9 - 50 quite good blogs about food – The Times

8 - And now, in startlingly unlikely supergroup news – Bestweekever

7 - Here’s an unusually long palindrome. Hooray for palindromes! - Neatorama

6 – The Cosby Show kids: Where are they now? - Metromix

5 - The world’s longest list of Star Wars quotes that have a word replaced by ‘pants’ - Keeperoflists

4 – Who was dressed horribly at the Brits? Oh, these people – Popsugar

3 - East European lolcats translated into English. In a word: mournful – Rolcats

2 – Today’s lesson: Finnish big band jazz isn’t nearly as awful as it sounds – Quimsy

1 - Warning: this is INCREDIBLY gruesome - I Am Bored

That’s right. Duffy. Duffy who your mum likes. Duffy who sings like a baby goat stuck in a cattle grid. Duffy who looks like she’d burst into tears if you showed her a sad kitten. Duffy won three Brit awards last night, roughly six more than she deserves. But still, it’s not like Iron Maiden won anything, is it?

What? Iron Maiden did win something? God. We’re doomed.

If you missed the Brit awards last night you’d do well to keep quiet about it, because we didn’t and it was such a horrific waste of two hours that we’d seriously consider chopping the top of your head off in your sleep and swapping brains with you if it meant we’d forget it.

Because, let’s not mess around here, the Brits were bad last night. Worst in living memory bad. Everything about last night’s Brits was wrong. The barely-there hosts. The set (really, whose idea was it to make the winners go on a five-mile hike just to get to the podium?). All the cutaway shots of bored-looking bald men in suits. The winners. Everything.

In fact, to keep us from getting so angry that we accidentally crap out one of our kidneys, we’re just going to bulletpoint some of the more memorable moments from last night’s Brits for you and have done with it:

* U2 performing their new song as the lyrics flashed up behind them like they were too deeply profound to go ignored. They aren’t profound. It’s a song about some shoes.

* Incidentally, we promise never to mock Bono for his sunglasses again if he promises to never take them off again. Seriously, the man looks like Gollum’s malformed twin.

* Duffy winning Best British Female.

* Duffy accepting the award by saying “Best British Female? I don’t know what that means.” She’s a clever one, that Duffy.

* Coldplay still not realising that shouting “OK!” before every line of every song they perform makes them all look like wankers.

* Duffy winning Best British Breakthrough.

* Girls Aloud’s artfully-staged ‘nude’ performance being wrecked by all the cameras clumsily picking up the straps of their dresses.

* Duffy winning Best British Album.

* Take That miming from an actual spaceship just to annoy Robbie Williams.

* Duffy winning Best Jumped-Up Working Mens’ Club Cabaret Act.

* Paul Weller winning Best British Male purely because there was nobody else to give it to.

* Duffy winning Most Marketable Amy Winehouse Substitute Who Probably Won’t Take All The Drugs Or Punch Paying Fans In The Face.

* Iron Maiden winning Best Live Act, followed by the swift realisation that Radio 2 listeners should never be allowed to vote for anything ever again.

* Duffy winning Best Sustained Impersonation Of Uni From The 1980s Dungeons And Dragons Cartoon.

That is all. Try harder next year, please.

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It may not have happened yet, but we can’t see it being edgy, cool or vaguely risky. The show goes out at 8pm, leaving today’s young pop stars with an entire hour to swear before the watershed kicks in.

Just over a week ago, we watched the Grammys which quite frankly overshadowed the entire Brits ceremony. Not only did the Grammys have a million categories where nearly everyone can win, but we don’t expect there to be any pre-show scraps like the alleged one between Rihanna and Chris Brown. Unless someone attacks Chris Martin with a pack of streaky bacon.

Hosted by Kylie and the two blokes from Gavin And Stacy, we’ll no doubt see references to their own show multiple times during the Brits. Well, that and Kylie putting on her best fake smile when she doesn’t get all the references towards Cumberland sausage.

Its shame really that M.I.A couldn’t keep her newborn child inside her belly for an extra week. How selfish of how to boost the Grammy ratings with a potential live birth. Poor Fearne Cotton would have been perfect to follow the event live on a special ITV2 show. Imagine her mopping up M.I.A’s broken waters and getting the first interview with the child.

