Mark your calendars: Sunday’s the day to cash in on Dr. Pepper’s long-standing challenge to Axl Rose.

The soft drink maker had said back in March that it’d give a free can of Dr. Pepper to “everyone in America” if Rose’s Chinese Democracy album actually came out in 2008. The album — currently available for free streaming at MySpace Music — officially comes out Sunday.

So that means Sunday, you can grab your free can and celebrate. Dr. Pepper says it’ll post coupons for free 20-ounce sodas on its Web site for 24 hours starting at 12:01 a.m. Sunday. The coupons will be good until the end of next February.

“We never thought this day would come,” Dr. Pepper execs said in a statement. “But now that it’s here, all we can say is: The Dr Pepper’s on us.”

Carbonated refreshment aside, though, does Chinese Democracy live up to its 14-year hype? The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times both have interesting reviews that sum the effort quite well. Slash, however, is thus far staying silent.

There are reports that AAP has obtained a copy of a Coast Guard Repot in which US Coast Guard investigators came to the conclusion that Olivia Newton-John’s ex-boyfriend, Patrick McDermott, more than likely drowned at sea.

The Coast Guard report, which has not been made public until now, also determined McDermott could have survived in the ocean for 14 hours. This means that had the crew of the fishing vessel Freedom, bothered to notice he was missing, sometime that day, or even the next he may have been rescued.

The Coast Guard had refused to provide details of its investigation into the disappearance of McDermott, a Los Angeles cameraman, who dated Australian songstress and actress Newton-John for nine years before he went missing.

“The evidence suggests McDermott was lost at sea,” the Coast Guard report concludes.

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Ludacris will bring holiday cheer to 500 Atlanta families this Thanksgiving, via his non-profit organization, The Ludacris Foundation.

This weekend (November 22 & 23rd), Luda and the foundation’s LudaCares program will distribute Thanksgiving turkeys and pies to underprivileged residents of metro Atlanta.

“This is the foundation’s sixth year giving away turkeys and distributing food boxes for Thanksgiving,” Ludacris revealed. “I especially look forward to this time of year because it allows me directly touch the people we are trying to help.”

On the 22nd the foundation will distribute food items to areas on the Southside of Atlanta.

On the 23rd, Ludacris will be on the North side of Atlanta, distributing more food to local residents in need of a hand this holiday.

The events are private, for recipient families who have been pre-selected by community organizations who have partnered with the Ludacris Foundation.

“Our major focus is youth – at the holiday time we uplift youth by uplifting the family” added Ludacris’ mother Roberta Shields, who is also President of The Ludacris Foundation. “The Foundation helps people year around through our LudaCares Program. We want to do something to help families have a wonderful Thanksgiving Day – It’s a great feeling to sit with your love ones and share the many blessings that God has bestowed upon us. If we add to their blessings in a small way then we have accomplished our goal.”

Sam’s Club, The Schwan Food Company and GM are sponsors of the holiday food boxes that needy families will receive.

The Ludacris Foundation is a 501c3 non-profit organization which was founded in 2001 by Ludacris.

Black Enterprise magazine recently named The Ludacris Foundation as one of the top twenty “Leading Philanthropy Foundations” this year.

Ripley’s Believe It or Not! has acquired a portrait of rapper Eminem made completely out of M&M chocolate candies.

Enrique Ramos, who lives in Orlando, Florida and Mexico, created the portrait of Eminem using more than 1,000 individual M&M’s.

Ramos used over 8 pounds of chocolate to create a portrait of the chart-topping rapper, born Marshall Mathers.

The high calorie portrait - which measures at 40 inches x 30 inches - will hang in the halls of one of Ripley’s museums.

“Our customers have a pretty good eye for art. They won’t be disappointed by Eminem in M&M’s,” said Tim O’Brien, VP of Communications for Ripley’s Believe It or Not! “This thing looks good enough to eat.”

Ramos has also crafted other unusual works of art, including a replicate portrait of by Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, which he painted on the back of a cockroach.

Eminem’s M&M portrait will hang along side other oddities in the Ripley’s musuem, including a picture of Princess Diana made from lint, The Supper in burnt toast and Michael Jackson, done completely in gumballs.

Robots and Underpants

A Bolt of Fresh Air

By Kevin Quigley

November 22, 2008

I’ll never forget the palpable excitement I felt heading into the theater. The year was 2001 and it was summer, and the big event movie for me was Atlantis: The Lost Empire. I’d dragged my friend Tracey to it, even though she doesn’t particularly care for animation, and I could sense some of my excitement was catching. I was literally bouncing up and down in my seat, waiting for the magic to start.

