Everyone can relate to Roman Polanski – really, who hasn’t admitted to a sexual encounter with an underage girl then spent 30 years on the lam in France?

And it’s this completely universal nature of Roman Polanski’s story that’s won him so many  supporters. The trouble is, none of them work at the LA Superior Court.

The court says that it’ll consider dropping dropping Roman Polanski’s charges, but only if he appears there in person first. And Polanski thinks it’s all just a big set-up to arrest him. Wow, who knew that alleged child-rape could be so exciting?

It’s been three decades since acclaimed film director – and owner of the world’s rubbishest life – Roman Polanski hot-footed it to France to avoid being sentenced for a sexual encounter with a 13-year-old girl that he’d previously admitted to.

And surely that’s punishment enough. Spend 30 years in jail and what’s the worst that you’ll have to suffer? An occasional bumming? The constant threat of stabbing? Compare that to what Roman Polanski’s been through in France – 30 years of exposure to creperies, accordion music and an almost galactic level of feminine armpit hair. Doesn’t the man deserve any human rights?

And that’s why Roman Polanski has decided that he wants the charges against him dropped. There’s apparently enough evidence to suggest unlawful conduct on the part of the deputy district attorney at the time, plus the woman who Roman Polanski allegedly had sex with thinks the charges should be dropped. Plus she’s in her forties and he’s 75 now, so it doesn’t seem that creepy any more. Well it does, but in a different and more legal way.

However, there’s one stumbling block between Roman Polanski living in exile in France and Roman Polanski living the life of a free man in America who has to stay indoors all the time because of the angry mob pelting eggs at his windows and screaming “BURN THE RAPIST WITH THE FUNNY VOICE!” at him – and that’s the LA Superior Court.

The court reasons that if it’s going to drop Roman Polanski’s charges, Polanski should at least appear there in person beforehand to explain why. And the trouble is that Roman Polanski thinks it’s all a cunning ruse and he’ll be arrested as soon as he lands in America to make his argument. Which is why Polanski’s lawyer Chad Hummel wants a judge from somewhere other than LA to hear the case, as AP reports:

In a motion filed Monday, attorney Chad Hummel sought removal of Polanski’s case to the California Judicial Council for resolution. He claims that statements by a court spokesman since the original motion was filed showed that the courts have prejudged at least one issue – whether Polanski must appear in court on Jan. 21 for his request to be considered. Such an appearance might make him subject to arrest.

If Roman Polanski’s demands are not met, he’s going to face a tricky decision – does he take the court at its word and go to LA despite the possibility of his arrest, or does he remain an exile in France?

It’s not a choice we’d take lightly, but we’re pretty sure that Roman Polanski will ultimately return to America, because it’s only there that he stands a chance of making the movie that everyone will remember him for – Big Momma’s House 3: Momma’s Inna Kitchen.

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Roman Polanski is a modern-day superhero – he can direct films quite well and also he’s great at having sex with children.

Or, possibly, not having sex with children. Although he’s been on the lam since fleeing America in 1978 after pleading guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old girl, Roman Polanski has now decided to ask a Los Angeles court to dismiss his charges.

Let’s hope Roman Polanski gets his dismissal, because then he’ll stop being an exiled genius and become what he’s always dreamed of – a director in America who can’t get work because everyone thinks he’s so flipping creepy.

Depending on how many turtleneck sweaters you own, you either think that Roman Polanski is famous because he’s directed iconic movies like Chinatown, The Pianist and Rosemary’s Baby or because he allegedly had it off with a kid in the 1970s and then legged it out of America before anyone could do anything about it.

But if you believe the latter, then Roman Polanski has news for you – he didn’t have sex with 13-year-old girl who he pleaded guilty to having sex with in 1975. Or he did, but he’s worked out that the girl is well into her 40s now so it isn’t that illegal any more. Or something. Anyway, Roman Polanski wants his charges dismissed, as Reuters reports:

The film director’s lawyers said they had new evidence, sparked by a documentary film earlier this year, that revealed “judicial and prosecutorial misconduct … so distorted the legal process that the interests of justice can only be served with complete dismissal of the case.”

Perhaps some background information would be helpful here. In 1977 Roman Polanski was asked to guest-edit French Vogue which, it’s alleged, he decided to do by first taking photos of 13-year-old Samantha Geimer drinking champagne, and then allegedly raping her on drugs. In the ensuing court case, Roman Polanski agreed a plea deal whereby the rape would be downgraded to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. And then he buggered off to France before sentencing, and has been a kind of fugitive in Europe ever since.

But now, based on findings from the documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted And Desired, Roman Polanski thinks that it’s time the charges were dropped so that he can return to America and be embraced by the artistic community once again. After all, an acquittal in a case involving sex and children doesn’t hurt your reputation at all. Just look at Michael Jackson. He’s um… ooh, bad example.

