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SIMON WOULD STILL SAY "IT'S NOT GOOD ENOUGH': Here is the latest in Sideshow's probing series on American Idol's viselike grip on the American psyche . . . and pocketbook . . . and radio airwaves . . .
The top two songs on Billboard's Hot 100 singles chart this week are Clay Aiken's This Is the Night at No. 1 and Ruben Studdard's Flying Without Wings at No. 2.
Bypassing the hot-button issue of the runnerup's single being ahead of the winner's, we move on to these factoids from Billboard.com:
This is the first time in the chart's 45 years that the top two entries are debuts. This Is the Night is the first song to debut at No. 1 since 1998. It also is the first No. 1 debut since Billboard changed its ranking criteria to include songs not officially released as singles but that get a lot of play on the radio. The Billboard people say that the change makes it "almost impossible" for a song to debut in the top five, much less at No. 1, but that the Idol singles benefited from "massive sales."
Moving on to those sales figures: Aiken's single sold almost 393,000 copies and Studdard's nearly 286,000, according to Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks these things. This Is the Night had the biggest one-week sales since Elton John's Princess Diana tribute, Candle in the Wind 1997.
WE UNDERSTAND THEIR CONCERNS: The latest thing with an image problem in Hollywood is Perrier-Jouet champagne. At least that's what the makers of Perrier-Jouet believe. They let their product be used in the movie The Italian Job and are not happy with the result. They complain that the lead characters are seen "guzzling a bottle . . . like a bottle of Miller Lite," the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
Perrier-Jouet does have its standards. It turned down a chance to be the champagne of choice in Chicago because the drinking was to have been done by Renee Zellweger, not Catherine Zeta-Jones.
IT'S OFFICIAL: Homer Simpson was a landslide winner in the BBC's unscientific online poll to determine who is the greatest American. He finished with 47.17 percent of the 37,102 votes cast. Abraham Lincoln was second with 9.67 percent, followed by Martin Luther King Jr. and Mr. T.
YOU CAN RULE OUT IRONY: Given how the Miss America Pageant railroaded Vanessa Williams out of her 1983 title after Penthouse published pre-Miss America nude pictures of her, we are highly amused to see her included on the pageant's official Web site under "Miss America Milestone Anniversaries." What a difference a successful career makes.