani, Mario capture sound of 2005
Downloads were Gwen’s world, while a super Mario hit dominated radio in the first half of 2005.
Gwen Stefani’s Hollaback Girl outsold all competition as the top downloaded track so far this year. Stefani also scored the No. 8 track with Rich Girl. Total download sales hit 159 million, triple last year at this time.
Teen R&B crooner Mario’s Let Me Love You easily topped the radio airplay list with a total audience of 2.6 billion (determined by total plays and listeners at radio nationwide) over the past 26 weeks. But his reign is not likely to last out the year.
Mariah Carey’s We’ll Be Together, which shattered total audience records in June, reached No. 6 for the first half on only three months’ worth of airplay. It should soon surpass Mario’s total and is the song to beat for the entire year.
The download top 10 continues to strongly reflect radio’s hits. But radio leans more toward R&B and hip-hop: 51% of the top 100 first-half hits, compared with 20% for pop, 19% for country and 10% for rock.
Radio’s strong R&B/hip-hop orientation may be waning: At the end of 2004, 61% of the hits were R&B/hip-hop records.
Meanwhile, the top 100 downloads are more balanced: 33% R&B/hip-hop, 32% pop, 31% rock (and 4% for country).
Each of the top 10 download tracks reached the top 20 at some point this year on the national airplay chart. And radio’s biggest hits generally become top-priority downloads. Nine of the top 10 radio hits ranked among the top 40 download tracks.
Although the download track list is rigorously oriented toward current hits, the occasional intriguing older title does crop up. Green Day’s 1997 hit Good Riddance (The Time of Your Life) nearly cracked the top 50, likely boosted by the success of songs from the group’s most recent album, American Idiot.
Also showing up in the top 200: Oasis’ Wonderwall, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama, Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, Lee Ann Womack’s I Hope You Dance, The Eagles’ Hotel California and Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby.

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Go Leafs, go!!

CBC’s NHL ratings among best ever
TORONTO (CP-AP) — The Stanley Cup final was a bonanza for the CBC and a bust south of the border.
Tampa Bay’s 2-1 win over the Calgary Flames in Game 7 drew an average of 4.862 million viewers Monday night, making it the second-highest rated NHL game ever for CBC. Only coverage of Game 7 of the 1994 final between Vancouver and the New York Rangers drew more, with 4.957 million tuning in for the Rangers’ 3-2 win.
But those numbers include pre-game and post-game coverage. The game itself Monday drew 5.560 million Canadians, which was up from 5.404 million in 1994.
The entire final averaged 3.735 million viewers — the highest-rated final round since the ratings were introduced in 1989. Last year’s final between Anaheim and New Jersey averaged 1.507 million.
All four rounds of the 2004 playoffs averaged 2.154 million viewers, up 35 per cent from last season’s 1.593 million.
The record audience for a sporting event in Canada, with more than 10 million English and French-language CBC viewers, was the Canadian men’s gold medal hockey win over the U.S. at the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics.
In the U.S., the average rating for the five Stanley Cup final games on ABC were the lowest since the network began broadcasting the final again in 2000.
Monday’s game got a 4.2 rating with a 7 share. That’s down nine per cent from the 4.6 with an 8 for New Jersey’s 3-0 win over Anaheim in Game 7 last year — the highest-rated NHL game since broadcast networks began carrying the final in 1998.
Still, the rating for Monday’s game was well above the five-game average of 2.6 with a 5 share.
The rating is the percentage of all homes with TVs, whether or not they are in use. Share is the percentage of homes with TVs in use. Each rating point represents about 1.08 million households.
The U.S. ratings were anemic throughout the series. The first two games were on ESPN, with Game 1 tying for the lowest-rated Stanley Cup final game on the cable network since 1990.