However, Amy Winehouse has received a rare nugget of good news today - police have confirmed that Amy won’t be charged for that video of her apparently smoking crack like it’s going out of fashion.

What fantastic news! Now that this crack video palaver is out of her hair, all Amy Winehouse has to do is sort out her crumbling marriage, her multimillion-pound divorce, her drug addiction, her self-harming tendencies, her skin disease and literally single other thing regarding her personal and professional life and she’ll be almost completely back on track. Go Amy!

Nobody can really know what it’s like to be Amy Winehouse. That’s because to be like Amy Winehouse you have to be off your munch on crack most of the time, and if that’s the case you’re probably worrying too much about the heart attack you think you’re going to have to stop and think “Ooh, this must be what it’s like to be Amy Winehouse.”

But, hey, that’s just speculation. For all we know Amy Winehouse has never taken crack in her entire life. Yes, she’s taken cocaine, heroin, Ecstasy and ketamine to the point of a near-death overdose, but we can’t say for sure if she’s ever taken crack.

Yes, we know that The Sun secretly filmed Amy Winehouse smoking a crack pipe, and that as soon as the video was released Amy Winehouse checked into a crack clinic and that Amy Winehouse was recently arrested for smoking crack in that video of her smoking crack, but where’s the proof, eh?

There isn’t any. And that’s why the police have just let Amy Winehouse go without charge, as BBC News reports:

Singer Amy Winehouse will not face charges over a video that purported to show her smoking a crack cocaine pipe, police have confirmed. She was interviewed under caution by police in east London after the footage was posted online in January. “The Crown Prosecution Service has now reviewed the case and no further action is being taken,” a Metropolitan Police spokesperson said. “Amy is pleased to be able to move on,” her spokesman said.

Let’s hope this close shave with the law has helped teach Amy Winehouse a valuable lesson - next time anyone films her huffing frantically on a crack pipe, she should make sure that the video will only get sent to You’ve Been Framed and nowhere else. After all, if it’s shown on TV she’ll get £250, and that can buy you a lot of crack these days.

Yeah, allegedly. Whatever.

Read more:

No drug charges for Amy Winehouse - BBC

First Britney Spears sauntered back onto the set of How I Met Your Mother for her much-heralded follow-up cameo and now she’s started crashing her car again with all the wild abandon you’d expect from a recovering psychiatric patient who’s too unfit to look after her own children.

It’s been reported that Britney Spears yesterday ploughed her Mercedes into the back of another woman’s car near Sunset Boulevard. Nobody was hurt in the crash, but we should all be aware of the wider implications of this; if Britney Spears really is revisiting her old tricks then everyone needs to take cover right away before she starts waggling her grotty old flim-flam around all willy-nilly again.

Funny how things work out isn’t it? Britney Spears is apparently too mentally unwell to look after her own children, but fine to drive a car. Tiny pink squidgy babies that couldn’t do much damage if they bumped into anything at 30mph vs a giant clump of speeding metal. We certainly feel safer knowing that Britney is allowed near one and not the other.

Britney Spears has crashed her car so often in the past that she could write a book about it, if only she could read or write. Or knew what a book was. Or wasn’t so medically unstable that stabbing herself in the eye with a pen nib was a genuine concern. Aside from all that, though, Britney’s a flipping expert.

We literally don’t have room to list all the ways that Britney Spears has managed to crash her car in recent years, but rest assured there have been hit and runs and slow moving almost-shunts and one time where Britney was driving an umbrella and she kept accidentally reversing it into the same car again and again and it made her so angry that she started crying and getting all angry and her brain went a bit wrong. And now it appears that Britney Spears is at it again.

