HollywoodIdiocy.com

CBS drama Jericho seems to be down for the count again; the show is largely rumored to be headed for the cancellation bin, despite delivering a second season that was far more even, suspenseful and interesting than the first season proved to be. So forget the teak outdoor furniture and start investing in nuts to send to CBS again?

Not likely. While the nut strategy worked last season, it’s unlikely that the show will be saved this time; thanks to the strike-shortened season, any show the networks have any amount of faith in at all are being renewed. If Jericho isn’t among that number, its chances of being picked up for a third season are about as remote as the chances of Floyd “Money” Mayweather would have in a real fight, outside of a WWE ring, against Paul “The Big Show” Wight.

Despite a huge, $20 million challenge from Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns, as well as $10 million bows from Shutter and Drillbit Taylor, it was Dr. Suess’ immortal Horton Hears A Who that remained atop the weekend box office charts this weekend, raking in another $25 million. The animated film’s total is now at $86.47 million and growing, certainly making the film with the $85 million investment required to make the movie.

Horton’s search for the Whos of Whoville might have been aided these days by GPS tracking, but even such technological advances won’t recover the $105 million investment it took to make 10,000 BC, which thus far has only made $76 million and is sinking fast.

By far, the worst bow this week belonged to Under the Same Moon, which debuted at 10th with only $2.6 million.

You can dress Britney Spears up in equestrian clothing or bury her in a nurses’ garb, and nothing changes; wherever she goes, the Pop Tart causes chaos. Shortly after announcing the casting of the unstable Spears in a small supporting role on CBS’ How I Met Your Mother, Alicia Silverstone, selected recently for a multi-episode arc that may have revealed her as the long-awaited Mother of the show’s title, canceled her commitment to the show.

Silverstone’s reps reportedly fears Spears’ notoriety would overshadow Silverstone’s appearance on the show, which isn’t far-fetched. The latest word is that the female doctor Silverstone was slated to play will now be portrayed by Scrubs’ Sarah Chalke, and the storyline will center more on Spears’ character.

The good news is that Silverstone remains open to appearing on How I Met Your Mother, and the show’s creators have stated they hope to create a different character for her soon. Meanwhile, the doctor who seemed destined to become “Mother” now will be reconceived as just another ship that passes through Ted’s long night of the soul, since Chalke’s schedule was too full to accommodate anything more than one episode, since Scrubs is still in production and may even be renewed for a previously-believed-to-be-unlikely eighth season, be it on NBC or ABC.

With over $45 million in gross receipts, the celebrity-voice-filled Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears A Who! easily won the weekend box office war, drawing in around $29 million more than its nearest competitor, 10,000 BC, which took in only $16.4 million in its second week of release.

Few people made a directbuy of tickets to one of the other two main first-week releases, Never Back Down, which drew only $8.6 million, but the most disappointing bow was Doomsday, which was indeed doomed when it debuted to only $4.7 million, good enough only for seventh place.

Underdog favorite Juno stayed within the Top 15 movies, adding $1.2 million to its $139 million plus total over 15 weeks of release.

The fourth-season debut of Ghost Hunters on the SciFi Channel, scored record ratings for a regular-season broadcast, notching a 1.9 Neilsen, making the broadcast tops among all cable channels last Wednesday night. Boasting a more scientific, “attempt to disprove it all” approach than other paranormal investigation shows, Ghost Hunters focuses on the adventures of Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson’s “The Atlantic Paranormal Society,” known popularly as TAPS, as they investigate a variety of reported hauntings, trying to measure alleged paranormal activity at such sites.

Only broadcast nets scored biggest numbers in that time period, which makes Ghost Hunters the current darling of cable netlets owned by parent corporation GE under the NBC-Universal banner. If the ratings hold, expect Ghost Hunters to remain on SciFi for some time to come. You don’t need a Jaeger LeCoultre to tell you that right now, on SciFi, it’s Ghost Hunters time.

Two of the most central characters to the TV show Smallville - Kristin Kruek’s Lana Lang and Michael Rosenbaum’s Lex Luthor - won’t be returning next year, the show’s eighth season, according to TV Guide’s online edition. While they are negotiating how many episodes they will actually appear in, in season eight, neither will be weekly regulars after this strike-shortened season comes to an end.

Since TV Guide’s Michael Ausseillo is generally more reliable than life insurance quotes, the question now remains whether the show can maintain its popularity without two of the show’s “core four” returning.

The “core four” for Smallville have been Clark, Lana, Lex and Chloe for the past seven seasons; that list used to include a fifth, Pete Ross played by Sam Jones III, who exited after the third season. While the show can theorhetically survive without Kruek’s Lana - who, after all, is not Superman’s bride in the comics, and the show already has her replacement, Erica Durance’s Lois Lane, in place for the past several seasons - but replacing Rosenbaum’s Luthor could be the real problem.

