Thanks to Galley friend S.B. who sends us this link to a Daily Mirror story on a boy born yesterday and named Damian. The mother is a fan of The Omen and thought it would be a great idea to induce labor so that the baby could be born on 06/06/06. Damian supposedly weighed in at 6 lbs. 6 oz. but was delivered at 6:59 am.

So what’s next? Dobermans? A tattoo on his scalp? Will he take up ice hockey? Please let this be the end of it.

I don’t care what you say, soccer is a real sport.

Of course, this video must be fake. But it sure is funny. Would have been funnier if was the French team, though.

Yes, for my fellow End of Times/End of Days/Armageddon/Deep Impact observers, today is truly significant–the sixth day of the sixth month of the sixth year of the millennium. Could a baby born today be the anti-Christ? Now before we do something rash, let me offer these thoughts: Being born on 06/06/06 is bad luck, but I wouldn’t make much more of it than that. Unless the child is a boy and his parents name him Damian. Secondly, there is some dispute over the anti-Christ being born on 06/06/06 or being conceived on the said date. If it is the latter, I urge everyone to abstain until midnight.

But what more appropriate timing for the release of The Omen with Julia Stiles? From what a friend who previewed the remake tells me, it is pretty much the same film. Except it is Stiles instead of Lee Remick and Liev Schreiber instead of Gregory Peck. Most disappointing is the absence of the chorus chanting “Damian!” and “Sanctus! Dominus!”

But does this also mean we will be treated to remakes of The Omen II and III? Will we again be subjected to horrors such as the kid trapped beneath the ice pond and the woman who gets her eye gouged out by a crow before she gets smacked by an 18-wheeler? (If you saw these films in your youth, thanks to HBO, you never forget them.)

And does anyone remember who played Damian in The Omen III? (Hint: He never got to go to Montana.)

And how the ill-fated David Arquette wrestling movie did a promotional tie-in with the then Turner-owned WCW?

It looks like Nacho Libre is doing a similar tie-in with the WWE. Do we think it will work?

Galley Reader E.H. sends along this fantastic video of the Trek-era William Shatner doing a dramatic reading of Rocket Man.

Wow.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVbv6r_tKnE]

If you’re not doing anything right now, go turn on the Clijsters-Hingis match on ESPN2. Hingis went down 5-2 in the first set and fought off 3 set points before losing in a tie-break, 7-5.

This has the look of a classic match. Plus, there’s no beating Dick Enberg in the morning.

Update: Never mind. Hingis collapsed in the second.

Seth Stevenson comes to love Martina Hingis:

I’ve also come—to my own great shock—to adore her style of play. It turns out I got bored with all those power hitters on the women’s tour. What fun is there in watching cannon forehands, flat and low and hard, one after another? Half the players seem to come from a mysterious genetics lab somewhere in Russia, which pumps out 9-foot-tall blondes who do nothing but grunt, crush the ball cleanly down the line, and occasionally attempt an ill-advised drop shot. Meanwhile, Hingis’ arsenal includes some gorgeous, looping topspins; bedeviling slices; pinpoint placement; and sudden changes of pace. As with her countryman Roger Federer (though she lacks his floating, ghostlike movement around the court), it’s Hingis’ tremendous variety that makes her such a treat to watch.

Jennifer Aniston is omnipresent in the culture and she just had a bona fide moviestar launch of The Break-Up–which grossed $38M despite bad reviews and misleading marketing. Give her credit: She opened this picture basically by herself.

But how surprised would you be to learn that this is only the fourth time she’s opened a movie over $10M:

The Break-Up-$38M
Derailed-$12M
Along Came Polly-$27M
Bruce Almighty-$68M

Bruce Almighty is a Jim Carey vehicle and Along Came Polly was a Ben Stiller vehicle designed as a pseudo-sequel to Something About Mary. What the success of The Break-Up shows is that, if an actor is forced on audiences enough times, eventually they’ll get a hit.

Ben Affleck is another great example of this. After the slow-burn success of Good Will Hunting, Affleck was allowed to ride shotgun alongside Bruce Willis and Michael Bay in Armageddon, after which Hollywood assumed that he was a new leading man. He then bombed five consecutive movies, the biggest opening gross of which was $13.5M for Forces of Nature. He helped Pearl Harbor underperform, bombed again with Changing Lanes, and finally opened The Sum of All Fears to a respectable $31M.

You see similar patterns with Josh Hartnett (who hasn’t actually gotten his hit yet) and the former Mr. Jennifer Anniston, Brad Pitt, who after being pulled along by Tom Cruise’s coattails in Interview with the Vampire, ran off a string of 8 leading roles without opening a movie above $15M.

Most actors don’t get all of these extra chances. But the lesson to studio executives is clear: No matter how many failures a “star” has, if you keep giving them work, eventually they’ll have a breakout hit.