I never stopped waiting. For all its terrific hype and marketing, Atlantis had failed as a creative project. Failed utterly, and when I left the theater, I actually felt betrayed. I wasn’t then a Disney fanatic, but I had loved Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin and The Lion King, I’d liked Mulan a lot more than I had thought I would, and I had (and still have) a special place in my heart for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, still among of the most underrated Disney films. This company gave me Atlantis? Honestly?

Dejected, I mistakenly skipped Lilo & Stitch, instead preferring to wait for the execrable Treasure Planet. My questionable judgment was rewarded with palpable disappointment … and it just didn’t stop there. What followed was a testament to a company that had lost its way. Brother Bear was merely serviceable. Home on the Range was … just intolerable. It seemed strange that someone like Michael Eisner, the then-current CEO of Disney who had spearheaded the second Golden Age of Disney films (starting with The Little Mermaid and ending somewhere around Tarzan) could have steered his company so wrong.

Meanwhile, a tiny subsidiary of Disney, an upstart little company called Pixar, was doing something that Disney couldn’t seem to do at all: it was making quality animated films. What’s more, it was doing it with the relatively new technology of computer animation. Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc: four movies that had been both critical and commercial hits, each one grossing more at the box office than the last. It was obvious that they were doing something right, and that Disney, who distributed their films, was not. Eisner, in what would become a characteristic display of poor judgment, ordered that all traditional animation be stopped in favor of computer animation. What he failed to recognize was that it wasn’t the medium that was the problem, it was the movies.

Around this time, Pixar asked for more money and more control of their product. Disney – with Eisner at the helm – wouldn’t budge. Their distribution agreement had given them almost total control over Pixar’s product. Eisner tried to convince his shareholders that Pixar’s special brand of magic wouldn’t last forever, and that they could stand on their own just fine without Pixar’s help. When Eisner attended a test screening for the new Pixar film, Finding Nemo, he walked out of it chuckling, telling people that it was awful, that it would be Pixar’s first flop. He was wrong.

Finding Nemo went on to become Pixar’s greatest achievement yet, grossing nearly a billion dollars worldwide. Eisner was ousted from Disney, who released their own first computer animated film, an embarrassing little film called Chicken Little. No one was impressed.
More behind the scenes wheeling and dealing happened. It’s actually an interesting story, told most recently in the terrific book The Pixar Story. Something else was happening around this time, too: I was becoming a Disney lunatic. I seem to often glom on to pop culture phenomena while they are at uncharacteristic ebb. This is the only way to explain how I discovered Bruce Springsteen during what is largely considered to be the only “bad period” of his career, the Human Touch/Lucky Town era. Or maybe I just have a sense when things are about to get better.

See, after the dust settled, the fine folks over at Pixar had been given the keys to the Kingdom. John Lasseter, the head of Pixar, was now in the new capacity of Chief Creative Officer at Walt Disney Animation. The last project in the Eisner pipeline – an all right film called Meet the Robinsons – premiered to tepid audiences and mediocre reviews. Now it was time for John Lasseter to prove himself.

In barks Bolt, which premiered today. It’s the story of a celebrity dog so immersed in his own television world that he doesn’t even know he’s an actor. The producers of his television show have seen to it that Bolt believes everything about the world he’s in, a hyperreality in which he has super powers and is on a mission with “his person,” Penny to stop The Green-Eyed Man. (The opening sequences are among the most action-packed I’ve ever seen in a Disney film. It’s contemporary stuff – planes and bombs and highways – but it can easily rival the battle scenes in Sleeping Beauty or The Black Cauldron.)

At the Networks’ insistence, the show decides to shake things up by introducing a cliffhanger. Penny is “kidnapped,” but Bolt has no idea that the kidnapping is staged. Intent on finding Penny at any cost, Bolt breaks away from the set of his show – the only home he’s ever known – and inadvertently finds himself in a box being shipped across the country. When he’s freed, he finds himself alone and lost in New York City … and still believing he’s Bolt the Super Dog.

This is where the movie really kicks into high gear. With the assistance of a sassy alley cat named Mittens (voiced by Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Susie Essman, in pitch-perfect casting) and a pudgy hamster named Rhino, Bolt takes to the road on a cross-country search for Penny. It’s sort of a high concept – The Truman Show meets The Incredible Journey – but Disney manages to make the film rise above mere concept. It’s one of the funniest Disney films I’ve ever seen – there’s a sequence in which Mittens teaches Bolt how to beg for food that had me literally bent over, laughing – but it’s got its share of pathos, too. Rhino may exist mainly for comic relief, but Mittens had a real story behind her. Disney/Pixar enthusiasts might some similarities between Bolt and Toy Story 2 … a healthy comparison.

