The World Cup in South Africa was so underwhelming and blighted by vuvuzelas that the world turned its attention to a grotesque cephalopod mollusc. Yep, it was Paul the Octopus who idly sat on boxes with flags on them while slackjawed journalists clapped giddly, banging the glass of the tank.

And now, in utterly bewildering news, Paul the Psychic Octopus is to going to release an Elvis Presley tribute album.

If he gets any more famous, at least he’ll be ace at signing autographs with all those horrible little grabbing arms he’s got.

Paul has now been signed up to several endorsement and merchandising deals, according to DS. We’ve clearly walked straight into some dream-sequence. This can’t be happening.

The octopus’s agent Chris Davies (see? Who spiked our Corn Flakes this morning?) said: “There are books being written, a range of octopus toys are coming out this Christmas and there is even a new iPhone app.

“One of the most exciting things is that he has a record deal in place for an album, called Paul The Octopus Sings Elvis.”

Paul’s life is due to be documented in a film called The Murder Of Paul The Octopus.

Are they going to kill him as well?

*goes for a lie-down in a darkened room*

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Us cool dudes at hecklerspray aren’t perfect. In a bid to be totally sick and wicked and bad and whatever for you kids, we sometimes make mistakes, speak out of line or go a bit too near the knuckle.

The trouble is, and we’ll use a metaphor that you young people might understand, we’re constantly ’Hanging Ten’ on the gnarly waves of cutting edge celebrity gossip on ‘Surfboards’ made from insight, honesty and a childish fixation with willies and fannies. All while wearing a wetsuit of journalistic integrity or something like that.

But every now and again, we ‘Wipeout’, which I’m sure you will all is agree is ‘Bogus’ (is that the right word?). Sometimes our wetsuit falls off and our willies and fannies hang out for all the fish to see. That’s right, we have both. If you wanna see, meet us behind Google in five minutes…

Now, we kind of suggested yesterday that miniature pop-louse Justin Bieber may have a sexual penchant for youngsters. We’ve since realised that it’s not very nice to bandy unfounded accusations like that about. We certainly wouldn’t say things like that about anyone else, say for instance, Michael Jackson, would we? So we’re re-waxing our integrity boards and thinking on…

But while we do that, here’s news that Kim Kardashian’s a kiddy-fiddler!

The former Playboy model lured the Peter Beale-a-like Bieber (American readers – Google it. See?) into her sordid web of age-gap lust at the 2010 White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington D.C. on Saturday night. She Tweeted after the event:

“I officially have Bieber Fever!!”

In the 17th Century, Parisian doctors would often treat cases of Bieber fever with amputation and a rectumful of leeches. Luckily for Kardashian, she lives in LA, it’s the 21st Century and we made that up.

Bieber returned the favour by posting a picture of the pair onto his own Twitter feed with the text:

“Look it’s my girlfriend Kim Kardashian.”

If you consider that the fluffy-haired pillock has more than two million followers on Twitter – all of who are pre-pubescent girls – you can practically hear the collective sighs, cries and self-harming that would have greeted his comment.

Could there be something to this half-arsed rumour/story? Probably not, but we’ve got a word count to hit, okay?

All this business is nothing new, the pair would only be walking in the Nabokovian footsteps of such anti-establishment icons and challengers of moral acceptance as Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and Katie Price and Gareth Gates.

The dwarf-king munchkin of nothing could have to experience his first wank alone, though, as Kardashian is reportedly dating Real Madrid midfielder Cristiano Ronaldo. This will, in all likelihood, mean that the smooth-faced prince of blandy-blandy-beige-bollock-pop-blah-blah-blah may have to look elsewhere for the older lady he desires.

Perhaps the newly single Susan Sarandon? But then Madonna’s bound to be up for it. Maybe even the late Jessica Tandy?

So, once again, can we just point out that Justin Bieber is not interested in having sex with children.

He wants to fuck dead old women.

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//

Last week’s instalment of American Idol was truly nail-biting – a fat bloke almost went home but then didn’t.