But still, regardless of whether or not he committed the crime that he pleaded guilty to three decades ago, there’s no doubt that Roman Polanski has served an unbelievably harsh punishment in the interim. The man had a cameo in Rush Hour 3, for crying out loud. Murderers get less than that.

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Remember when that male prostitute said Boy George chained him to a wall, hit him and threatened to kill him?

Well, turns out it’s true. Partially – Boy George has admitted that he did handcuff Audun Carlsen up, and that he did hit him a bit, but only consensually. But Boy George swears that he wasn’t going to kill him, because a dead manwhore wouldn’t be great for his career.

Remember, Boy George once painted his jaw black and pretended to be David Bowie on Celebrity Stars In Their Eyes, so he obviously knows a great career move when he sees one.

You can tell that Christmas is coming. There’s a chill in the air, a sense of breathless anticipation in everyone you meet, and also Boy George has managed to cartwheel gormlessly into another fat crapload of trouble.

It’s becoming a tradition, you see – Christmas 2006 was when Boy George went to court because a) he wanted to show off the new Fat Bald Goth look he was cultivating and b) he’d been arrested for filling his house with cocaine or something.

Then Christmas 2007 was when Boy George got arrested for allegedly falsely imprisoning a Norwegian male prostitute by handcuffing him to a wall, beating him up with a chain and threatening to kill him and, now it’s coming up to Christmas 2008, it must be time for Boy George to go to court for that very thing.

So he has. And in a shocking display of honesty, Boy George has admitted that he did chain his Norwegian manwhore up to a wall in his house. But only because Boy George wanted to make a series of pornographic photographs with him and then got a bit paranoid because he thought the manwhore was stealing the photos from his computer. Reuters reports:

Singer Boy George admitted to police that he handcuffed a male escort to his bed and threatened him, but was not going to kill him, a court heard on Monday at his trial on false imprisonment charges. “I absolutely admit I had him in the handcuffs, so he wouldn’t go anywhere while I checked the computer. I certainly wasn’t going to kill him, that’s hardly going to do my career any good is it?” he told police.

So let’s get this straight – Boy George is in court because he didn’t want a glitter-covered Norwegian prostitute to make pornographic photos of Boy George public? And he might go to prison for this? This is all wrong – Boy George should be freed immediately. Freed and given the keys to the city. And a castle made of solid gold to live in.

Seriously – if Boy George hadn’t chained Audun Carlsen up and threatened him like he supposedly did, then do you know what we’d be looking at right now? Pictures of a fat bald goth who looks like he does a bit of bricklaying on the side standing around licking his lips with a funny little erection wedged between his fat little thighs, that’s what.

No, by making sure that those photos stayed private, Boy George has saved us all from blindness or madness or both, and we should all shake him firmly by the hand for that.

Well, OK, maybe not literally shake him by the hand. Not unless we want to catch Norwegian hand-syphilis or whatever it is that these manwhores pass about. But, you know, we can bump elbows with him or something.

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We can all say that we’ve had visions where Jennifer Garner gets beaten by an angry mob due to her belief in Jesus, can’t we?

No? Most of us? No, not most of us either? Some of us have had visions of Jennifer Garner being persecuted by a mob for believing in Jesus? No? Not even some of us? Just Jennifer Garner’s psychiatric patient stalker Steven Burky, then? Oh.

Well, it’s just a shame that Steven Burky won’t get to warn Jennifer Garner of his vision, then, because Garner has just taken out a court order claiming that she’s living in mortal fear of him. So let’s just hope that Jennifer Garner doesn’t end up being assaulted by a violent mob because of her faith in Jesus Christ, because if she does, Jennifer Garner is going to end up looking pretty bloody stupid.

If you’re a celebrity with a stalker, rule number one is that you must never deliberately lead them on. It doesn’t matter what they do – whether they try to blow up an airport in your name or whether they send you boxes of sex toys accompanied by photos of themselves drinking unidentified yellow liquid – you must always remain standoffish in case they flip out and get all Single White Female on you.

That’s a lesson that Jennifer Garner could do well to learn. She’s had a stalker by the name of Steven Burky for a few years now. He’s a born-again Christian psychiatric patient who believes he was satanically abused as a child, and every now and again he’ll pose as different people to get to meet Jennifer Garner, or send her mounds of weird love letters, or just turn up at her house unannounced – but Jennifer Garner has been dealing with him in completely the wrong way.

Look at it this way – what are the two main things that Jennifer Garner is famous for? That’s right – marrying Ben Affleck and letting Gary Busey lick her neck. And what does that tell any potential stalkers about Jennifer Garner? That a) she’s sexually attracted to idiots and b) she likes it when strangers lick her neck. Honestly, she may as well spray herself with catnip and paint ‘STALK ME NOW’ on her tits.

Which, actually, she doesn’t have to do. You see, Jennifer Garner already has Steven Burkey and – since he has visions of Jennifer being beaten to death for her religious beliefs, along with other visions involving witchcraft, human sacrifices and dark conspiracies – he’s probably filling her crazy quota quite nicely.