From the debut episode, the emotional core of the show has been the almost brother-like friendship between Clark and Lex, and the devolution of that friendship into a bitter enmity that sets them up as future rivals. There is no established replacement who can play the foil to Clark at the same level that Rosenbaum’s Luthor is able to, setting up the potential for the show to become, once more, a “villain of the week” melodrama, much as it was in the first season.

Of course, the show has survived multiple exits; John Schneider’s Johnathon Kent was written out via a character death in season five, while Annette O’Toole’s Martha Kent has been largely absent throughout the current season, the show’s seventh. Yet with only Chloe Steel and Clark Kent surviving from the first season to next fall’s eighth season, it appear more likely than ever that next season could be the show’s final bow.

You might need Panoptx to read the fine print here, but despite winning the weekend box office war in overwhelming fashion this week, 10,000 B.C., which took in an estimated three-day total of $35 million, is being considered a disappointment. That’s because studios were shooting for at least $40 million if not more.

To be honest, my wife and I considered going to 10,000 B.C. this weekend, but ultimately chose to go to Jumper instead, which we hadn’t seen yet, seemed potentially less violent, had a PG-13 rating, and turned out to be a lot of fun and certainly sequel-worthy. However, Jumper slipped all the way down to eighth place this week, raking in only $3.5 million in it’s fourth week of release. The film’s made $75 million to date, but had a lofty, $85 million budget.

Due to it’s hard R rating, Semi-Pro dropped swiftly to fourth place in its second week, adding only $5.9 million to its total, bad news for Will Ferrell. College Road Trip took second place with $14 million while Vantage Point held steady at third in its third week of release. Juno slipped to 13th in its 14th week of release and has an impressive $137.9 million in total box office to date. The Bank Job was a flop, debuting at fifth place, while Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day did an impressive per-screen average in limited release.

OK, this could just be the grape juice talking, but the word on the street is that actress Alicia Silverstone could become the mother everyone’s been waiting to meet on the CBS sitcom, “How I Met Your Mother.” In fact, I’d almost be willing to wager a month’s worth of sleepnig on a foam mattress on it, and I’m an air mattress addict!

Here’s the clues so far: Silverstone is indeed signed to a “multi-episode arc” when production resumes on the CBS sitcom in a few weeks. The post-strike episodes have a chance of being the last ones to air, because CBS has not yet renewed the show - even though it’s renewed several others so far. Plus, the producers have promised we’ll meet “mother” this season; if the show is indeed canceled for some strange reason, this would also give producers a chance to wrap the storyline up in a tidy way.

So, all that seems to point to Silverstone being the mother in question. And here I was hoping, given the presence in the regular cast of Buffy alumn Allyson Hannigan, that “mother” would turn out to be Sarah Michelle Geller. Oh well.

Although they had a splashy launch and huge promises of making available every song ever recorded in the known universe past, present and future, Qtrax has, at least so far, failed to deliver on all the hype and promises. But I’ve discovered a site that pretty much delivers most of what Qtrax promised, and in rare cases, more, only instead of still wrestlnig with record labels over download rights, this company is already up, running and delivering the goods: free, legal music downloads … right now.

I’m speaking, of course, about SpiralFrog.com. Like Qtrax, you have to download a player/song manager tool in order to use the service. Like Qtrax, SpiralFrog.com asks you to endure commercials and other ad content while downloading. Like Qtrax, SpiralFrog.com is funneling most of the funds from their ads back to the artists. The biggest difference is, Qtrax doesn’t offer a single song for downloading yet, either free and legal or otherwise. By contrast, SpiralFrog.com offers over 1 million songs and videos already, with more added all the time as they continue the types of label-by-label, artist-by-artists negotiation deals that Qtrax is only just beginning.

One million songs to choose from is superior to no songs to choose from, no matter how big Qtrax’s promises may be. Until Qtrax delivers, SpiralFrog.com is a far more relevent choice, because it’s available now.

Here’s the deal with SpiralFrog.com. There’s no membership fee. No per-song download fee. No hidden charges. No credit card information being given out. They don’t make their money off your pocketbook.

What IS going on with SpiralFrog.com is that you can only download one song at a time, during which you are treated to ad impression refreshes, which is what helps SpiralFrog.com earn income that, in turn, goes to the hard-working artists whose labors of love are downloading to your desktop and, usually, into your MP3 player.

Downsides? There’s only a few.

1) The DRM software added to each SpiralFrog.com song requires you to synch to SpiralFrog.com no less than once a month, or the songs will stop working until you do.

2) SpiralFrog.com’s still missing a lot of major artists and songs, though they’re working on it.

3) SpiralFrog.com is neither iTunes nor Zune compatible. However, the service works with most other MP3 players, including the new Panasonic P10, which has iPod Touch-style functionality. So there’s that.

That’s not a lot of downsides. In fact, staying at a cheap hotel Las Vegas-style is more of a pain.

In the end, while it may not be as huge as Qtrax promises it will be, one day, for now SpiralFrog.com’s 1 million song-and-video catalog is about 1 million selections more than long-suffering Qtrax users have to choose from right now. SpiralFrog.com’s a great choice; it delivers today what Qtrax can only promise, yet not deliver.