Could it be topped this week? Of course it could, because last night’s American Idol was an almost completely perfect show. Not only was there a double elimination, with Katie Stevens and Andrew Garcia being catapulted back to obscurity, but Tim Urban survived for yet another week and Adam Lambert turned up to sing a song AND the Ford music video featured a cover version of a Polyphonic Spree song that we used to like AND the group medley took the form of genuinely the most insulting tribute to Elvis Presley that we’ve ever seen.

Oh wait, those are all bad things, not good things. Hey, that means that American Idol wasn’t perfect at all! What an unfortunate misunderstanding on our part.

Elvis week. Just let those words soak in for a moment. Elvis week. All the American Idol contestants – one of which stands a very good chance of becoming an international superstar – reduced to Elvis Presley impersonators. In retrospect, no wonder two contestants went home this week. Chances are that if the American Idol producers offered viewers a ‘KILL THEM ALL WITH HAMMERS IMMEDIATELY’ voting option at any point during Elvis week, one very unlucky janitor would currently be trying to scrape bits of Lee Dewyze‘s skull from the inside wall of the orchestra pit.

But, thanks to last week’s daring deployment of the judge’s save, two American Idol contestants would have been sent home anyway. However, the unlucky rubes this week were Andrew Garcia and Katie Stevens. And you know what? We’ll miss them. Andrew Garcia, we’ll miss the way that you never pronounced any vowel apart from the letter A, turning last week’s Can’t Buy Me Love into Can’t Bay Ma Lave and this week’s Hound Dog into Haand Dag. And Katie Stevens, we’ll miss not really knowing who you are.

However, while we mourn Andrew Garcia and Katie Stevens, at least we can console ourselves with the fact that Tim Urban is still a part of American Idol. Fun fact: by surviving this long, Tim Urban is now the most successful worthless dollop of Jonas Brothers afterbirth in the history of the entire show. Congratulations Tim!

Also worth celebrating – Adam Lambert made his triumphant return to American Idol, mentoring the acts and performing his new single. Thanks to his valuable input, this year’s remaining American Idol contestants will know exactly how to stay in the media by utilising one of several tedious attention-grabbing stunts. Don’t believe us? We’ll be here to accept your apology the day after Crystal Bowersox pushes her fingers up a dancer’s bottom during a routine on live television. Because don’t think that she won’t.

Still, at least we can be certain that next week’s American Idol couldn’t possibly be as bad as this week’s American Idol. What? Annie Lennox is performing? OK, we take it all back. Next week’s American Idol is going to be terrible.

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If you’re a famous musician or actor, you can whore out the merchandise left, right and centre.

The teenage market will consume most of the crap that various companies spit out on your behalf. Who wants to be bullied in the playground because they haven’t got the official sticker book, lunchbox, pencil case, fake tattoo set and poster collection?

For the older market, fans of a certain person can purchase a celebrity’s official scent. Most celebrities have one now. From Britney Spears to Kylie, you can live under the illusion that these stars visited the finest perfumeries in the world to muster up a scent. But these are the fragrances from people who are actually alive. How could a dead musician bring one out? By the power of fan exploitation? Well technically yes, but it’s more to do with science and clever stuff like that. Isn’t it, Michael Jackson?

Amazingly, this isn’t Joe Jackson’s failed aftershave launch under the guise of his dearly departed son. This is indeed a brand new product that’s going ahead even though Michael Jackson is currently doing the moonwalk in the afterlife. But how is this possible? Well gather round and let us explain. Grab yourself a drink of Jesus Juice why don’t you?

It’s a tale involving a weird individual called John Reznikoff who has the world’s largest collection of historical hair. We kid you not; he owns locks from people like Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, Albert Einstein and Marilyn Monroe. How he gets hold of them is a bit of a mystery. Either he’s very good at grave robbing or he’s on friendly terms with a lot of hairdressers. So what do you do with all these strands of dead hair? You could sniff it, or make it into perfume.

So how do you make perfume out of hair? You can’t squeeze it and make nice smelling liquid come out. Instead, you have to go to a company that sounds like a wacky real life equivalent of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Based in Los Angeles, a company called My DNA Fragrance claims it can extract the DNA from hair and turn it in to something nice and worth sloshing on your face.