He’s certainly filling her ‘petrified that one day she’ll be murdered by a crazed stalker’ quota, if the court order that Jennifer Garner has just taken out against Burky is anything to go by. In her court papers, Jennifer Garner wrote:

“Mr. Burky’s repeated efforts to contact me, his delusional and paranoid letters, his appearance at my private residence, and his recent claims that I will be ‘persecuted’ in a manner that may result in my death are all extremely frightening. I now fear not only for my own personal safety, but also for the safety and well being of those I love and care most about, including my husband and my daughter. Also, I am currently pregnant and fear for the safety of my second child once born.”

Thanks to the court order, Steven Burky isn’t allowed within 100 yards of Jennifer Garner. Not that he’d be able to do that at the moment, of course – he’s too busy being being locked up in a psychiatric hospital – but it will definitely ease Jennifer Garner’s mind.

After all, everyone knows that if there’s one thing that infatuated mental patients cursed with nightmarish Old Testament-style visions of apocalyptic death respect, it’s court-ordered restraining boundaries. Everyone wins.

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People of London, pin up your bunting! Roll out your barrels of Jesus Juice! Cover the eyes of your squeamish young! Michael Jackson’s coming to town!

And it’s all thanks to that sheik’s lawsuit that threatens to push Michael Jackson into permanent financial ruin. According to reports, Michael Jackson will fly to London next week to give his testimony in the case that literally everyone’s calling ‘about the millionth Michael Jackson lawsuit of the last couple of years, and certainly one of the most dreary’.

But you know what this means? This means that if Michael Jackson’s going to court then the old Michael Jackson lookalike used in the TV coverage of his child molestation trial will get some work that doesn’t involve starring in adverts about the dangers of being hit in the face with a firework or being a scarecrow for once! This must be the happiest day of that particular Michael Jackson impersonator’s life.

Michael Jackson has a special history with London. It’s London that usually gets chosen as the venue for Michael Jackson’s eternally-delayed comeback concert even though not a single person on the planet believes it’ll ever happen.

It was London where Michael Jackson gave his now iconic ‘three lines of We Are The World and a sharp exit‘ performance of 2006. And, most fondly of all, it was London where Michael Jackson was allegedly caught jumping around on a hotel bed dressed as Mickey Mouse accompanied by several children in Peter Pan costumes a few weeks after being acquitted of child molestation. Ah, the memories.

And now it’s been reported that Michael Jackson is due to return to London next week, although sadly for something that doesn’t conjure up as many bone-chilling mental images – his lawsuit.

Remember Sheikh Abdulla bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the man suing Michael Jackson because he apparently gave Michael Jackson millions of dollars and let him live in his house on the proviso that they made an album together? Well, he’s called Michael Jackson to court to defend himself, as Reuters reports:

Singer Michael Jackson plans to testify next week in a British court in a lawsuit brought against him by a Bahrain prince, Jackson’s lawyer said on Thursday. “Mister Jackson is intending to travel to this country…and will be available to give evidence to your lordship,” Jackson’s lawyer Robert Englehart told the British High Court in London. The singer is expected to take the witness stand on Monday.

Now, don’t get your hopes up. Michael Jackson has already tried to wriggle out of the court appearance once by claiming that he was too ill, and Monday is a long way off yet – in Michael Jackson’s world that’s enough time to catch six or seven new illnesses, to be hit with about 400 new lawsuits and for a large percentage of his face to slip away from his skull like a sort of gruesome melting icecap. His court appearance is nothing like a dead cert yet.

But Michael Jackson would be a fool not to come to London. Not only does the court need to hear his side of the argument – that he assumed everything the sheik lavished on him was a gift – but also, if he does lose the case and end up penniless, he’ll be nice and close to King’s Cross. And if he wants to rebuild his fortune anywhere, he’ll find that wanking off drunk businessmen in an alleyway for pennies is probably the best way to start.

You rarely see paparazzi pictures of Keanu Reeves, and that’s because the paparazzi are terrified of Keanu Reeves squishing them into liquid with his car.

Or it’s because Keanu Reeves is quite private and stuff. One or the other. But photographer Alison Silva probably thinks it’s the first one, because he’s suing Keanu Reeves for allegedly hitting him with his car last year, causing career-threatening injuries to his wrist which, coupled with the fact that he’s got a girl’s name, must have really ticked him off.

But yesterday Keanu Reeves showed up in court to spread some of the trademark Keanu Reeves moviestar razzle dazzle around and convince everyone otherwise. Sadly, the Keanu Reeves version of razzle dazzle involves standing around looking blank-faced and a bit confused and occasionally saying “woah.” We aren’t anticipating a good outcome for him.