Yesterday Britney Spears was apparently let out of her father’s clutches for enough time to go for a pootle around Los Angeles. Specifically a pootle into the back of another woman’s car. E! Online reports:

Spears was tooling around Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills in her convertible Mercedes SL when she rear-ended a red 1998 Ford Explorer at about 2 p.m. Sources tell E! News that Spears’ bodyguard jumped out to talk down the other motorist, and the “Toxic” songbird hopped into the passenger seat, just as she did last month when she was involved in a similar fender-bender on Los Angeles’ 101 Freeway.

The driver rear-ended by Britney Spears - a woman named Edith Cortese - was then taken back to Britney’s house to swap information, citing all the photographers present at the scene of the crash. We’re not sure exactly what happened at the Spears house, but if our suspicions are correct it probably involved some sort of lesbian sex fumble in the swimming pool. Or a sober exchange of insurance details. Does it really matter which?

Anyway, the point is that Britney Spears keeps driving her car in a variety of dangerous and irresponsible ways seemingly without a care for other road users. It’s just like the old days, in fact. Britney’s getting better! Yay!

Read more:

Britney’s Latest Smash Hit! - E! Online

Everyone knows that the celebrity courting ritual involves an absurdly quick marriage to someone you just met, then an equally quick divorce followed by the adoption of an African kid who you decide to name Jifrizznia Grundlequack and then raise alone, filling it with a warped notion of reality that will ruin their lives when they grow up.

Not Mariah Carey, though - after her absurdly quick marriage to Nick Cannon, Mariah Carey apparently wants to skip the divorce and go straight to the child section. And get this, Mariah Carey doesn’t even want to adopt one - she wants to play god and grow a baby in her own stomach. Looks like it might be time for Mariah Carey to start taking her nutty pills again.

Remember when Mariah Carey’s wedding to Nick Cannon was a secret? Remember when nothing was officially confirmed by either party? Yeah, it seems like such a golden time in retrospect, doesn’t it?

Because now the only way we think we’re going to be able to get Mariah Carey to shut up about her wedding is to creep up on her in her sleep and smack her in the throat with a table leg one night. And obviously we wouldn’t want to do that because it would stop her from releasing any more mus… wait, that’s a brilliant idea.

Sadly, the law and a number of court-enforced restraining orders means that we’re not actually able to do that, so our best hope is that Mariah Carey just talks herself out soon. Hopefully it won’t be much longer - we’ve already heard about that ‘Mrs Cannon’ tattoo Mariah Carey got on her back, and now she’s also gone on Ellen to yammer about being married as well, and the woman’s only got so much breath left, surely.

In fact, Mariah Carey even went one better than just talking about being married to the least famous man on the planet - she also told Ellen that she wants him to get her pregnant as soon as possible. The Chicago Tribune reports:

Asked on Ellen Degeneres’ show whether she is thinking about having kids, she told DeGeneres, “Yeah. I mean I always said, I think we’ve actually talked about it. … It was like, ‘Would you ever think about having kids?’ and I said … If I found the right person who I felt would be on the same page as me in terms of raising kids and having the same belief system.”

Yes, it’s always good to be on the same page as the person you’re having a baby with - something you can read more about in Mariah Carey’s forthcoming book Extinguishing The Joy Out Of Pregnancy With Tiresome Middle-Management Jargon.

But good luck to Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon - if the sound of her biological clock has grown louder than the sound of her basic rational thought process, then who are we to argue? All we know is that Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon should hurry up if they want to have a baby - they have a messy, regret-filled divorce scheduled for the middle of next month, after all.

Read more:

First comes love, then comes marriage … - CT

Look, we know that most people would rather remove their bellend with the rough side of a cheesegrater than actually watch a Woody Allen film these days, primarily because they’re all uniformly rubbish, but this one - entitled Vicky Cristina Barcelona - is different.

OK, it’s probably not that different at all really - we’re willing to bet it’ll be as painfully rubbish to watch as anything else Woody Allen has released in the last 20 years - but in this one Scarlett Johansson and Penelope Cruz have a bit of a kiss. We’ve got the video after the jump, effectively saving you the price of a cinema ticket. We’re good to you, no?

