Pulling a name out of a box

Salem, Va. Legend has it that the Statler Brothers got their name from a box of tissues.

That seemed only fitting after their final concert Saturday night: Much of the audience was bathed in tears.

After 38 years of touring, the down-home boys from Staunton are packing up and retiring from the road to spend more time with their families.

According to one popular story, band member Harold Reid came up with the quartet’s name after spotting a box of Statler Tissues in a hotel room.

“We might have been called the Kleenex Brothers,” Reid has often said.

Talent scouting

http://caroline.warnerbros.com/

Milwaukee They came with guitars, Hawaiian-patterned skirts, spoons, their voices and a sense of humor.

About 60 people, mostly amateur comics and singers, auditioned Saturday in front of Caroline Rhea for a chance to appear on her talk show and win a new SUV.

“I was really impressed by a lot of people,” said Rhea.

“The Caroline Rhea Show” is looking for dancers, singers, standup comedians and anything out of the ordinary at auditions and in videotapes contestants send in.

Successful candidates will appear on her show in November and viewers will vote for their favorites. The winner, to be announced Nov. 27, gets a moment in the limelight and a 2002 Dodge Durango SLT.

Poetic injustice

London The daughter of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has accused her stepmother of withholding money Hughes wanted her to have.

Hughes’ will left all of his $2.2 million estate to his widow, Carol Hughes, when he died of cancer in 1998. But the one-time British poet laureate’s daughter, Frieda Hughes, wrote in The Sunday Telegraph that her father also left a letter instructing Carol Hughes to share proceeds from sales of his books with his two children and his sister, Olwyn.

Frieda Hughes, 42 and also a poet, said her stepmother sent her a check six months after Ted Hughes’ death for a portion of his works’ earnings, but subsequently made clear that she felt she was not legally bound by his letter.

Fact stranger than fiction

New York Courtney Love has been telling pals that she’s devastated over the bizarre death of her Pomeranian, according to The New York Post. Apparently, several years ago when Love had her breast implants removed, she kept them as “souvenirs.” All was fine until her dog ate one of the souvenirs and keeled over.

We kid you not.

“They weren’t her implants, they were bootleg implants from Mexico,” Love’s rep said. “The dog ate one and died.”