There’s a deeply complex relationship between celebrities and the paparazzi. On the one hand the paparazzi financially gain from essentially endorsing the lumbering self-worth of the celebrities they follow and the result in beneficial to everyone. But on the other hand, sometimes Pierce Brosnan will thump a photographer in a car park.

It’s not just Pierce Brosnan, though – every now and again Kanye West will get angry and shove some photographers around too, or maybe Matthew McConaughey will get his surfer mates to rough them up a bit. Or, you know, Keanu Reeves could run them over or something.

Or not, because there’s a chance that Keanu Reeves doesn’t run photographers over. But that hasn’t stopped paparazzo Alison Silva from claiming that he did. Last March it was reported that Keanu Reeves bumped into Silva with his Porsche, and now Silva has sued Keanu for all the injuries and whatnot he gained from slowly falling to the floor in front of a barely-moving vehicle.

The upside of this is that Keanu Reeves got to go to court yesterday to refute Alison Silva’s claims, and it was a rare chance to see Keanu Reeves saying some words that he’d thought up himself, and that therefore didn’t obviously confuse him the instant they came out of his mouth. E! Online reports:

Under cross-examination, Silva’s lawyer, Joseph Farzam, tried to nail down the Matrix man on whether he really made an effort to avoid hitting Silva, asking Reeves if he used his horn or hand signals to get Silva to move. “He was in front of a starting car,” Reeves replied. “It’s common sense to me.”

Keanu’s argument seems to be that Alison Silva was walking backwards while trying to take pictures when he tripped and fell of his own accord. It might have happened. It might not have happened. Frankly that’s not for us to decide – and a good job too, because if it was then we’d probably try sawing our own legs off as a protest to the futility of our own lives.

But we hope that Keanu Reeves is telling the truth. Not because we trust and respect him as an actor and as a human being, but because we’re scared that if he loses this lawsuit he’ll make another Matrix film to recoup his lost money. Because, if the quality pattern of Matrix movies holds, The Matrix 4 will be so bad that watching it will feel like you’re being slapped with the guts of an infected Ebola monkey. So fingers crossed that doesn’t happen.

Back when Britney Spears was a crazy person, and not the well-adjusted pillar of society she is today, she did a lot of regrettable things.

And what was the most regrettable thing that Britney Spears did during her barmy lost weekend? No, not proving herself to be an untrustworthy mother or consistently becoming more and more of a global embarrassment with every single passing second – we’re talking about the time that Britney Spears sort of gently drove into a car in a car park. It was, quite frankly, outrageous.

We know this because people still aren’t shutting up about it – Britney’s lawyer is still trying to appeal against a criminal trial for the hit and run scheduled for next month. Experts have responded to the move by Michael Flanagan with shock. Slowly punching yourself in the face again and again while murmuring “Make it stop” does still count as shock, right?

As we will never tire of telling you, Britney Spears is back. Back back back. Britney Spears is back with awards, Britney Spears is back with a new album and Britney Spears is back with an exploitative book about Britney Spears written by her mother. That’s literally as back as you can get.

But it’s a tentative comeback. Over the last few months, Britney Spears and her family have worked as hard as they can with only one goal in mind – to get straight Britney back on the treadmill that almost destroyed her a few months ago. And, given all her recent psychiatric episodes, the smallest bump could demolish Britney’s painstakingly-constructed house of cards.

A bump like, ooh, a reminder of a crime she committed in her darkest days, for example? Say, the minor hit and run incident that Britney Spears got into over a year ago?

Some of you may remember that in the middle of all the fuss made about Britney Spears and the shaved head and the custody battles and the accusations of child abuse and the vomiting and the collapsing and the vaginas, Britney Spears knocked into the side of a car in a car park and walked away from the scene. Well, that’s what people are still banging on about.

There’s a chance that Britney Spears might have to face a criminal trial for the hit and run next month, but not if her attorney Michael Flanagan has anything to do with it. That’s because Michael Flanagan is claiming that Britney Spears isn’t back at all. In fact, he says she’s as mental as ever! E! Online reports:

He filed documents today in Los Angeles County Superior Court requesting a stay in the proceedings because she is remains under the control of a conservatorship. “The Probate Court has found that [Spears] lacks the capacity to retain counsel,” Flanagan writes, “as a result, [Spears] is currently unable to participate meaningfully in this matter.”

What? Surely not. Is Michael Flanagan really suggesting that robotically saying the word ‘womanizer’ 41 times in the space of three minutes doesn’t automatically give you the capacity to retain counsel any more? Gosh. Everything we thought we knew about the legal system is wrong.

Anyway, you can see why everyone is so anxious about getting this trial halted – if she’s forced to attend, the pressure could set her recovery back unbelievably. And nobody wants that – after all, crushing up Britney’s anti-psychotic medication and hiding it in her food is just so bloody time-consuming, isn’t it.

Remember that book about Harry Potter that JK Rowling didn’t write that made JK Rowling so furious that she almost pooed her spine out in court?