It must be brilliant being Woody Allen. Just because he made maybe three good films in the 1970s he can get actors to do pretty much whatever he wants now. One minute he’s all like “Hey Scarlett Johansson, swan around in a tennis skirt for me,” and the next he’s like “Hey Ewan McGregor, be in this film of mine even though it’s obviously going to be awful. And do a funny accent while you’re at it!”

And now that he’s started making films in Spain, Woody Allen can be all like “Hey Scarlett Johansson again, get off with Penelope Cruz while I film it! Do it! I’m Woody Allen, director of Annie Hall, for God’s sake! It’s art! What? No, this isn’t an erection, whatever gave you that idea?”

Woody Allen’s new movie is called Vicky Christina Barcelona. It’s been billed as a ‘comedy drama’, which mean it’s either a naval-gazing exploration of blah blah blah snore, or a film that Woody Allen thinks is a comedy but since he stopped being funny several years ago it had to have the word ‘drama’ bunged onto the end to stop people feeling sorry for him.

But that’s not why people will go and see Vicky Christina Barcelona. Actually, nobody’s going to see Vicky Christina Barcelona anyway, because it’s a late-period Woody Allen film and they’d rather spend two hours doing something more fun, like letting infected AIDS monkeys chew on their balls.

But if anyone does go and see Vicky Christina Barcelona it’s because there’s apparently a lesbian sex scene between Scarlett Johansson and Penelope Cruz in it, plus a threesome with Scarlett Johansson, Penelope Cruz and the bloke with the funny haircut from No Country For Old Men.

And guess what? There’s a hint of this Scarlett Johansson on Penelope Cruz action in the just-released Vicky Christina Barcelona trailer. Have a look…

Do you see what we did there? We made you watch one minute and 12 seconds of hopelessly dull, dialogue-free trailer for a film you’re never actually going to watch anyway just so you could see Scarlett Johansson and Penelope Cruz kissing for less than two seconds. You pervert.

But has the promise of a Scarlett Johansson/ Penelope Cruz sex scene whetted your appetite to see Vicky Christina Barcelona? No, us neither. Looks rubbish, doesn’t it?

Further rumor has it that while in there they all join together making beautiful music banging tin coffee cups on their cell bars and slapping out dope beats by smacking soap-on-a-rope into the bare bottoms of their cell mates. It’s all melody they tell us.

And on the chain gang they sing into their pickaxes. It’s just what we heard.

Whatever stories you’ve heard about rappers in prison before – forget them. They pale in comparison to this one. That’s because this one involves Remy Ma getting smuggled a possible means of escape by her rhyme-loving groom.

Remy Ma fully intended to marry a baby Indian while in prison, and for some reason that baby Indian had every intention of marrying her back. It’s what we assume anyway. Technically the groom’s ethnicity and age really haven’t come up a lot, but he does refer to himself as Papoose and he only wears moccasins and feather-laden Mohawks. We can’t make this up.

OK we did make that up – but what we’re not fictionalising is that Papoose, a man, showed up at prison to marry Remy Ma, a woman. Remy was recently incarcerated, remember? It was for shooting some girl in the stomach, and she could have gotten up to 25 years for it – but she only just got sentenced to eight.

Papoose doesn’t care though, he knows it was just Remy’s finger that pulled the trigger – the rest of her would never dream of doing such a thing. That’s why he’s still engaged to her, and that’s also why he still loves her so much he’ll wait for her forever - even if it means only be able to make sweet, slow love to her through the US Postal Service, MSN Chat every Thursday from 2:15 - 2:30, or occasionally to the wads of spit she tries to send him out her prison window.

Most of that isn’t fact. What is fact though is that Papoose showed up to wed his betrothed in a ceremony probably complete with little cubes of prison meatloaf that had toothpicks stabbed into them. Also they likely had watery prison Jell-o in paper cups and an inmate-reverend with a piece of paper that says he discovered religion and got the power to marry folks in year five of his lock-up.

