Way back when, in the dim and distant past, women were referred to as "the weaker sex." It's a new day, baby. Female solo artists account for eight of the top 10 albums on The Billboard 200. Susan Boyle leads the pack as I Dreamed A Dream debuts at #1 with sales of 701,000. That's the biggest one-week sales total of 2009. It beats Eminem's Relapse, which sold 608,000 copies in its first week in May. It's also the biggest first-week sales tally in Nielsen/SoundScan history for a debut album by a female artist. It tops Ashanti, which opened with sales of 503,000 in April 2002.

Two male solo artists (Andrea Bocelli and Adam Lambert) round out the top 10. This means that groups and duos are completely shut out of this week's top 10. (The highest-ranking group or duo is the contemporary Christian group Casting Crowns, which dips to #17 with its Christmas album, Peace On Earth.)

Only one debut album in Nielsen/SoundScan history has sold more copies in its first week. That's Snoop Doggy

The Twilight Saga: New Moon was #1 at the box-office over the weekend, three weeks after its soundtrack album reached #1 on The Billboard 200. New Moon is the 23rd movie in the past 28 years to top the weekend box-office listings and also spawn a chart-topping soundtrack.

It's hard enough to reach #1 in just one of these arenas. To top both charts is a remarkable achievement (as evidenced by the fact that it happens, on average, less than once a year.)

The movie/soundtrack tie-in goes through hot and cold spells. We're definitely in an upswing. The Twilight Saga: New Moon is the fourth movie in a year to hit #1 at the box-office and generate a #1 soundtrack. It follows Michael Jackson's This Is It, Hannah Montana: The Movie and the first Twilight. This matches the frenetic pace from July 1997 to July 1998 when Men In Black, Titanic, City Of Angels and Armageddon all hit #1 at the box-office and spawned chart-topping soundtracks.

The weekend box-office charts, dating back to January

The odds are four out of five that history will be made when the Entertainer of the Year is announced at the Country Music Assn. Awards on Wednesday.

Kenny Chesney would become the first five-time winner in the history of the category-and the first act ever to win four years in a row.

Taylor Swift, 19, would become the youngest Entertainer of the Year winner ever-and the first female solo artist to win in this decade.

George Strait, 57, would become the oldest winner ever--and the act with the longest span of wins (20 years).

Keith Urban, who was born in New Zealand, would become the first person born outside of the U.S. to take the award twice.

The fifth nominee is Brad Paisley, who is co-hosting the annual CMA Awards telecast with Carrie Underwood. It would be Paisley's first win in the category, though he wouldn't establish any key records.

A total of 28 acts have walked off with the Entertainer of the Year award since the first CMA Awards in 1967. Twenty of them have been male solo

Michael Jackson's Michael Jackson's This Is It enters The Billboard 200 at #1, with first-week sales of 373,000 copies. This is the biggest weekly sales tally for a Jackson album since HIStory: Past, Present And Future-Book I rang up first-week sales of 391,000 in June 1995. This Is It outpaced the impressive tallies that Number Ones rang up in the weeks after Jackson's death. That greatest hits set posted sales of 339,000 and 349,000 in the first two weeks of July. So, Jackson is still setting records: No other artist has topped the 300,000 weekly sales mark twice this year, much less three times.

Jackson is the first artist to top The Billboard 200 posthumously since The Notorious B.I.G., who scored in March 2007 with Greatest Hits. This Is It posted the biggest posthumous weekly sales tally since an earlier Biggie album, Duets: The Final Chapter, which sold 438,000 copies in one week in December 2005.

This Is It reaches #1 by displacing another theatrical movie soundtrack, The