Michael Jackson's untimely death has been a boon to his record sales: The first nine spots on the albums chart of Billboard's Top Pop Catalog feature Jackson-related CDs, an unprecedented achievement. (Eight titles are by Jackson himself; the ninth is a Jackson 5 compilation.)

Last week, Number Ones was his only CD on the chart, at No. 20, selling 4,000 copies. According to sales figures from Nielsen SoundScan, this week, the CD sold 108,000 units - an increase of 2,600 percent - to land at No. 1.

MJ's The Essential Michael Jackson and Thriller are at No. 2 and No. 3, with 102,000 and 101,000 copies respectively. Off the Wall, from '79, has re-entered the chart at No. 4 with 33,000, while the Jackson 5's The Ultimate Collection is at No. 5.

Collectively, MJ's solo works alone sold 415,000 copies this week, a full 40 percent more than sales of his entire catalog all year (297,000).

The rest of the top nine are: Bad from 1987, Dangerous from 1991, 2001's Greatest Hits: HIStory - Volume 1, and Jackson's own Ultimate Collection from 2004.

The 10th slot on the chart also belongs to an oldie: a reissue of the Woodstock movie soundtrack.

Ryan: A bad lot

Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O'Neal's jailed son Redmond, 24, was granted leave to attend his ma's funeral Tuesday. So where was his half-brother, Griffin?

Ryan tells Inside Edition he banned Griffin "because he's a bad guy."

Griffin says he drove 300 miles to be there. "She's mad right now that I'm not in there," he said of his mom.

Adding a Duff to the mix

At last, CW's Gossip Girl is getting an injection of class. Entertainment Weekly Online says singer-actress Hilary Duff will join the show beginning with the Oct. 5 episode. H.D. (a great modernist poet in her own right) will bring poetry and light to the show as a film star who wants to have a normal college life at NYU.

Fans in powerful places

Doubt Duff's awesomeness? Not Sen. John McCain's daughter, Meghan, 24. She thinks so highly of Ms. Duff that she wants H.D. to play her in the big-screen version of her forthcoming memoirs. "I think she's really hot - hotter than me - but I'd still want her to play me," Meghan tells the New York Daily News.

Meghan says the tome is half memoir, half political tract. "It's like Primary Colors meets Tori Spelling's sTORI Telling," she says, adding that it will, like, totally examine "what it means to be a progressive Republican in the party today."

Country music nutrition

So what does country star Aaron Tippin, who once advised that "You've Got to Stand for Something," stand for?

Nutritional supplements, dude.

USAtoday.com says the Florida-born 51-year-old warbler, whose '90 single became an anthem for Gulf War soldiers, is marketing his own brand of bodybuilding supplements, Aaron Tippin Nutrition (ATN). "I was a fanatic about bodybuilding," Aaron tells country news site The Boot (www.theboot.comCQ). "It was an obsession that drove me."

Tameka disputes report

In court papers filed this week in Fulton County Superior Court in Georgia, Usher's wife disputes the megastar's claims that the couple have been living separate lives since July '08.

Tameka Raymond says she "had every reason to believe her marriage was intact," adding that the couple were "intimately together as husband and wife as recently as June 6." So why would Usher make the claim? What does he have to gain?

Contact "SideShow" at sideshow@phillynews.com.

This column contains information

from Inquirer wire services.