It gets better - when Papoose arrived to tie the knot – he brought a handcuff key to apparently free his woman. According to Daily News:

“A wedding was scheduled today and a visitor to that wedding service was found to be in possession of jail contraband so the wedding was canceled,” a correction official told the Daily News. “The key that was found today easily opened handcuffs that we and other law enforcement officials use,” the official said.”

Whether or not there were any post-break out plans is unknown. We assume Remy would have ditched the cuffs and hid in the back of a laundry truck while Papoose wore the appropriate uniform and drove her through the gates to a waiting helicopter with fake Mexican passports and a 50 pound bag of guano.

It’s because that stuff is worth money down in Mexico – brown gold they call it for short. Brown gold with specks of undigested-insect they call it for long.

Read More:

Update: Remy Ma’s Jail Wedding Called Off, Papoose Found With Handcuff Key – Six Shot

According to reports, Michael Moore is preparing ground to make a sequel to his 2004 anti-George Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. The new movie has a working title of Fahrenheit 9/11 1/2, although it’s expected that Michael Moore will formally change it to Fahrenheit 9/11: Nyer Nyer Nyer I Was Right All Along Let’s Hear It For Michael Moore I’m The Best I’m The Best nearer the release date.

Anyway, will this new Michael Moore documentary succeed where Fahrenheit 9/11 failed and push George Bush out of office for good? Even better than that - George Bush is going to stop being president about six months before Moore’s film is released. Hooray! Another righteous victory for Michael Moore!

You might think that this is a good time to be Michael Moore what with the impending election and the ongoing Iraq war and whatnot, but it really isn’t. There’s a fairly strong chance that either a woman or a black man will become the next president of America, bringing with them a sweeping agenda of Democrat-based reform. And the second that happens, Michael Moore is effed.

Michael Moore has made a career out of ranting at the American government, about everything from gun control to its lack of universal healthcare to what a shit George Bush is. But if a Democrat is elected president in November, all the things Michael Moore likes to bitch about might just be fixed. It’s a scary prospect, and it leaves Michael Moore with two options:

1) He could start making bombastic, suspiciously-edited, simultaneously doomy and patronising documentaries about whatever irks him the most in a post-Bush world, like Is It Me Or Did Cadbury’s Creme Eggs Used To Be Bigger? and The Woman In Front Of Me In The Post Office Queue Smells Vaguely Like Dog Food, or

2) He could just keep making films about what a crap president George Bush was.

Guess which one he’s going to do. Go on, guess. OK, here’s the Los Angeles Times to tell you:

Michael Moore is plotting a follow-up to his 2004 documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Although the film is being kept under wraps, it is said that Moore plans to pick up where he left off four years ago, to examine the fallout from  eight years of the  Bush administration’s policies. Moore is beginning production on the documentary “immediately,” according to studio reps. Moore’s follow-up to “Fahrenheit 9/11,” referred to informally in some circles as “Fahrenheit 9/11 1/2,” is expected to be released in mid-2009.

What with Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 sequel and Oliver Stone’s George Bush biopic, it seems like we’re going to be inundated with movies showing us all the ways that George Bush messed everything up pretty soon. Which is more than Jimmy Carter ever got. Eat that, Carter.

Of course, what’ll be most interesting to see is what Michael Moore does after this Fahrenheit 9/11 sequel. George Bush has been good business for him, so it hardly makes economic sense for Michael Moore to shut down that avenue entirely - especially when Bush looks set to leave such a suspect legacy behind him.

So here’s to Michael Moore quickly making Fahrenheit 9/11 2, Fahrenheit 9/11 3 and the direct-to-DVD Fahrenheit 9/11 4: He Never Even Rinsed Out The Sink After Shaving Either, The Bastard as soon as possible.

