LONDON – Charlie Sheen or Muammar Gaddafi? Once thought to have nothing in common, the longtime Hollywood bad boy and embattled Libyan leader have not only topped the headlines this week, but popular culture blogs, news websites, media outlets and social networking sites. The Web has been abuzz with comparisons of both these colorful characters over who offers the better entertainment value for their outlandish quotes and in Gaddafi’s case, his unabashed fashion sense.
A British newspaper offered a much emailed quiz this week with 10 over-the-top quotes and a choice to pick in each case Sheen or Gaddafi, such as “I have defeated this earthworm, with my words.” Unless you have been following every development in each case, you might be surprised at what you get wrong. Sheen’s one-liners have become so popular that he has achieved, through loose lips, a record-setting Twitter run, gaining more than 1 million followers in 25 hours and 17 minutes after joining this week. And The Hollywood Reporter says Sheen is about to become the next possible celebrity to earn endorsements for their tweets.
It may not be close to the roughly $2 million per episode he earned on “Two and Half Men”, but each tweet could get him between $200 and $25,000 – not unlike Kim Kardashian. Sheen’s boast of having “tigerblood” became a hot trending Twitter word. Gaddafi’s choice speeches have become widely followed, too. So, it may not pay in politics to ramble, but in entertainment the looser the mouth, the bigger the payday.
