Here, as Bill O’Reilly might say, is the most ridiculous item of the day.

At a recent concert in London, liberal diva for the ages, Barbra Streisand, held an audience at ransom for £600 a head. That’s roughly $1,230 US dollars.

And even after all that, the Algorian global warming disciple couldn’t even be bothered to take the stage on time, according to ThisIsLondon.co.uk.

That £600 is no small amount. In the UK, that is the rough price of a Sony PlayStation 3 … which will last a lot longer than the concert, although Babs’ endless farewell tour may just outlast it.

Of course, even British libs slobber all over themselves once the diva of all divas opens her aging mouth and croaks out a few notes. Truth is, she hasn’t been The Voice for ages; Celine Dion outperformed her at the Oscars years ago and has never looked back. Of course, Ms. Dion then went on to grow an ego of Babs-sized proportions all on her own.

Of course, neither are my style. I may be 40, but I’d much rather listen to Seattle native Brandi Carlile than either of them, any day. Or Jewel. Hell, in a pinch, I’d even prefer Pink wearing a pair of Air Jordan shoes over hear ears to those two. Get the message?

He’s many things to many people, our Tom Cruise. A film heartthrob. A huge, bankable star. A cultural icon who changes wives every decade or so. Katie Holmes’ cradle-robbing husband. Mentally and emotionally unstable. Nutty religious fanatic. Brooke Shields’ personal nightmare.

And now, trying to win back some credibility in the eyes of a disillusioned public, a Nazi-hater, to boot. Way to shoot fish in a barrel, Tom!

Mr. Cruise’s new movie is the Bryan Singer-directed Valkyrie, which casts Cruise in the role of German national hero Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the brains behind the failed plot to kill Hitler.

What an ingenious plan! Get people to like off-his-rocker Cruise by having him hate someone absolutely no one this side of Mahmoud Ahmadinijad has expressed even the slightest sympathy for in the last 60 years or so. (Not that anyone should… thus the “shooting fish in a barrel” comment.)

A better script choice might have been for Cruise to do the Ricky-Bobby role in Will Ferrell’s recent smash hit, The Ballad of Ricky-Bobby. Having Cruise recall his Days of Thunder years in a silly comedy, hanging around with the NASCAR crowd and finding joy in auto accessories might have been just the ticket to win fans back.

Or better yet, if Cruise really wants to show the world he’s not off his rocker, have him star in an epic film about Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychiatry, that points Freud in a favorable light.

Now that would prove something.

Worse than his showdown with the Half-Blood Prince or the Deathly Hallows, the biggest challenge facing Harry Potter is the publication this weekend of the final book in the seven-book series by J.K. Rowling. For the first five Harry Potter films adapted from the series, fans have had the mystery of not knowing how all their favorite characters will end up, in the end.

That ends this weekend. With the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, all guessing games come to an end. It will be there in print for everyone to read. Will Harry, Ron and Hermoinie live? Or die? Is Snape ultimately good, or is he in league with Valdemort?

All the answers – or at least, all the answers Potter fans are ever going to get – will be known just as soon as the fastest reader can skim through the book this weekend. Unless, of course, they are lazy journalists who’ll flip to the last chapter or so and write up a news story that spoils the fun for everyone.

While millions of readers may be locking themselves away from TV, radio and Internet from the moment they pick up the book until they finish reading the last page, Potter’s movie-goer fans are in for a much longer wait; isolation for the next 2-3 years is simply not a realistic option.

Imagine the horrors Warner Brothers is facing. Almost 2-3 years before they release the book version of Deathly Hallows on the world, wrapping up the acting stints of Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint on the series, fans worldwide will know how the last film is to end.

Because of the finality of the seventh book, keeping a clamp on spoilers is a bigger concern than ever before. If, for example, Harry … or one of the other “big three” characters … does die, consider the impact such foreknowledge might have on the box office receipts of the last two films.

There will always be a core of Potter fans who will faithfully attend the final two movies; but what about the rest? Can the more casual fans keep up their enthusiasm if it becomes confirmed that Harry or someone else dies in the end?

It doesn’t take financial reporting software to figure out that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix might be the last “huge box office” outing for Harry, Hermoinie and Ron. If one of those big three die in the last book, the more casual Potter fans may skip Half-Blood Prince altogether, though they may return for the movie adaptation of the death of a major character (or two… or “more than two,” as Ms. Rowling is fond of saying).

That would mean a box office nightmare for Warner Brothers. Don’t be surprised to see some studio exec insist that the film version, “won’t have the same ending as the book.” Another Idiot move, that…

If dismissed The View hostess Rosie O’Donnell had had her way, octogenarian The Price Is Right viewers would have been future-shocked into the decadence of the 21st century by the bawdy, loud, over-the-top comic.

In her self-serving blog, Rosie admits she wanted to “gay up” The Price is Right. One of her ideas was to replace The Price Is Right girls with some Chippendale-style male prize presenters. Hmm. Lesbian hostess “gays up” a show by … firing females and hiring males? Just what kind of lesbianism is that?

O’Donnell rationalizes endlessly in her rant, saying, “In the end, they turned me down because CBS thought I was too controversial, which wouldn’t have been the case …I just wanted to ‘gay it up.’ I wasn’t going to give away a TV set and rant, ‘So you can watch George Bush and Dick Cheney lie to America on it!’”

But Rosie isn’t heading to Destination: Vacation Home Orlando just yet. Her next gig, according to several media reports, is an extended run on FX’s Nip/Tuck.

Maybe if the Nip/Tuck docs do their job right, they’ll extend the outspoken liberal’s life by 20 years by getting her down to a healthy size. But, uh… it would be unkind to hope otherwise.

One can always count on Rosie to fill the pages of Hollywood Idiocy on a slow news day…