DO NOT LOOK INTO BRIAN WILSON'S BEARD OR YOU WILL WITNESS THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF YOUR OWN DEATH*: Wow. Wow. Wow.

* Credit, when I can note it, to SFGate's Peter Hartlaub.

AND SHE CAN'T EVEN DRINK LEGALLY YET: The days of mega-debuts on the Billboard album chart seem over, with the biggest selling opening week this week going to Eminem's Recovery, with just under 750k sold. (In contrast, NSync's No Strings Attached sold nearly 2.5M copies just in its first week.) That said, given the media frenzy (OMG! Which song is about Taylor Lautner?), I could see Taylor Swift's Speak Now, which arrives on Tuesday, opening close to a million. The album will ship double platinum--2M copies, and first single Mine sold nearly 300K digital downloads in its opening week (it's now just over 1.1M downloads), with the title track having accumulated 217K downloads in its opening week despite limited non-country radio play. Fearless opened just under 600K, on its way to over 6M copies sold, so it's not that big of a leap, and between the Grammys, the Kanye incident, and general mainstream pop crossover, I think it's very very possible.

I'M WAITING FOR JOAN'S RESPONSE BOOK: Sterling's Gold, the memoirs and observations of Roger Sterling, will be available at your local bookstore in November.

$206 MILLION JUST DOESN'T BUY WHAT IT USED TO: Congratulations to the New York Yankees, whose historic titanicism epicly clutchstoried their legendy meaningfulness all over the hapless Texas Rangers who won the right to dam up a river of money for Cliff Lee to swim in once he hits free agency in two weeks. Seriously, if one's own team can't win the World Series, is there any better consolation prize than the Red Sox missing the playoffs and the Yankees getting eliminated in a mismatch against a team that a month or two ago was sold in a contested bankruptcy auction? The Yankees should have just bought the Rangers in the auction.

YOU LOOK LIKE YOU COULD USE A COLD ONE: Sure, Hollywood types occasionally swear they will move to Canada under certain political circumstances, but rarely do they actually seek political asylum from Hollywood itself.

HEY, LOOK. I'M SORRY I DRAGGED YOU AWAY FROM WHATEVER GAY-SERIAL-KILLERS-WHO-RIDE-HORSES-AND-LIKE-TO-PLAY-GOLF-TOUCHY-FEELY-PICTURE YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING THIS WEEK:  This week's We're Not Calling it Fame Audit Anymore, But It's Totally The Fametracker Fame Audit is of Matt Damon, and while we can discuss the parallels to George Clooney's career (we assume he's smart and making smart choices, and accept that his films don't always make a ton of money but he's unquestionably A Star), there's a broader point about the Star Market that we've before which is worth noting:

Ten years ago, his recent string of low grossers would diminish his power, but today is a different world, where names on a movie poster don't mean what they used to. In the words of an agent, "Maybe he doesn’t guarantee an opening, but he makes a movie a ‘go.’ If you define ‘movie star’ as someone who opens a movie, then there are no movie stars anymore, except maybe Will Smith. But since almost no movie stars are opening movies, the definition of 'star' changes: Nowadays, a movie ‘star’ is someone who gets a movie made, and Damon definitely gets a movie made.” Says a manager, “If you see Matt Damon in a movie, it says, ‘good, classy, intelligent.’ He’s a movie star in that sense.”

Is Will Smith, indeed, the last movie star, or does Seven Pounds (and nothing since) start to knock him out of the running too?  (Sandra Bullock?)

BOBOS ON TELEVISION: Normally, David Brooks' pieces on the op-ed page of the Times are outside the scope of this blog, but when he talks about television, as he does today, it falls squarely within our bailiwick. Part of Brooks' thesis today is that sitcoms in particular have moved away from being "family-based" to shows about "groups of unrelated friends who have the time to lounge around apartments, coffee shops and workplaces exchanging witticisms about each other and the passing scene." Three issues I have with him here:

• Brooks ignores that the most successful, both critically and commercially, sitcom of the past few years is Modern Family, which is unquestionably a "family-based" sitcom, and the current top-rated sitcom on television is Two And A Half Men, which revolves around an admittedly unorthodox and dysfunctional family unit of its own. (He also overlooks that non-family-based sitcoms have a long and distinguished history--Mary Tyler Moore, M*A*S*H, Taxi, and Cheers all were not family-based, and even Dick Van Dyke had plotlines that were workplace-centric.)
• Inexplicably, Brooks, citing a Neal Gabler piece from the LA Times, asserts that new sitcoms Better With You and Raising Hope aren't family-based. Better With You is most assuredly about a family unit (mother, father, two adult daughters, and the daughters' romantic partners), and Raising Hope is largely based on a family unit (though has regulars from outside the unit).
  
• Brooks cites a lot of shows (past and present) that don't involve traditional family units--Friends, Glee, HIMYM, Big Bang Theory. However, almost every one of those shows is centered around characters who because of geography, family discord, or other reasons, may not have a family in the traditional sense near them, and how the group of friends become a family unit of their own (this is particularly true for Friends and HIMYM, and is perhaps the overriding theme of The Office).

Seems to me David Brooks needs to spend a little more time watching TV.