You do? Well in that case you’ll be pleased to know that JK Rowling has won her court case. A judge in New York has claimed that Steven Jan Vander Ark‘s The Harry Potter Lexicon does illegally plagiarise the Harry Potter novels and so it can never be released.

What does this mean? In short it means that if Harry Potter fans want to buy a secondary book that acts as a reference guide for the myriad Harry Potter characters, locations and themes, they can now either a) wait for JK Rowling to finish writing her Harry Potter encyclopedia or b) grow up and stop being such moon-faced, sappy-eyed farty arseholes with their gormless wizard fixations and their stupid bloody haircuts.

JK Rowling didn’t get where she is today by letting people walk all over her, you know. No, JK Rowling got where she is today by writing seven books about a speccy wizard fighting Darth Vader with his pet owl. And there’s nobody who can take that away from her.

Not even Steven Jan Vander Ark, author of The Harry Potter Lexicon – a digest of the Harry Potter characters and mythology that infuriated JK Rowling almost to the point of bloodclots when she caught wind of it earlier this year.

In the end JK Rowling took the Lexicon to court to try and halt its release, claiming that as the author of the original Harry Potter books it was her right to kick every last drop of cash possible from the series and nobody else’s.

And she put up a mighty fight in court too, doing just about everything short of turning up to testify in a fake bushy beard and biblical robes and ordering the sky to destroy The Harry Potter Lexicon with lightning.

She claimed, for example, that the Lexicon was theft and that it preyed on the vulnerability of overexcited Harry Potter fans by offering them a tawdry knock-off experience based on a character they love. Incidentally, the Wizarding World Of Harry Potter theme park opens in 2010. Book your tickets now, kids.

And it seemed to work because, five months after the trial ended, the judge has finally reached his ruling, and it’s good new for JK Rowling. The New York Times reports:

“Plaintiffs have shown that the lexicon copies a sufficient quantity of the Harry Potter series to support a finding of substantial similarity between the Lexicon and Rowling’s novels,” Judge Robert P. Patterson Jr of Federal District Court in Manhattan wrote in his 68-page ruling… “I took no pleasure at all in bringing legal action and am delighted that this issue has been resolved favorably,” Ms. Rowling said in a statement.

As well as stopping The Harry Potter Lexicon from being published, JK Rowling also received financial damages in the ruling, too – $6,750, to be precise. Now, that doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but JK Rowling is still grateful nonetheless. She might get three, perhaps even four bumwipes out of that cash.

And what of Steven Jan Vander Ark, the Harry potter fan who spent seven years compiling The Harry Potter Lexicon? What will he do now that his work has been blocked? Hopefully he’ll buy himself a mirror, because that’s probably the only way that he’ll realise he’s a 50-year-old man who likes Harry Potter and has therefore completely wasted his entire life.

Well thank all that is good and right in the world for DMX.

In today’s world of boring, pointless, vapid celebrities mincing around never doing anything, not causing any trouble and generally being thoroughly boring you could be forgiven for thinking that the entertainment that we, the public, rightly deserve from these fools is never going to come our way.

Then DMX goes and gets a mega-whammy of arrests for a number of different reasons – granted, he’s not going around stabbing people, but he is doing things that we’re allowed to take the piss out of. Which is clearly much better for us.

The most recent of DMX’s failures to obey the law came about when the rapper didn’t really manage to appear in court for an earlier arrest. Instead he went to hospital. Close, but not quite the right building. Must try harder.

DMX, known to people who don’t want to dignify that ‘name’ by actually using it as Earl Simmons, was lingering about a Wal-Mart, possibly trying to cause more mayhem involving drugs and stuff, when the police acted on a warrant and brought the vagabond in for his no-show.

The original charges levelled against Earl were related to possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia, though reports this consisted of a T-shirt with the slogan “DMX Likes Pot” on it and a matching headband were unconfirmed at the time of going to press.

Needless to say though, these are definitely serious charges and ones sure to cement Simmons’ reputation as a bad boy on the rap scene. Or just a bloke who had some weed on him and got caught. Either way, he’ll be known as… a man… who did something.

DMX is also waiting on the outcomes of a few other cases, involving animal cruelty and identity fraud, amongst others. Come to think of it, we do remember receiving an email from an ‘American prince’ the other month, but we didn’t actually put two and two together until now. He offered us the chance to “Party Up” if we gave him all of our savings.

Naturally we did, but this ‘Prince of DMXia’ never got back to us. It all makes sense now. But why he would want to take on the identity of the amorphous blob that is hecklerspray we do not know. Maybe the life of alleged crime is too much for the poor dear.

It’s not the first time the X-ey one has faced charges – he was cleared of rape, a stabbing, impersonating an FBI agent and some other pretty comical charges like ‘mischief’. We didn’t know you could be arrested for behaving like a nine-year-old boy, but hey ho – at least he’s keeping his part of the bargain up and actually offering us some entertainment in his private life.