Read more:

Cannes ‘08: Michael Moore plots sequel to ‘Fahrenheit 9/11′ - LA Times

Well ‘they’ get top marks for believing the hype, but they could also require after-hours schooling for a little reality, because if A Place To Bury Strangers are the loudest band in New York then the city that never sleeps is in line for some well deserved shut eye.

It may be the aural abilities of The Legion, Shoreditch’s nearest thing to an alpine ski bar, but even stood close to the stage with ears unplugged, our tympanic membranes remain intact and not even a drop of blood trickles from our auditory canal.

This is no bad thing, and in truth we’re only disappointed because we believed the hype ourselves. Watching a band labelled the loudest in New York is enough to get anyone intrigued, and after reading the stories of record pressing plants broken by excessive noise levels, blown power circuits and raucous SXSW shows, excitement is high.

This is a band who, when shut down by local cops after only two songs because of the residents’ complaints, were allowed to play a third and final track by the officer because “this band is sick.”

That’s sick in the American sense of being rather good (see also ‘rad’ and ‘gnarly’), and even if APTBS haven’t quite rendered us deaf, we’re still inclined to agree with the kind policeman.

After setting up their own gear, the trio (Jay Space on drums, Jono MOFO on bass and frontman Oliver Ackermann) get to work, and although not ear-splitting, they are suitably fierce.

Lead singer Ackermann’s day job is making guitar effects pedals for his company Death By Audio, suppliers to bands including U2, Wilco and Nine Inch Nails, and he does a good job of combining work with pleasure by employing so much fuzz on his guitar that it could run off and join the muppets.

On record, tracks like Ocean and I Know I’ll See You Again are strongly reminiscent of fellow fuzz lovers My Bloody Valentine, Jesus and Mary Chain and The Cure, but the live version isn’t retro - it’s more like playing some of those bands on your iPod as you jump out of a plane.

Exhillarating stuff, but it is a bit of a shame that the lyrics are getting lost in the excellent wall of feedback because “I’ll just wait for you to turn around and I’ll kick your head in” from To Fix The Gash In Your Head really is one of this year’s best.

The room full of mostly first-time watchers are certainly enjoying it though, and as Ackermann rips the strings from his guitar like he’s disemboweling a demon, the evening hits a high point.

So maybe not the loudest band in New York, but they really could be one of the best.

[story by Tom Atkinson]

Rainbow Web 2 is so fast and furious and fun that we’ve been hooked on it for some time now. It’s your usual ‘match the coloured tiles’ puzzler, but the ingenious inclusion of letters into Rainbow Web 2 gives it a life expectancy far beyond many of the other generic puzzley games we’ve had here. Plus Rainbow Web 2 is indirectly about spiders. And who doesn’t like spiders, eh?

Order Rainbow Web 2 Now

Download Rainbow Web 2

In the beginning, Big Brother was a crazy experiment which for once didn’t involve cutting people open or giving them drugs which would result in the growth of an extra eye. Instead, it was set to monitor the results of living in a controlled human environment. Or as most viewers interpreted it, a chance to maybe see some people have sex. But as time has gone on, the experimental phase has vanished and contestants have used Big Brother as a platform to launch a career. None are ever successful and, brilliantly for us, we get to see them crash and burn.

It’s now the turn of Chanelle Hayes.

The ninth series of Big Brother is due to hit the UK in a couple of weeks, which only means we will be in store for more tantrums, bitching, crap romances which will end six months after the show finishes, swearing, potentially racist comments and someone to become the new national idiot.

Every year, one of the contestants annoyingly lingers around like a bad fart once the show has ended. Unfortunately for us, it’s Chanelle Hayes, a woman who still seems like the hideous creation of someone determined to show us the opposite of how humans should act and behave around around others.

Jesus, was she an annoying cow. Listening to a car alarm for half an hour or shitting glass seemed more appealing that sitting through her endless tyrant of squeaks, moans and arguments with anyone who’d listen.

