I know we’re supposed to hate our cable companies, but Comcast is really trying hard to stay one step ahead of the competition:

LaChania Govan made dozens of phone calls to the cable company to complain about service, but she said she was never rude.

So the Elgin, Ill., woman was shocked when her bill came and had the insult printed where her name should be.

Instead of her name, the bill had the “b” word printed on it.

Wednesday, Comcast said it fired two employees for the incident and also issued an apology to Govan.

“We are appalled by this treatment of our customer and want to extend our sincerest apologies” to LaChania Govan, the company said Wednesday in a statement. “This is not the way Comcast does business.”

Comcast officials offered Govan two months of free cable to try to make amends.

But she’s canceled her Comcast account, anyway.

Good for her. DirecTV must love this.

At least that’s what Simon says:

[Simon] Cowell’s mobile rings every few minutes. Sometimes it’s his mother, Julie, calling from her home in Brighton to tick him off for being too rude during the first episode of the new series of The X Factor (The ITV show attracted 6.6 million viewers - 40 per cent of the audience - on Saturday night.) Sometimes, it’s a US TV network, asking whether he is ready to accept a $25 million offer to host his own chat show.

With another hit show under his belt and lucrative offers from Hollywood, Cowell has every reason to smile. So it is unusual to hear him dismiss the X-Factor as “culturally insane” and his own talents “crap”, then saying his career is “one bad move away from being totally f*****”. […]

“If you are in a show that is successful in America, everybody loves you. I get these offers all the time which are so tempting but I have to keep reminding myself that I would be rubbish at all of them and, if I did them, I’d make a complete arse of myself and my career would be over.”

Cowell has been offered the chance to host his own chat show by all the big US networks. One network offered him $25 million to do whatever he wanted, in any hour on the schedule. “I could have dressed up in women’s clothing and cavorted with barnyard animals and they would have said: ‘Great. We love it.’”

Sounds like Simon’s been meeting with NBC.

It sure looks like Howard Stern is still the king of all [edit: premium subscription] media:

In Demand Network on Wednesday said it has a three-year exclusive deal to begin airing a televised version of popular shock jock Howard Stern’s ribald radio show on one of its video-on-demand channels starting later this year.

The deal, which comes 10 months after Sirius Satellite Radio agreed to pay Stern $500 million to leap to satellite radio, means that Stern, who became a poster boy for bad behavior on U.S. airwaves, will by January no longer be heard or seen in original shows on free radio or basic cable. […]

A spokesman for privately held In Demand, whose investors include cable operators Comcast Corp., Cox Communications and Time Warner Inc., said it will likely launch something akin to a “Howard Stern Channel” later this year. Viewers will pay a monthly subscription fee to their cable operator to watch the shows.

I wouldn’t be suprised if a lot more than just the gloves come off…

Did she or didn’t she?

FOX TV seems pretty determined to get to the bottom of this sleazy story:

Taking a page from Washington, the producers of “American Idol” and Fox TV hired an independent counsel to determine whether judge Paula Abdul had an affair with a contestant on the hit talent show.

“Any allegations against this show we take quite seriously,” Fox Entertainment President Peter Liguori said Thursday, calling the competition’s credibility “extraordinarily important to us.”

Liguori refused to say if Fox and producers Fremantle Media and 19 Television would fire Abdul if the claims by Corey Clark, an unsuccessful contestant on season two, were found to be true.

The probe’s results are due soon and will be made public, Liguori said in an appearance before the Television Critics Association.

It looks like someone’s gonna get screwed (no pun intended).