John Travolta, who looks alarmingly like Ke$ha, has had a baby. Of course, he hasn’t developed a womb and birthed the thing himself. If that were the case, the headline wouldn’t be quite so dismissive. Naturally, it is his wife Kelly Preston who squeezed the child out of her front bum.

If you’re interested, the child is a boy and they’ve called him Benjamin and he was born in a Florida hospital weighing 8 lbs. 3 oz.

Of course, both the parents are tremendously happy and all that hokey junk, but we’re more interested in his future, which will no doubt be riddled with jealousy of another celebrity child.

A statement from Travolta and his wife says:

“John, Kelly and their daughter Ella Bleu are ecstatic and very happy about the newest member of the family. Both mother and baby are healthy and doing beautifully.”

Kelly Preston said earlier a couple of months ago:

“I’ve been cleaning out everything in the house. Ella has been helping too. She’s looking forward to being a big sister.”

Aside from the usual sibling jealousy that blights all families, this one is a little different.

As we all know, John Travolta is a Scientology devotee. There’s many celebrities in that church/school of thought/cult/youth club for rich people. As such, slebs are the most shark-eyed, ambitious swines you’ll ever have the misfortune to meet.

And, looking in from the outside, it seems that Tom Cruise is being set-up to become the next big cheese of Scientology (or, the new David Koresh if you prefer). This means that Cruise’s child, Soupy (or whatever it is called) will be granted some kind of religious grace by other Scientology quacks.

Of course, Travolta has been in Hollywood a lot longer than Cruise, meaning that, his professional jealousy… and dare we say it, his Scientological jealousy… might rub off on his new kid who will grow up wanting to become some Chosen One ahead of Snaffles Cruise (or whatever it is called).

And so, let hecklerspray be the first to congratulate the Travolta family on their latest addition to the Church of Scientology! Long may he jump up and down like a mad fucker on the sofas of American chatshows!

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For many people, their  interest in John Travolta began and ended with his starring role in the disco-dancing, parent-upsetting, tight-panted 1970s movie Saturday Night Fever.

These people have no desire to learn more about The Trav’s later career as a man looking after a talking baby, or a man who carries around a briefcase full of Christmas lights, or a man who swaps faces with the wooden-faced Jodie Foster impersonator Nicholas Cage.

But we can’t all be rational adults with problem-strewn lives of our own and no time for monitoring the affairs of yesteryear’s celebrities.

Which is good news for hecklerspray, as today we report that John Travolta’s wife, Kelly Preston, may or may not be about to squeeze out a Scientologically-enriched sprogling. Oh, the excitement/slight interest/almost painful need to escape this bullshit.

Here’s the deal: earlier this week, reputable British gossip magazine The Daily Mail broke the news that John Travolta was flying his enormous penis-shaped plane out of Australia earlier than expected. The reason? Because, they explained, his wife – Kelly Preston – had gone into labour.

While the Mail were explicitly told at the time by a spokesman that this wasn’t true, they decided to run with it anyway. After all: who gives a monkeys about the the veracity of a story concerning the fourth most important actor in Get Shorty?

Well, now it turns out that the whole thing was a sack of balls: Kelly Preston is still pregnant, the Scientology lovechild is still hanging in there, and John Travolta flew home from Australia because…well, we don’t know. Because he grew sick of drinking awful beer?

Let’s see if the Mail can help out:

Mr Travolta had been due to arrive in Perth as the main celebrity at a charity event, at which he was to receive the key to the city from Lord Mayor Lisa Scaffidi.

Nicole Kidman, of who it’s long been known hates all cultures except that one from wherever she’s from (we think its Iceland), absolutely hates everything about Australia.

She hates Australia’s Outback, she hates Australia’s kangaroos, and perhaps most perplexing of all, she only has nice things to say about the country’s gaping ozone hole. THAT THING IS KILLING PEOPLE, NICOLE!

The final alleged anti-Australian blow that Kidman’s PR people should really get on is the way she hates Aborigines and all they stand for – especially their musical instruments that are sacredly reserved for the lips of men, but that she likes to puff on anyway.

Australia’s native Aboriginal population is full of wonderful people with ancestral roots dating back to ancient Mesopotamia – once a suburb of modern day Sydney. Long have they enjoyed a fertile climate generous enough to supply edible vegetation and ample space to film Crocodile Dundee movies.

Another thing they enjoy are wind instruments or, more specifically as it applies to this story, the didgeridoo. The didge, as it’s commonly called, is made from the branches of a gumtree. You blow in the smaller end and a large vibrational sound is emitted.

Sure, this sounds nice – but that’s just because you don’t yet know the frequency emitted is the exact one that can clog a woman’s baby parts if she’s the one huffing into the smaller end. This is an actual aboriginal belief, more or less. But Nicole Kidman doesn’t care – why should she fear anything to come out of such a stupid country, right?

Her thoughts, not ours. Plus, worst case scenario all she’d have to do is jump in that one lake again.