Coldplay, Duffy, Elbow, Radiohead and The Ting Tings have all been nominated for best British album. This strikes us as nothing short of an amazing feat for Radiohead to be nominated. Not because it’s a rubbish record, but their In Rainbows album was released in 2007. It became downloadable in October and physically went on sale in December. Perhaps the organisers didn’t want to nominate Estelle in case she did a wonky dance as an acceptance speech. Or maybe everything else released last year was utter gash.

We’d go through each and every nomination, but to be honest it’ll be a waste of your time. Despite winning the Mercury prize, Elbow will win bugger all, Coldplay will sweep the board and make cheesy acceptance speeches and Take That will have to do with their music being used in supermarket adverts.

But what about the entertainment on the night? Who is going to perform at the ceremony and no doubt see their record sales/downloads rise dramatically the next day. Make sure your socks don’t blow off, because the following people are going to be singing and messing up dance routines. Coldplay, Duffy, Estelle, The Ting Tings, Pet Shop Boys, Girls Aloud, Kings Of Leon, Take That and bloody U2.

Yes, U2 are going to be providing us with a performance with their latest single in an attempt to get more people to like it and get over its strange title. We don’t know if Bono plans to spice it up with some visual imagery of dying children, topped off with a speech about how economically fucked we are.

Each year, the ceremony honours a band/artist who in the eyes of the BPI has contributed outstandingly to music. This year, synth-based techno duo The Pet Shop Boys get the dubious honour. With fifty million sales behind them, we can’t really argue with how successful they are. At least they kept Simply Red out for another year.

Will someone turn up drunk at the ceremony? How many swearwords will be uttered? Who’ll balls up their acceptance speech and fall off the stage? No-one knows! Tune in to ITV from 8pm tonight to see the supposed best of British music being celebrated.

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Snorting a line of ants? Check. Chewing the heads off animals? Check. Urinating on the Alamo? Check. Getting hammered and trying to murder his wife? Check. Falling over a couple of times before the Brit Awards earlier this year? No way! Ugh! You sick bastard! Suggest that and Ozzy Osbourne will sue your tits off.

And win, too – Ozzy Osbourne has won undisclosed damages from the Daily Star after it claimed that Ozzy had a health scare right before the Brit Awards that almost saw him get withdrawn from the show. Turns out, though, that he was such a shaky and incoherent mess during the Brit Awards because he’s Ozzy Osbourne. Sheesh.

Anyone who saw the Brit Awards this year will know two things – 1) that there’s not a court in the land that would convict you for tearing Mika’s head off and shoving it up his bottom and, 2) whoever let the Osbournes host the show is a clown.

Because the Osbournes were dreadful for so many different ways. Kelly and Jack Osbourne, knowing that that sort of stuff is what they’re going to do for the rest of their lives, dug in grimly and tried to act all professional while Sharon Osbourne managed to get so enraged at Vic Reeves that she actually bent the laws of space and time.

And then there was Ozzy Osbourne – a man who was only allowed to say about four words during the entire show, and even then in the wrong order at completely the wrong time. But the thing is, that’s Ozzy Osbourne. Ever since The Osbournes was on TV he’s been a kind of professional shambles. That’s what we expect from him.

You know what would have happened if Ozzy Osbourne had dug into his heart and delivered a precise, eloquent speech about the myriad ways that Paul McCartney had influenced him as a person and a musician at the climax of The Brits? There’d have been a bloody riot. Appalled Brit School students would have torn up their seats in protest and Take That would have started bottling each other in the face out of nothing more than confused fury. It would have been awful.

So instead Ozzy Osbourne just yelled “Laydeezangennalman, Mr Sir Pol McCartnezizzyszzagh!” and everyone was happy. Especially the Daily Star, because it got to write a story called Ozzy’s Freak Show claiming that Ozzy’s shambolic appearance was down to him collapsing twice before the show and spooking the organisers into discussing whether or not he should appear at all.