It would appear that outside of allegedly committing crimes, DMX is the only artist to have five consecutive albums debut at number one on the Billboard chart. (Alleged) crime does pay, it would seem.

No matter how bad things get, you can always make them better with a song – unless you’re on trial in court, because that would just be stupid.

Try telling that to DMX, though. He’s currently up to his eyeballs in trouble – for just about every illegal activity that a human being is capable of committing – but he still had time to lighten the mood outside court yesterday with an inspirational freestyle that we think was possibly about being a good person.

True, bellowing “stand for something or fall for everything!” at some bewildered reporters to the rhythm of some sort of weird internal metronome might not seem like the best way for DMX to solve his problems, but at least it’s a step up from his usual rapping style, which tends to involve screaming “I smell pussy!” at the top of his voice and then barking like a dog for an hour.

DMX is widely regarded as an inspirational figure. He certainly is here at hecklerspray – the centrepiece of our office is a giant motivational poster featuring the phrase “The power of imagination makes us infinite” superimposed over a still of DMX angrily shouting at a car’s steering wheel from his X Gon Give It To Ya video.

That’s why DMX is dedicated to spreading his euphoric inspirational message to the biggest audience possible. But, having converted fans of gormlessly derivative hip-hop and straight-to-DVD action movies to his cause, DMX needed to break the ceiling and speak to the mass media.

Where can you usually find the mass media? Outside a court, that’s where. How do you get to stand outside a court? By just going up to a court and standing around outside it? No, that’s too route one for DMX – he decided that the best way to stand outside a court would be to get arrested for something.

So he did – DMX got arrested for driving badly and not wearing a seatbelt on a plane and hiding a gun under a car seat and faking his identity to avoid paying a hospital bill and burning the starving corpses of some dogs in his garden. Notice that DMX didn’t get arrested for being raped in his sleep by a woman. He tried, but apparently that isn’t even illegal.

Anyway, the plan worked. Yesterday DMX went to Maricopa County Superior Court in Phoenix for the identity theft arrest and, after pausing briefly to plead not guilty, rushed outside to give his long-awaited motivational rap to the awaiting media and thus the world. According to Reuters, that rap went something like this:

“If and when you ever fall down, get back up, drop something, stop fretting, pick that shit back up. Stand for something or fall for everything, wait for the right pitch or miss with every swing.”

And if you’ve felt a unexplained lightness in your step today, or the feeling of pressure being lifted from your shoulders, or the inexplicable urge to whistle a happy ditty on the way to work this morning, that’s why. Because DMX told you to pick some shit up yesterday.

You may thank DMX however you want for this. He’d probably prefer cash.

Would-be criminals can learn a lot from today’s news that Blake Fielder-Civil has been sentenced to 27 months in jail.

Firstly, Blake Fielder-Civil’s sentence has shown that you can’t go round violently attacking pub landlords in the face; and that if you do, you definitely can’t try buying their silence with great big wads of your wife’s cash.

Most of all, though, Blake Fielder-Civil’s 27-month jail sentence shows that you’ll still get lumbered with a giant stretch in prison even if you get Amy Winehouse to bellow your name in public every six or seven seconds. Speaking of that, we’ve got another 27 months of that. Thanks, the British justice system. Thanks a lot.

These last nine months have been hellish. They’ve been an unrelenting torture, the likes of which will rarely come round again. That’s because Amy Winehouse’s husband Blake Fielder-Civil has been incarcerated for nine months. And it’s been agony.

Not for Blake Fielder-Civil, who has been plunged into a nightmarish stay in a squalid prison for those nine months. And not for Amy Winehouse, who’s slowly been unravelling to the point where she’s now nothing more than a violent drug addict constantly on the brink of death. No, we’re talking about us.

Nine months we’ve had of listening to Amy Winehouse bellow the word “Blake!” when she’s singing her songs or staggering around Camden off her face on whatever substances she’s into these days. Blake Blake Blake, that’s all we ever bloody hear. And it’s fairly annoying, we don’t mind telling you. We definitely have it worse than Amy Winehouse and Blake Fielder-Civil put together.

And it’s not going to stop until October 2010, because Blake Civil-Fielder has finally been sentenced for his crime of getting trashed on booze and cocaine, smashing up a pub landlord’s head until he needed a metal plate inserted to hold his face together and then offering him £200,000 to flee the country or change his story. And he’s been given 27 sodding months. The Independent reports:

Judge David Radford told Fielder-Civil he had behaved in a “gratuitous, cowardly and disgraceful” way. Fielder-Civil, who had looked calm and relaxed throughout the hearing, showed little emotion as the sentence was passed. But as he was taken down to the cells by court staff at the end of the hearing he looked up and smiled at friends and family in the front row of the crammed public gallery and mouthed “see you soon”.