Due to John Reznikoff having a stupidly large collection of dead people’s hair, he has joined forces with My DNA Fragrances to offer obsessive fans and general nutjobs the chance to smell like their favourite dead person. Michael Jackson is simply the newest person on their so called client list. Speaking to the Economic Times, the chairman of the company Carlton Enoch said:

“We use the genetic code to formulate the fragrance. If you are putting on MJ’s perfume it’s a unique fragrance to him. The biggest seller is Elvis, but MJ is selling very well too. It’s a powerful fragrance and there is no alcohol in it.”

What, no alcohol? That almost made us spit our Jesus Juice in anger. Michael Jackson loved that beverage as much as he loved sleepovers with young children. Somewhere in the spirit world, he’ll be thrusting his crotch in sheer anger.

With Christmas coming, we wonder if the common person can bottle up their own scent based on a piece of DNA. Saying that, it’s probably not advisable for people like us. We’d only send along one of pubes and watch someone douse themselves in our cheesy smelling perfume.

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10 - Win tickets to see Rihanna in concert! Do it now! – Popsugar

9 - Fingerless gloves: the critical re-evaluation – Interestment

8 - Things we’re now afraid of: getting trapped on an iceberg with three polar bears – Asylum

7 - This just in: bald bears are TERRIFYING – Geekology

6 – Shakira! Quick! Do something to your hair that’ll stop us fancying you quite as much! Good girl! – AmyGrindhouse

5 - Footage from the Concert For Care concert with Rob Brydon and that bald Irish bloke – Leapanywhere

4 – Vegetable Elvis Presley. You Heard – Domesticsluttery

3 - Because of the day that it is – YouTube

2 - Womanizer by Britney Spears, as sung by the French – Bestweekever

1 – Where’s today’s idiot? Oh, here he is…

Elvis Presley may have shaped the modern notion of what popular music is, but was he ever the cover star of a '100 Hottest Body Tips From The Stars' special issue of People magazine?

No he wasn't. But Mariah Carey is. Thus Mariah is better than Elvis Presley.

And Mariah Carey isn't just better than Elvis Presley at having a beach fit bikini body, either – Mariah Carey is also better at music and stuff as well. It's true – Mariah Carey has notched up her 18th American number one single, while rubbish old Elvis Presley only managed to get 17 before he snuffed it. Mariah is the new Elvis! Yay! That means we'll be able to dress up like her and ghoulishly traipse around her house when she dies! Yay!  

Elvis Presley has been dead for 30 years, but he still has a lot going for him – he's richer than any other dead person, plus he left behind an overweight daughter and mangle-faced wife. And how do we repay Elvis Presley for these two lovely – if slightly startling – gifts to the world? By wrestling everything he holds dear out of his fat dead hands and giving it to Mariah Carey, that's how.

Mariah Carey's new single Touch My Body – as well as possibly being a weird insurance scam – is number one in the Billboard Hot 100 chart. And, as you'd expect for the white-hot talent responsible for hits like Fantasy, That Other Song, The One About Touching Her Body, The High-Pitched One and The Song That Sounds Like The Song About Touching Her Body, number one records are nothing new for Mariah Carey at all.

In fact Touch My Body is Mariah Carey's 18th American number one, which is more American number ones than that useless turd Elvis Presley ever flipping got. BBC News reports:

"I'm just feeling really happy and grateful," the 38-year-old performer told the Associated Press.  "I really can never put myself in the category of people who have not only revolutionised music but also changed the world, that's a completely different era and time," she said."In terms of my ethnicity, always feeling like an outsider, always feeling different… for me it's about saying, 'Thank you Lord, for giving me the faith to believe in myself when other people had written me off."

Although congratulations are due to Mariah Carey for surpassing one of the most famous men who ever lived, she should remember that beating Elvis Presley at stuff is actually quite easy. This morning alone, for example, we beat Elvis Presley at arm-wresting, Guitar Hero and Pin The Tail On The Donkey. And, honestly, if he hadn't creeped us out so much during that staring contest we'd have creamed him at that too.

You see, while Mariah Carey has had more number one records than Elvis, she still needs three more number one records to beat all-time champions The Beatles. And you know what that means, don't you? It means that Mariah Carey isn't going to retire until she's released at least another three insipid, instantly forgettable R&B pop ballads. Joy.