None of that actually happened, by the way, which is why Ozzy Osbourne has just won a massive libel settlement against the newspaper, as BBC News reports:

Rocker Ozzy Osbourne has accepted libel damages from the Daily Star over allegations he suffered a health scare which jeopardised the Brit Awards. Osbourne’s lawyer John Kelly said the article had caused “considerable embarrassment and distress”. He added that the newspaper now accepted that Osbourne was fit enough to present the awards and had not suffered health problems.

But, as embarrassing as this ordeal must have been for Ozzy Osbourne, at least there’s a happy ending – Ozzy has decided to donate all his damages to Sharon Osbourne’s colon charity. And, although we’re not sure of the exact figure he received, it’s thought to be at least enough to send four underdeveloped Southeast Asian boys up into Sharon Osbourne’s colon with industrial floor polishers and not come out until it’s shiny and polished enough to eat your dinner off.

Daily Star, everyone scheduled to eat their dinner out of Sharon Osbourne’s arse thanks you for your libellous inaccuracies. Keep up the good work.

Is that what happened, though? No – thanks to the Brits' stringent 'don't let Ozzy Osbourne say more than three words in a row' policy, the only vaguely controversial thing the Osbournes brought to the Brit awards was the way that Sharon Osbourne's face looked as if it had been attacked by jellyfish in her sleep.

Oh, and Leona Lewis didn't win any of the four Brit awards she was nominated for. That's sort of controversial, isn't it? Anyone?

The Brit Awards always manage to scrape at least one stand-out moment, whether it's Jarvis Cocker mooning Michael Jackson, that Tubthumping bloke lobbing water at a politician or Joss Stone acting like the world's biggest anus. There was plenty of scope for controversy at last night's Brits, too – Ozzy Osbourne wanted to violently attack Heather Mills, for example, and the puffy-cheeked chimney sweep from Kaiser Chiefs got in a strop because people thought he was quite a lot crapper than he thought he was – but nothing came of it. 

In fact, aside from a brief display by Vic Reeves reinforcing why he isn't famous any more, the Brit awards were so utterly incident-free that we wish we spent two hours doing something a bit more worthwhile, like trying to burp the national anthem or crying.

So, without anything interesting to discuss, the Brits can be boiled down to two things – the performances and the awards. The awards went to the artists you expected them to – Take That got a couple, Foo Fighters got a couple, Arctic Monkeys got a couple, Mark Ronson won one – and Mika and Kate Nash also won a Brit each, although they weren't so much 'expected' as 'horribly, horribly wrong'.  

Sad old X Factor winner Leona Lewis didn't win a jot, though, despite being nominated for four Brits – Best Breakthrough, Best Female, Best Album and Best Single. Leona's losses might have been down to music industry snobbery – she won a talent show contest, after all – or a backlash because you can't listen to any local radio station for more than 30 seconds without hearing Bleeding Love any more.

And then there are the performances. Despite the much-trumpeted musical collaborations at this year's Brit awards, nothing really clawed out of the realms of mediocre. Mika wanked around like a little girl hopped up on Um Bongo at a karaoke party with Beth Ditto. Rihanna and Klaxons sounded like one of those dreary mash-ups that were popular six years ago. Mark Ronson, Adele, Daniel Merriweather and Amy Winehouse made Version sound even more Stars On 45s-y than usual and Kaiser Chiefs were upstaged by some tiny buildings.

And let's not forget that Paul McCartney finished the evening with the same four-hour version of Hey Jude that he closes every single bloody event he's ever invited to with.

So that was the Brits 2008. Woo hoo. Let's put in an early motion to get Joss Stone to host next year's show. And let's fill her dressing room with Special Brew beforehand. At least that way we'll have something to talk about afterwards.

Read more:

Leona Loser - Mirror 

And that's Ozzy Osbourne violently attacking Heather Mills.

It'll happen, too, if Heather Mills decides to show her face at the Brits. Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne have more or less said so themselves. And forget watching Take That mumbling a gracious acceptance speech – who wouldn't want to see a confused, shaking old drug addict having a punch-up with a terrified amputee? Nobody, that's who.

As essentially rational human beings, we'd have trouble leaving Ozzy Osbourne in charge of a tin opener in case he ended up concussing himself with it somehow. However, some people aren't as obviously clever as us, and they've put Ozzy Osbourne in charge of Britain's biggest live-televised music awards show.