The Telegraph has specifics on the didgeridoo matter:

“Nicole Kidman has angered indigenous Australians by attempting to play a didgeridoo while promoting her new film Australia on a German television programme. The stunt flouts an Aboriginal custom that dictates women are forbidden to play the instrument. Kidman made the faux pas on the weekend during Wetten Das…? a popular chat show”

Well this obvious flaunting of something held in high regard by so many people doesn’t surprise us when it comes to Kidman. Not after what we’ve previously heard. For instance it wasn’t long ago someone told us they saw her poop on a Nordic war-hammer. This may not sound bad to some – but in Nordia those things are usually kept on sacred alters.

See? That’s what we mean – this doesn’t surprise us at all.

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When it comes to the anti-gay slur, there’s perhaps no greater master than Jerry Lewis – the man is nothing short of a maestro.

Just over a year since Jerry Lewis last got into trouble for airing his uniquely fruity views on homosexuals during a live telethon, he’s done it again. This time, Jerry Lewis managed to offend all the gays in the world while in Australia, where he told a reporter that cricket is “a fag game.”

Obviously that’s a completely outrageous thing to say, and it’s obvious why so many people have reacted to Jerry Lewis’ comment with horror. By calling cricket a fag game, Jerry Lewis has displayed not only a casual intolerance of homosexuals but also a huge lack of education – cricket isn’t a fag game at all. It’s a crap game that only turds enjoy. Again, cricket is a crap game that only turds enjoy.

As the star and director of an unreleased movie about a German clown who lures Jewish children to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps, Jerry Lewis probably isn’t anyone’s go-to man when it comes to matters of taste. But even by his own standards, Jerry Lewis is having a rough couple of years.

It all started when, midway through the annual Jerry Lewis telethon, Lewis decided to refer to someone called Jesse The Illiterate Faggot, drawing the ire of the two or three people who actually happened to be watching it live. Jerry Lewis immediately issued an apology for the outburst and everything quickly went back to normal.

Except now he’s gone and done it again. In Australia, where he’s touring a show that we assume is called An Evening Of Faded Nostalgia And Uncomfortable Bitterness With Jerry Lewis, Lewis has kicked up a storm by blurting out a choice anti-gay slur about cricket. AP reports:

Following a news conference in Sydney Friday, Lewis, 82, was asked by a Network Ten national TV reporter for his opinion on the Australian nation sport of cricket. “Oh, cricket? It’s a f– game. What are you, nuts?” Lewis replied. The network broadcast the comment in full on its Friday evening news bulletin along with footage of Lewis handling an imaginary cricket bat with an effeminate gesture.

Inevitably, Jerry Lewis’ comments have been met with a wave of appalled responses all demanding an apology. True, most of them are from gay people offended to be associated with a sport as lumpen and dreary as cricket, but that’s beside the point.

Whether Jerry Lewis does issue an apology for this slur or not remains to be seen. Our gut feeling is that he won’t, since lobbing such an obviously offensive comment around seems to have been the best advert that his show will ever get.

In fact, if Jerry Lewis was smart, he’d adapt this tactic of offending the locals in every single new country he takes the show to. Maybe in Britain he could say that the Queen smells of penis, or in France that boules is only ever played by paedophiles.

One thing’s for sure, though, he’ll need to get in some serious training if he ever wants to tour Japan – we hear it’s deceptively hard to make your eyes go squinty while screaming “ME SO SOLLY!” without literally dying of shame these days.

Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, myths, ancient artifacts, religion, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

The Bunyip is an Australian legend that started with the Aborigines, and was subsequently spread among the white settlers. It’s been physically described as looking a thousand different ways – having everything from horse parts to tentacles.

At one point a skull of the creature was thought to be found, and when science at the time could not definitively identify it – it looked like the legends were all too true.

Here is a definition of the Bunyip as found in the Encyclopedia Mythica:

“A bellowing water monster from Aboriginal legend, believed to bring diseases. It lives at the bottom of the water holes, swamps, lakes and rivers of the Australian outback. The creature is roughly the size of a calf and requires calm water to live in. Unless its food sources are interfered with, the bunyip usually leaves human beings alone. However, if necessary it has the strength to pull a person down into the water and drown him. The name comes from an Aboriginal word meaning “devil” or “spirit”.”

Although no specific sighting or encounters with the creature seem to have been reported, there was still plenty of fuel to feed the fire. For instance, according to Skeptic World.com:

“In 1846 a peculiar skull was taken from the banks of Murrumbidgee River in New South Wales. In the first flush of excitement, several experts concluded that it was the skull of something unknown to science. In 1847 the so-called bunyip skull was put on exhibition in the Australian Museum (Sydney) for two days. Visitors flocked to see it and the Sydney Morning Herald said that it prompted many people to speak out about their ‘bunyip sightings’ “Almost everyone became immediately aware that he had heard ‘strange sounds’ from the lagoons at night, or had seen ‘something black’ in the water.”"

The skull was eventually called that of a deformed horse or calf, but public interest did not fade. Take the Bunyip of the Greta area, for instance. Long had locals claimed to hear a ‘loud booming sound’ coming from the swamp. When a search party would be dispatched, they always reported the same thing – nothing. Eventually the swamp was drained and the noise stopped. Some thought the creature had been killed by the death of it’s natural habitat, others thought it just moved.

Perhaps the most convincing piece of evidence that the Bunyip exists is the fact it was shown in a South Park episode playing the role of God (season 3). Camera footage like that is very hard to fake, and thus far, science has not been able to definitively prove it wrong.

Just you think about that for a minute.