Amazingly, Chanelle was somehow signed by a talent agency. Not because she had any talent or credibility, but because if she took her clothes off, opened her mouth and looked vaguely seductive, blokes could imagine she was about to give them a blowjob.

After modelling and destroying TV shows, Chanelle has now turned her hand to singing. Of course, it’s absolute bollocks and Chanelle is the only one deluded enough to believe that it will actually sell. Because everyone suddenly likes dance music, this is genre that she’s gone and destroyed. Her single I Want It is a bland slab of Balearic house which hasn’t exactly had leading DJs queuing up in order to play it.

But let’s give Chanelle some credit. Because she knows it’ll bomb, she’s said:

“I’ve spent time in the recording studio and I’ve got all these songs for an album so if the single is a success then I’ll do an album. But if it’s not then I won’t inflict any more pain on you all!”

Good, she’s soon to be gone when her single crash lands in at number 178. However it’s not all good news. With a new series of Big Brother on the way, we can only guess that’ll they’ll be another gaggle of plebs emerging who’ll want to launch a dream singing career.

So more than likely we’ll run the same story next year and just replace ‘Chanelle Hayes’ with some other idiot. You’ll never notice.

Read more:

Chanelle: I’ll Quit If Single Is A Flop - Digital Spy

So if Davina McCall ever left Big Brother, the show would obviously fall to pieces. Well, either that or Alexa Chung would instantly start presenting it and nobody would really notice the difference. One or the other.

Anyway, despite a whirlpool of rumours to the contrary, Davina McCall has publicly stated that this won’t be her last season of Big Brother. Which is good for Davina McCall, but you know what that means? It means that this won’t be the last season of Big Brother, either. In fact, it’ll probably go on forever. If you need us, we’ll be crying and drinking bleach in a corner somewhere.

Big Brother has been good for everyone who’s ever hosted it. Look at Dermot O’Leary - after presenting Big Brother’s Little Brother he’s now the host of X Factor, one of the biggest TV shows in the country. Then there’s Russell Brand - the host of Big Brother’s Big Mouth - who’s now a bona fide Hollywood star. And then there’s Davina McCall.

As the host of the main Big Brother show, Davina McCall has obviously enjoyed spoils far greater than anyone else - some hair dye adverts that require her to talk to her never-seen mother in the same chilling way that sociopaths talk to corpses that they’ve just stabbed to death.

OK, so maybe Davina McCall’s career hasn’t gone as well as she expected. Other than the hair dye ads, Davina McCall’s greatest achievement was her BBC1 chatshow - a chatshow that was quickly dropped when people staggeringly decided that they didn’t want to watch a 40-year-old shouting attention-seeking questions at Max Beesley for an hour - and an equally disastrous stint as a radio DJ.

But there’ll always be Big Brother. And although this year’s Big Brother was widely believed to be Davina McCall’s swansong, Davina has publicly stated that she’s going to keep presenting Big Brother forever. Well, either forever or until people get sick of it and they stop making it, probably within in the next couple of years. Whichever one comes first. The Press Association reports:

Davina McCall has slammed rumours she is quitting Big Brother. The TV presenter has hosted the reality TV show since it began eight years ago and it has been claimed this year’s series will be her last. Asked if the rumours were true, Davina said: “No. Bollocks! Am I allowed to say that? Good!”

In a way it’s reassuring to think that Davina McCall will keep presenting Big Brother until she’s a wizened old lady rolled out once a year to pull funny faces, shout telephone numbers and ask fame-seeking dicksplats not to swear. In another way the thought of it makes us feel all claustrophobic and panicky and slightly unwell, but we’ll just stick with the first one for the benefit of this article.

Besides, it’s wise for Davina to keep hosting Big Brother, because without it she’s only got those hair dye adverts and you know what they say - there’s always someone younger and prettier waiting to babble on about hair to the dispossessed voice of their dead mother that only they can hear.

Read more:

Davina rejects rumours over BB exit - PA