Ozzy Osbourne's hosting the Brits tomorrow night, alongside members of his family who have variously been rejected by Joss Stone and almost died in a house fire and called Mother Teresa a cunt. It sounds like a should be a total shambles, but let's not forget that Ozzy Osbourne is a respectable older gentleman now, and he'll have been primped and prepared to within an inch of his life to ensure that nothing goes wron…

What's that? Ozzy Osbourne is going to call the Brits short and launch a violent attack on Heather Mills if she manages to turn up to the Brits and present an award tomorrow? Fair enough. Female First reports:

Speaking about the rumours Heather is planning to attend the prestigious bash, Sharon said: "I would boot her off. I think she's a miserable old cow." Ozzy – who will present Paul with the BRITs Lifetime Achievement Award – added: "I'm looking forward to seeing Paul McCartney – he's my hero. The body of work he's got is just unbelievable. But I really don't want to be there if Heather shows up. Never mind McCartney having a go – I think the audience will string her up. Sharon and I have met them both her on a few occasions but if Paul doesn't know her, I'm fucked if I do. She's fucking nuts."

Let's hope this warning is enough to stop Heather Mills from attending the Brits. After all, it isn't just Ozzy Osbourne out to get her. Rod Stewart has also made his dislike of Heather Mills clear, and don't forget that Paul McCartney will be performing at the Brits, and we all know how tasty he is with a sawn-off wineglass. If she's not careful, Heather Mills could stumble into a bloodbath.

So if she's sensible, Heather Mills will steer clear of the Brits and let it pass without incident. Well, apart from the incident when Ozzy Osbourne inevitably trips over a power cable onstage, spears a Brit through his eye and sets fire to Kylie Minogue's hair on live TV. But that was always going to happen.

Read more:

Ozzy Osbourne's Heather threat – Female First 

In fact, all the acts that scooped the most Brit Award nominations are just sugar-free versions of older performers. The three biggest Brit nod-getters were Mika (Freddie Mercury lite), Leona Lewis (Whitney Houston lite) and Take That (Take That lite).

But don't worry – the Brits also had something for you indie kids too. The Eagles are up for Best International Album. That's The Eagles.

The Brit Awards are traditionally the jewel in the crown of the British music industry calendar, when everyone gathers together to celebrate the best music that this grey little island can produce and then goes home mumbling that it wasn't as good as last year.

And although they're wrong – the worst the Brits ever got were whenever Ben Elton was allowed to be the host – this year looks set to be the best ever because the Osbournes are hosting! Yeah! That means danger and excitement and rock and roll, even though the Osbournes are actually a shaking, forgetful old man, the star of a Saturday teatime singing contest, some girl from a musical and a part-time rock climber. Danger!

However, it doesn't matter how dangerous the Osbournes are because the Brits nominations have just been announced and the likely winners are all so doggedly personality-free that the evening promises to be less fun than a regional barometer convention.

Don't believe us? OK – let's look at the acts that got multiple Brits nominations. There's Take That, the greying reformed boyband up for Best Group, Best Album and Best Live Act. Thought Gary Barlow was a wildchild when he was a kid? Well you should see him now that he's in his mid-thirties! There's Mika (Best British Male, Best Album, Best Breakthrough, Best Single), whose biggest ambition seems to be to write songs for gruesome hen-night parties to screech at full volume on their way to Wetherspoons in a tatty white rented limo.

Then there's Kate Nash, up for Best British Female, Best Breakthrough and Best Single, which means that hopefully she'll be able to give up her day job as a monotone Claire's Accessories Saturday girl. And then there's Leona Lewis (Best British Female, best Album, Best Breakthrough, Best Single) who somehow managed to make the UK's fastest-selling debut album ever, even though no living human has ever heard her say more than three words in a row.

Still, there are a handful of decent acts with Brits nominations, like Arcade Fire and Jamie T and PJ Harvey, so maybe the Brits won't be as completely boring as we're expecting them to be. But, let's face it they won't win. It looks a lot like the 2008 Brits will go down in history as the most grimly professional Brits ever.

Joss Stone, we've never needed you more. Start drinking now.

Read more: 

The Brits – The Nominations - Sky