"Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" ruled the box office starting Wednesday and carrying all the way through Sunday. No surprise there, especially when the movie's playing on OVER 9,000 SCREENS. That's the third-widest opening of all time after the most recent "Spider-Man" and "Pirates." Fueling the mania was the buzz around the imminent drop of J.K. Rowling's final novel in the series.

Here are the "Potter" numbers: $44.2 million its opening day, a new record for a Wednesday. $140 million in tickets sold from Wednesday through Sunday, the sixth best five-day start. The weekend grosses were "small" -- $77 million -- but only because the hardcore mouthbreathers had already gone on Wednesday and Thursday. Factor in another $190 million overseas, and "Phoenix" has already hauled in a third of a billion dollars. Wouldn't it be nice if Warner Bros. put some of that to, I dunno, building some new schools or funding alternate energy programs? Oops, I forgot, under Hollywood accounting practices, the movie will never get out of the red.)

The only other new release, crummy horror movie "Captivity," barely showed its face, opening in a scant 1,000 theaters and raking in $1.5 million, doubtless from audiences who were shut out of "Harry Potter" screenings. "Transformers" and "Ratatouille" held their own passably. The excellent Don Cheadle movie "Talk to Me" did nicely in a limited 33-theater rollout, picking up an $11K per-theater-average.

More charts and analysis from Box Office Mojo and Leonard Klady.

The excitement over David and Victoria Beckham's arrival in Los Angeles from the U.K. is mysterious for sure. (As Victoria put it with a certain understatement, "We're not Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.") It is also a quaint throwback to pure glamor. (Never mind that we're now outsourcing that, too.) They don't appear to have any causes or crippling complications. So far there's no scandal, just work and that W magazine layout. He will play soccer for the Galaxy. She will play at being a Spice Girl again.

That these two are instant Hollywood royalty is like something from the 1950s or the 1960s. But it also suggests that our own stars might be to complex and calculating for this kind of straightforward adulation. Celebrity worship has now become a moral issue: Paris Hilton is only slight less hateable after prison. The Jolie-Pitts seem to be using their fame to shame us into gazing at international atrocity instead. They're jaded about us. We're jaded back.

Posh and Becks have endured their share of scandal at home. Here they're just two kids trying to make a go of it. They indulge our old-fashioned shallowness. We'll wear his jersey. Or a co-worker's kid's classmate will. But you get it: Despite their tenuous Hollywood bona fides (Beckham was conspicuously absent from "Bend it Like Beckham" and the less said about "Spice World" the better), we're rooting for them both to stay beautiful distractions and teach their new neighbors how to relax.

The excitement over David and Victoria Beckham's arrival in Los Angeles from the U.K. is mysterious for sure. (As Victoria put it with a certain understatement, "We're not Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.") It is also a quaint throwback to pure glamor. (Never mind that we're now outsourcing that, too.) They don't appear to have any causes or crippling complications. So far there's no scandal, just work and that W magazine layout. He will play soccer for the Galaxy. She will play at being a Spice Girl again.

That these two are instant Hollywood royalty is like something from the 1950s or the 1960s. But it also suggests that our own stars might be too complex and calculating for this kind of straightforward adulation. Celebrity worship has now become a moral issue: Paris Hilton is only slight less hateable after prison. The Jolie-Pitts seem to be using their fame to shame us into gazing at international atrocity instead. They're jaded about us. We're jaded back.

Posh and Becks have endured their share of scandal at home. Here they're just two kids trying to make a go of it. They indulge our old-fashioned shallowness. We'll wear his jersey. Or a co-worker's kid's classmate will. But you get it: Despite their tenuous Hollywood bona fides (Beckham was conspicuously absent from "Bend it Like Beckham" and the less said about "Spice World" the better), America is rooting for them both to stay beautiful and keep us distracted.

It helped create Detroit as we know it today… that is, a very… ummm… a very dark city (link via AmRen):
The toll: 43 dead, hundreds injured, thousands arrested, more than 2,500 stores looted or burned, and 1,000 families homeless.
Ah, the good ‘ole days when oppressed blacks took to the streets to loot, burn, and […]

Last week, I bought a used laptop on Ubid.com for $411. It’s a Hewlett Packard DV6000, 1.8ghz, 512MB, 80GB, with DVD/CDRW & Windows XP (I purposely did not want anything with Vista.) Not a bad price. I did not have to establish my credit rating with the seller. I simply had to save $411 […]

In the Jukebox this week we have an eclectic mix of swell songs that I’ve recently discovered:

West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band – Obviously Bad (1966): Cool instrumental by this obscure late ‘60s band.
Donovan – Wear Your Love Like Heaven (1967): One of my favorite Donovan songs, a psychedelic gem.
Zodiac – Aries (1967): From the […]

Thirty years ago, on the evening of July 13, 1977, NYC experienced a huge electrical blackout for 25 hours. So, how does the NYT reflect on that evening? Why, by romantically depicting it as both good and bad, yin and yang, just like life itself.
On Monday, we asked City Room readers for their reminiscences of […]