Picking a jury for the R Kelly child porn trial must be an unrelentingly difficult procedure.

The process involves weeding out those who really like R Kelly, those who really hate R Kelly, anyone who’s formed an opinion about R Kelly based on the mountain of press he’s received over his alleged underage sex tape, those who like the idea of watching child porn a little too much and those who did all of the above on purpose to get them out of jury service.

But, despite all that, three jurors have been chosen for the R Kelly child porn trial. The big news, however, is that yesterday R Kelly sat next to a toilet and the poo-stink went up his nose and he got all sad. No, really.

Although being a juror in R Kelly’s upcoming child porn trial means subjecting yourself to weeks and weeks of probably quite harrowing evidence and then wrestling with your conscience about whether or not to send a man to jail until the year 2023 because of that evidence, chances are you’ll get to write a book about it afterwards and that sounds fun. We want in, frankly.

Sadly, because we own over 38 copies of the Space Jam soundtrack on multiple formats and actually do believe we can fly, that’s not likely to happen. But yesterday three lucky kids were chosen to be part of the jury on the long-delayed R Kelly child pornography trial.

As you probably know, after six years of dreaming up new excuses why he shouldn’t stand trial, R Kelly is about to go to court over the video that surfaced in 2002 of him apparently having sex with a girl possibly as young as 13. The jury selection process has begun – an arduous task involving 150 people who must all be interviewed and whittled down to 16 – and according to the Associated Press the three picked yesterday included:

The wife of a Baptist preacher from R. Kelly’s hometown, a business executive and a telecommunications company employee… The executive, a middle-aged man, called child pornography “the lowest of the low” during questioning by the judge and attorneys. But he said he felt he could give a fair trial to the 41-year-old Kelly, who is accused of videotaping himself having sex with a girl as young as 13.

In addition to this, the telecommunications employee stated that he didn’t even like walking past pornography magazines in convenience stores, while the wife of a Baptist preacher is, well, the wife of a Baptist preacher. It’s not looking great for R Kelly – who denies the charges – although there’s still plenty of time to balance this out by picking a bunch of jaundiced-looking perverts in the coming days.

But, of course, the most fun in jury selection processes involve the jurors who didn’t make it. These apparently included a man who seemed to indirectly threaten R Kelly with violence if he was found guilty. God knows we wish he was picked.

The selection process is likely to take up the rest of the week, after which the meat of the trial can begin in earnest. That is unless R Kelly doesn’t pass out from all the shit-fumes billowing up his nose all the time. It’s a possibility – it’s been reported that yesterday R Kelly was made to sit so close to the men’s toilet that he had to keep a tissue clamped against his nose for most of the proceedings.

Hopefully this won’t change during the actual trial, because we’d quite like R Kelly’s poo-sensitive nose to be the new Phil Spector’s lesbian wig. And hopefully that will be enough to keep us going throughout the entire trial, because we can’t find a trace of humour in a video of a grown man weeing all over a girl’s face.

Oh, OK, yes we can, but the poo-nose thing would be an extra special treat on top. Make it happen, court people! Neglect all basic toilet hygiene for us! We’d do the same for you

Read more:

3 jurors chosen for R&B superstar R. Kelly’s trial – AP

This R Kelly child porn sex-tape kerfuffle has rattled on for so long that the child in question is now a 93-year-old great-grandmother with an irrational phobia of urine, and yet still it shows no sign of concluding.

That's partly because R Kelly keeps successfully managing to push court dates further and further back every time things start to look serious for him – but no longer, because if R Kelly doesn't turn up to court in the next 90 minutes, he's going to be arrested. R Kelly was due to appear in court in Chicago yesterday, you see, but he failed to show up because his tour bus was crocked first by snow and then by a slightly overzealous group of Utah police officers. Hopefully, though, this threat of arrest will force R Kelly to show up in court once and for all, where he'll do the decent thing and get his child porn trial pushed back a couple of years again.

Utah's not a good place to go if you're famous. It's a place where you can't even angrily attack the interior of your own car without attracting a crowd of rubber-neckers, and the threat of bumping into Lindsay Lohan is so high that the CIA has put the state near the top of its official Idiot List.

But worse than that, Utah is a state with a police force so officious that it even stops controversial R&B singers from attending child porn hearings, as R Kelly discovered yesterday.

R Kelly has been waiting since 2002 to go to trial over charges that supposed sex tape of him allegedly having sex with what appears to be a 13 or 14-year-old girl and then doing a wee on her. If he's convicted of all charges, then R Kelly will end up spending anything up to 15 years in jail.

But that's only if R Kelly hasn't died of old age by the time the trial actually starts, because it's been pushed time and time again thanks to burst internal organs and ladder-related accidents. Most recently, the R Kelly child porn trial was set to start in September, but that fell through because his lawyer had a sore tumpsy from giving birth. So yesterday R Kelly was due in a Chicago court to hear when the new trial would start.

Except he didn't show up. Why? Had R Kelly gone on the run to found a brave new land where grown men can film themselves widdling on teenagers' heads whenever they want, unless they didn't do it in which case they'd be perfectly free not to? No, R Kelly was stuck in Utah because a policeman had decided that his bus driver wasn't properly rested and ordered him to pull over for eight hours. According to E! Online, this annoyed the prosecutors somewhat:

"It is an abuse of the process and disrespectful of the court and your honor for everyone who has come prepared to go," said Assistant State's Attorney Shauna Boliker. "The very least he could do is be here for his appointed court date."

And because of the Utah-enforced no-show, the judge decided to put an arrest warrant on R Kelly's head unless he shows up in court by 9am today, Chicago time. It could be one of the most important court hearings of R Kelly's life, too, because it's expected to be when the judge will give him a final start date for the trial.

Well, OK, maybe not a final start date – what's more likely to happen is that someone vaguely related to the case will trip over a skateboard, push the trial back again and give R Kelly the chance to record a couple more slightly inappropriate albums all about the way his penis resembles a car key.

Read more:

R. Kelly's Bus-Stop Blues – E! Online