Although 27 months sounds like quite a long time – in which Blake Fielder-Civil will miss both Albania joining NATO and the end of the Swedish pharmacy monopoly – in reality he’s already served nine of those on remand, so he could be out by Christmas.

Still, though, the next few months are going to be especially difficult on Amy Winehouse. Being without her husband has been tortuous enough as it is, and she’d been publicly pinning her hopes on his release today, so those around her must be fearing for her safety at the moment.

Will Blake’s sentence throw her back into the drug-drenched miasma she’s been struggling to recover from? Will it cripple her productivity as an artist even further? Worst of all, does it mean she’s going to get off with another ancient member of Babyshambles? Christ, let’s hope not. That poor girl has been through enough as it is.

Nobody was ever really going to win the custody battle between Britney Spears and Kevin Federline, especially not the kids.

But, at long last, Britney and Kevin have managed to stagger to a full, final custody settlement. And it’s not particularly great news for Britney Spears – Kevin Federline has been granted sole custody of Sean Preston and Jayden James.

Britney Spears will still be able to visit her children, but that’s hardly enough time to build a loving relationship between mother and sons – all the time she gets with them will be spent frantically trying to make them unlearn whatever dumb lessons Kevin Federline has been teaching them, like ‘Cornrows make you look cool’ or ‘Jamming knitting needles into plug sockets is fun’. Poor Britney won’t even have a chance to hug them.

The child custody battle between Britney Spears and Kevin Federline never really took off the way anyone expected it to. While Charlie and Denise and Alec and Kim spent their time lashing out at one another in public, Britney and Kevin seemed to genuinely want the best for their children. Which is good for the kids but rubbish for us. Nobody ever thinks of us.

The potential was there – it’s not often that a child custody case comes along where the mother is a woman who shaves her head and calls herself the devil and the father sometimes goes to court dressed as a pirate – but the sparks never really flew between Britney Spears and Kevin Federline the way everyone expected them to. Stupid anti-psychotic medication.

But now it’s over. It’s all over. Rather than allow the court commissioner to give the children the best possible chance at life they had – by sending them to Cambodia to stitch footballs together, or giving them to a pack of hungry bears, or just letting them crawl around on the motorway – Britney Spears and Kevin Federline have reached a custody settlement.

And that settlement is sole custody for Kevin Federline with occasional visits from Britney Spears. E! Online spoke to Federline’s lawyer Mark Vincent Kaplan:

“The case has been settled. The court still has to approve it. As of this evening there is a fully executed deal memo… All the issues that would have been addressed at trial have been settled… Kevin is absolutely delighted.”

That’s not to say that Kevin Federline will have sole custody of the kids forever, though – once Britney Spears has recovered to the extent that she no longer needs a conservator, it’s thought that Federline is open to the idea of giving her co-parenting status again.

But that’s just a possibility to deal with in the future. For now Kevin Federline has sole custody of his kids. And, you know, perhaps it’s for the best.

After all, Britney Spears obviously still isn’t well enough to look after herself, let alone her children – and this means that she’s freed up to concentrate on making a professional comeback to the best of her abilities.

And this custody settlement has also boosted Kevin Federline’s credibility as a father. He’s had to put up with jibes about his ability for a couple of years now, but gaining sole custody means that he’s clearly a very capable father.

Plus it’s wicked funny when he dresses the babies up in tuxedos and gets them to act as beer butlers at house parties until 4am, too – now he gets to do that whenever he wants.

Everyone knows what they want from 50 Cent – and that’s gritty, hardcore tales of violent life on the streets.

However, don’t be surprised if 50 Cent’s next CD is a concept album about the art of making quiches and other assorted fancy continental pastry dishes, because 50 Cent, so help us god, has turned soft.

How soft? Get this – 50 Cent wanted to take his little boy on vacation so much that he took, and passed, a court-ordered drug test. Not taking drugs? Caring for his own children? Really, 50 Cent, what kind of role model do you call yourself? Quickly, go and mug a pensioner or shoot a policeman before it’s too late. Yeeuch.

We’re big fans of 50 Cent here at hecklerspray, from that song of his that goes “mumble mumble mumble shoot you mumble dead,” to that other song of his that goes “mumble mumble I got shot mumble mumble did I ever mention that mumble yeah I thought so.” We like 50 Cent because he’s got a formula and he’s not afraid to stick to it.

Even though he lives in a mansion that’s roughly the size of Luxembourg in the middle of a faraway forest, 50 Cent is still as street as they come. He got shot once, you know, did he ever mention that? And he became a drug dealer when he was just 12 years old. And he, um, organises nutritional drives to help combat child obesity.

Basically, if you cut 50 Cent open, he bleeds ghetto. And possibly a little bit of Human Growth Hormone, too. Possibly.

But what’s the least ghetto thing you can think of? How about not taking any drugs so you can go on a lovely holiday with your little boy? Because, as much as it pains us to tell you, that’s what 50 Cent has done.

