"When Smokey sings," sang ABC a decade ago "I hear violins" - but to the youth of today, when Cliff Richard sings they hear the sound of a giant deafening car alarm exploding into an overcrowded orphanage built of metal and endangered animals.

The music of Cliff Richard is literally the worst thing that today's young can possibly hear. That's not so good if you're a young person - or Cliff Richard, come to think of it - but if you're a travelling funfair plagued by swarms of marauding hoodies, a quick burst of any Cliff Richard record is just the thing you need to send them scurrying back to their Vauxhall Novas in floods of tears, as 1950s travelling show Carters Steam Fair victoriously discovered recently. It sounds like a win for Carters Steam Fair but - looking objectively - now they don't have as many paying customers plus they have to listen to sodding Cliff Richard music all day. Way to go, carnies.

Facebook is the social networking website that magically lets you know a) what your friends look like and b) what their names are. How we ever managed to survive without Facebook is a solid gold mystery, that's for sure.

But now Facebook lets you do more than just obsessively reduce valuable friendship into a worthless

Aww, Big Brother just isn't Big Brother without shocking outbursts of terrible racism - so imagine how relieved we were when housemate Emily transformed from a dippy upper-class ninny into the most racist human being since Josef Mengele.

A lot has been said about Big Brother's swift dismissal of Emily after she called Charley a "nigger" during a dance on Wednesday - some have said that it's a huge over-reaction to what was at worst a badly-judged joke by a ridiculously out-of-touch spazwit, others have said that you can only judge a racist remark by its reaction. And since the reaction was for Charley to bark "I'm fucking in shock. Fuck me" like some sort of chav Gordon Ramsay, it looked like Emily had to be removed from Big Brother as quickly as possible, ballsing up our planned Big Brother betting odds for tonight's eviction in the process, the inconsiderate bitch. Still, two men in tonight to make up for everything. Woo-hoo.

So instead, since Big Brother is in the middle of the biggest racism row since... ooh, the last one, here are some more Big Brother betting odds for Big Brother to be axed before the end of the series, with help from Paddy Power... 

When someone annoys us, we usually find that the best way to deal with them is to hurl them into a crowd. Actually that's a lie - we scuttle off and anonymously demean them on the internet - but at least Akon is taking this people-tossing thing seriously.

Obviously, Akon reasons, people tend to be a bit heavy sometimes, so he'll only throw children into crowds. And not girls, either, because he'd rather dry-hump them. But if you're a boy under the age of 16 who somehow enrages Akon, lordy are you ever gonna get it - just as the 15-year-old boy who Akon tossed into the crowd at a recent show has discovered. But now the game might be up for Akon, because police have identified the boy and are looking into pressing charges against the rapper. Akon needn't worry, though - not only do his attorneys deny that he did anything wrong, but also Akon has threatened to hurl the Earth into the Sun if any police so much as come near him.

For all the Phil Spector murder trial shenanigans, nobody has really tried to explain why Phil Spector allegedly shot Lana Clarkson in the mouth, although that's because most people assumed that she laughed at his hair and he got angry.

Not so, says the case's lead investigator Detective Mark Lillienfeld. Lillienfeld is convinced that Lana Clarkson's death was sexually motivated, thanks to subtle clues at the crime scene like the dress that Lana Clarkson was wearing, the false eyelashes left on the candlelit fireside next to the brandy snifters and the fact that Phil Spector had a two-thirds empty packet of Viagra in his suitcase. That's just what we needed - as if the mental image of a tiny man in a lesbian wig shooting a woman in the mouth wasn't disturbing enough, now we have to deal with the mental image of a tiny man in a lesbian wig shooting a woman in the mouth with a medically-assisted hard-on. Lovely.

Emily - the right-wing posho drama student Big Brother housemate who had been facing eviction with mad-eyed lunatic Shabnam tomorrow night - has been kicked out of Big Brother for dropping the N-bomb on fellow housemate Charley, so tomorrow's eviction is off.

According to a Big Brother transcript, at 8:30 last night Emily was dancing with Charley when she asked "Are you pushing it out, you nigger?" Although Emily did her best to immediately laugh off the comments, Big Brother called her into the Diary Room at 3:30am and booted her out of the Big Brother house, with the other housemates only being informed at 9:30 this morning. Of course, we can take several things from Emily's surprise Big Brother eviction: 1) Big Brother is going to operate a zero-tolerance policy on racist remarks in the house, 2) The Big Brother eviction scheduled for tomorrow night has been cancelled, although nobody is sure what it'll be replaced with yet and 3) This means another bloody week with Shabnam, doesn't it. Bugger.

So Dannii Minogue is the new X Factor judge - and we can't wait to see Dannii pass on the valuable knowledge she gained in the field of slapping her tits out for lad's mags in the mistaken hope that it'll help her sell any records.

Dannii Minogue? X Factor? Dannii seems like a strange choice to us, since we thought the point of X Factor was getting people number one records. Simon Cowell is responsible for number one records. Sharon Osbourne is responsible for number one records. Even Louis Walsh was responsible for his fair share. But Dannii Minogue? She's responsible for horribly-staged lesbian romps in strip clubs that can't even help to push her singles anywhere past the outer fringes of the top 20. Maybe though, just maybe, Dannii Minogue was given the X Factor judging spot because producers could convince her sister - the infinitely more successful Kylie Minogue - to make a couple of appearances. We're just thinking out loud here.

Rumours have quickly spreading that Paris Hilton was released from jail this morning - much earlier than expected, after serving just three days of her sentence, thanks to good behaviour. Quite what constitutes this good behaviour - maybe Paris didn't sing Stars Are Blind at any point, or perhaps she didn't spend her jail time wanking off men and putting the video on the internet - is beyond us; but the swarms of reporters, photographer and news crews outside the Century Regional Detention Facility at the moment seemed to suggest hours ago that Paris Hilton really has been released from her hellish three-day celebrity prison torture.