In the end, Bolt is a funny, sweet, sentimental buddy comedy – nothing more, nothing less. I’m okay with that because the movie did its job in keeping me happily entertained for over an hour. It may not be groundbreaking, but neither were The Rescuers nor Robin Hood, two of my very favorite Disney films.

Bolt marks the first Disney film under Lasseter’s watch, but it won’t be the last. Following this, we’re going to see a return to traditional Disney animation, with the 2-D musical The Princess and the Frog. After that, an entirely different kind of computer animated film with Rapunzel. I’m all in favor of Disney going back to its fairy-tale roots, and Lasseter, a fiend for Disney history, would love to restore his company to its rightful place in pop culture mythology. If Bolt is any indication, Disney is finally, finally on the right track again. It’s never been a better time to be a Disney lunatic.

GUY WANTS MORE TIME WITH SONS OVER MONEY !!

GO GUY !!!

ASSOCIATED PRESS LONDON — The show-business marriage that began in a Scottish castle came to an end in a drab London courtroom Friday as Madonna and Guy Ritchie were granted a preliminary decree of divorce.

Papers released by the court said Madonna petitioned for divorce on the basis of Ritchie’s “unreasonable behavior,” but did not elaborate.

Judge Phillip Waller ruled that he did not need to apply family law in the case _ meaning that he accepted an agreement reached by the couple over their assets and children.

Neither appeared at the brief court session, in which “Ciccone M L v Ritchie G S” was one of 17 cases given a preliminary decree. The divorce can become final after six weeks and a day,.

British news media reported, without identifying the sources of their information, that the couple had reached a settlement that would see the pop superstar keep the majority of her estimated 300 million pound ($445 million) fortune and share custody with Ritchie of their two children: Rocco, 8, and David Banda, 3, who was adopted from Malawi in 2006.

Madonna has a 12-year-old daughter, Lourdes, from a previous relationship with personal trainer Carlos Leon.

Requests for comment from representatives for the couple were not returned.

An agreement on terms would avert an expensive courtroom battle like the one between former Beatle Paul McCartney and model Heather Mills. Mills has said the media coverage of the rancorous divorce had pushed her to the brink of suicide; McCartney compared the process to going through hell.

Madonna and Ritchie, director of “Snatch” and “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” married in December 2000 at Skibo Castle in the Scottish Highlands.

Madonna and Ritchie announced last month they were divorcing. They own homes in London, Los Angeles and New York, and a 1,200-acre (480 hectare) retreat in England.

Barack Obama’s inauguration is set to draw visitors from around the world, Web activists and stars like Oprah Winfrey, Spike Lee and Melissa Etheridge. What’s in the works — and who’ll get to attend.

READ FULL STORY HERE AT WALL STREET JOURNAL

ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON — Global warming could be a boon to Russia, a European country could be overrun by organized crime and the U.S. and its dollar could further decline in importance during the next two decades, says a U.S. intelligence report with predictions for the world in 2025.

The report, Global Trends 2025, is published every four years by the National Intelligence Council to give U.S. leaders insight into looming problems and opportunities.

The report says the warming earth will extend Russia and Canada’s growing season and ease their access to northern oil fields, strengthening their economies. But Russia’s potential emergence as a world power may be clouded by lagging investment in its energy sector, persistent crime and government corruption, the report says.

Analysts also warn that the same kind of organized crime plaguing Russia could eventually take over the government of an Eastern or Central European country. The report is silent on which one.

It also says countries in Africa and South Asia may find themselves unstable and ungoverned, as state regimes collapse or wither away under security problems and water and food shortages brought about by climate change and a population increase of 1.4 billion.

The potential for conflict will be greater in 2025 than it is now, as the world’s population competes for declining and shifting food, water and energy resources.

Despite a more precarious world situation, the report also says al-Qaida’s terrorist franchise could decay “sooner than people think.” It cites its growing unpopularity in the Muslim world, where it kills most of its victims.

“The prospect that al-Qaida will be among the small number of groups able to transcend the generational timeline is not high, given its harsh ideology, unachievable strategic objectives and inability to become a mass movement,” the report states.

The report forecasts a geopolitical rise in non-Arab Muslim states outside of the Middle East, including Turkey and Indonesia, and says Iran could also be a central player in a new world order if it sheds its theocracy.

The report, a year in the making, also suggests the world may complete its move away from its dependence on oil, and that the U.S. dollar, while remaining important, will decline to “first among equals” among other