Entertainment

Bald eagles are congregating at Lake Coeur d’Alene to feast on spawning kokanee in Wolf Lodge Bay. On Wednesday, there were 129 eagles counted, said Carrie Hugo, a wildlife biologist with the Bureau of Land Management. The same week last year, there were 260.

It’s been a year on the road for LeAnn Rimes. The country star, who hit the big time with her debut album “Blue” in 1996 – at age 13 – has been touring in support of her latest record, “Spitfire.” The tour brings her to Northern Quest Resort & Casino on Sunday night.

This weekend, the Bing Crosby Theater is offering up two holiday-themed vocalist showcases just in time for Christmas: “Harmony for the Holidays,” which stars tenor Jonathan Mancheni and soprano Isabella Ivy, and “Christmas at the Bing,” a night of music hosted by Douglas Webster and featuring performances from several vocalists, including locals Krista Kubicek and Max Mendez. “Harmony” is a sort of two-hander featuring Mancheni and Ivy, trained opera singers who have been dating for a little over a year. The program is a mixture of standard Christmas classics (“O Come All Ye Faithful,” “White Christmas,” “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”) and less traditional picks, such as “Let’s Drink from the Joyful Cup” from Giuseppe Verdi’s opera “La Traviata” and “Lonely House” from the 1946 musical “Street Scene.”

The blow-dried hair, polyester suits, ’70s-style political incorrectness and facial hair are back in “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.” The buffoonery goes epic in this sillier-than-silly sequel, a broad, down and dirty comedy overfilled with funny people trying to one-up one another on the set in the classic “best line wins” school of comic improvisation. Many jokes land, and some die a quiet death that sounds like the crickets that could have made a home in Will Ferrell’s mustache.

A fatal shooting Sunday night at a home in a quiet South Hill neighborhood does not appear to be a random act, investigators said Monday. Police are asking anyone with surveillance footage in the surrounding area to hand it over to investigators.

Bilbo turns tougher and more cunning and “The Hobbit” turns altogether more entertaining in “The Desolation of Smaug,” Peter Jackson’s livelier, funnier and action-packed middle film in his trilogy based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s slight delight of a novel. It looks more like a fantasy – fantastical, with more murk and the otherworldly light of those mass-produced Thomas Kinkade paintings. Characters feel more distinct, with Martin Freeman’s Bilbo making the transition from mere passenger on this dwarf’s quest “beneath the Lonely Mountain” to the brains of the motley crew.

There are a number of reasons Bing Crosby is inextricably linked to the holiday season, but the biggest one is the Irving Berlin song “White Christmas” that Crosby made famous. It was the biggest hit of Crosby’s career – and widely acknowledged as the biggest selling single of all time – and he sang it in three different films: “Holiday Inn” (1942), “Blue Skies” (1946) and, of course, “White Christmas” (1954).