There’s been a protection order banning 50 Cent from seeing his son Marquise since the house fire that suspiciously gutted the home of Marquise and his mother Shaniqua Tompkins back in May. But 50 Cent wanted to see his son, so he went to court to fight for visitation.

There was one minor caveat set by the court, though – in order to see his son, 50 Cent had to pass a drug test. We’re sorry to tell you that 50 Cent passed. The New York Daily News reports:

Fitty was ordered to take a drug test before a Long Island judge would give him permission to take his son on vacation. Fitty complied, the test came back clean and now he’s free to take 11-year-old Marquise away. “I haven’t seen my son in a while. That’s why I came here today,” the rapper said after he passed the test.

Incidentally, Shaniqua Tompkins was ordered to take the same drug test and hers came back testing positives for opiates. Tompkins is blaming that on cough syrup, but you know what that means? It means 50 Cent is now less street than a woman with the surname Tompkins. You just can’t get less street than that.

Honestly, 50 Cent might feel like he’s accomplished something by passing a drug test and deepening his father-son bond with little Marquise, but this confusing show of maturity is bound to anger and alienate his fans.

Admittedly most 50 Cent fans are so stupid that they’re similarly angered and alienated by things like sentences and original thought, but that’s hardly the point here, is it?

If The Odd Couple ever returned to our screens, then there isn't a casting director in the land who could dream up an odder couple than this.

Everyone knows Osama Bin Laden – he’s that crazy foreign guy with a vengeance against the west – and then there's R Kelly, a successful singer who officially doesn’t love children a little bit too much. Imagine those wacky characters shacked up in a flat above a chip shop – it would be a certain ratings winner. 

The chances of these two ever bumping into each other over a packet of pork scratchings in the local ale house, though, is quite unlikely. Still this hasn't stopped R Kelly from comparing himself to the world’s most hated terrorist.

After going through a serious court hearing, you would be forgiven to presume that R Kelly would be a bit shaken and not his normal self. But even so, there's shaken and there's saying:

“Osama Bin Laden is the only one who knows exactly what I'm going through.” 

Unless Osama Bin Laden is sitting in a tricked-out cave somewhere in Afghanistan sipping on the finest camel’s milk and eating the priciest rice, we wouldn’t have thought so.

Granted, a lot of people despise the leader of Al Qaeda, but probably not as many as a man who legally didn't force a 14-year-old girl to piss herself to the sound of the Backstreet Boys. Still wounded from the ordeal, R Kelly said: 

“They can criticise you without even knowing you, and hate you when they don't even know you. All of a sudden, you're, like, the Bin Laden of America.”

Hecklerspray admits to making rude rhymes up about R Kelly during the case, but we never realised he’d take it so personally. We are sorry Robert, and promise to never call you a kiddy fiddler again.

We wonder if Bin Laden will feel Kelly’s pain of not having a decent record in such a long time. People we know tell us that the people in Afghanistan weren’t taking well to Bin Laden's last pop hit – The West Are Pigs And They Must Be Destroyed.

It was just a month or two ago when Naomi Campbell caused a stink on a British Airways flight.

At the time she claimed to be the victim of racism or something, and also she claimed that it wasn't her fault because the captain wouldn't let her sit in his posh seat for the flight's entire duration, and anybody else would have reacted similarly if placed in the same situation.

But maybe we exaggerated a tad there. Anyhow – she's in court for the whole mess right now – and she's pleaded…..guilty.

This action could result in regular state-provided dinners and a cellmate to scratch at.

Naomi Campbell has been to court at least a thousand times. In fact it could even be argued that she's such a common fixture there that is she showed up with a long black robe and a gavel, a bailiff might mistakenly escort her up to the judge's throne.

If memory serves correctly her last court appearance ended with her having to clean things with a mop. If memory serves even more correctly, when her hours were up every single co-worker wept on her neck and gave her a cake.

OK, so our memory isn't always that correct. But Campbell's legal woes continue – she got officially charged for her airport trouble almost a month ago, and today, apparently, she's pleaded guilty. E! Online has the skinny:

"The trouble-prone catwalker pleaded guilty today to assaulting two police officers after causing a stink aboard a BA flight at London's Heathrow Airport in April, charges that could land her serious jail time…when she finally made it inside, she copped to six charges in total—three counts of assaulting a constable, one of disorderly conduct likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress and two of using threatening, abusive words or behavior to cabin crew. The guilty plea could nab the runway star a maximum six-month prison sentence and a fine of $10,000."

So will she actually get locked up for her insane temper this time? Her maid that probably still has a blackberry lodged in her left eye socket certainly hopes so. Probably. But we think her imprisonment isn't such a good idea.

Think about it – she's already angry all the time. Imagine if she learned how to fight with a shank.

Now that's an airplane we would not want to be on.

To read more, see "Naomi Campbell pleads guilty in 'air rage' case" on The Associated Press