Read more:

Mariah breaks Elvis chart record - BBC

You may have seen pictures of Lisa Marie Presley recently and wondered how she got so enormous, but now we have the answer – Lisa Marie Presley ate a baby.

Wait, no, not that's not entirely true. In fact what's happened is that Lisa Marie Presley – daughter of Elvis Presley – is merely pregnant, as her spokesman has confirmed.

This will be Lisa Marie Presley's third child but, given that she's looking more and more like Fat Elvis with each passing day, it's unknown whether Lisa Marie will want to give birth to her baby in the regular way or die trying to crap it out of her arse on the toilet. As a mark of respect to her father, you understand.

For all the benefits of being Elvis Presley's only daughter – like never having to wait any longer than five minutes for a deep-fried squirrel burger as a child or getting to have sex with well-established dreamboat hunks like Nicolas Cage and Michael Jackson – there are bound to be drawbacks. 

Just ask Lisa Marie Presley. She is Elvis Presley's only daughter and, when she's not floating on a cloud of joy because she's probable touched Michael Jackson's penis, she has to live with the fact that Elvis still makes more money than she does even though he's been dead for 30 years. Plus she's a Scientologist, so she probably has to put up with hanging around Tom Cruise and Kirstie Alley a lot more than any human deserves to.

However, Lisa Marie Presley has one thing that Elvis Presley never had, and that's a functional female reproductive system. And she just keeps rubbing that in the dead man's face, because Lisa Marie Presley is pregnant again. Hello reports:

Elvis' only daughter is expecting her first child with guitarist and music producer husband Michael Lockwood this autumn. "The couple are incredibly overjoyed," says Lisa's spokesperson, who confirmed the happy news on Friday. The new arrival will be Lisa's third baby. She has a daughter Riley, 18, and son Benjamin, 15, with ex-husband, musician and actor Danny Keough.

You see? It isn't just celebrities like Nicole Kidman and Jessica Alba that can get pregnant – the barely-remembered offspring of celebrities can do it too. 

The news of Lasa Marie Presley's pregnancy will come a blessed relief to anyone who saw the photos of her earlier this week looking all gigantic. But at least now we all know that a woman we don't care about is only fat because she's pregnant and not because she eats a lot of chips. Truly, we can sleep soundly now.

Read more:

Elvis' daughter Lisa Marie expecting third child this autumn - Hello 

There's nothing like a list of people who earn more in a year than you ever will in your entire life even though they've been dead for years to inject some sunshine into your life, is there?

That's right – the annual Forbes Dead Celebrity Rich List has been published, and it's been another classic year for Elvis Presley. Elvis has managed to earn $49 million over the last year, $5 million more than his nearest rival John Lennon could muster. It's a triumphant return to the top spot for Elvis Presley, who was knocked into second place last year by Kurt Cobain, with industry experts claiming that this reflects the current public trend for favouring bloated corpses with blasted-open colons over miserable corpses with bits of their heads missing.

Elvis Presley has had quite the year. Ever since he died in 1977, the highlight of most of Elvis' years has been either when he decomposed especially slowly or when Toothless Bill the Graceland groundskeeper pounds on his grave and shouts "Guess how many times they've repackaged your Greatest Hits collection this year Elvis? Four!"

But this year was special. This year was the 30th Anniversary of Elvis Presley's death, which meant that not only did people steal his stuff and bury in a chemical toilet but they all rushed out and bought whatever Elvis-related tat his estate saw fit to hurl out, even though Elvis fans probably own it all in 25 slightly different formats anyway. And that's stood him in good stead for this year's annual Forbes Dead Celebrity Rich List, which has just been published.

You see, Elvis Presley is the daddy of rich dead celebrities. He's usually voted as the richest dead celebrity and only a last-ditch push to sell off 25% of Kurt Cobain's songwriting publishing beat him down into second place last year. But 2007 has been Elvis Presley's year, and the only way it could have been improved is if he hadn't killed himself trying to shit out a breezeblock three decades ago. He's rich, damnit! Rich! The Times reports:

Elvis earned $49 million (£24 million) in the past year, toppling the late Nirvana frontman and regaining the top spot on the Forbes.com list. Elvis’s estate continues to generate millions from music royalties, DVDs, licensing deals and tourism at Graceland, the singer’s mansion in Memphis. The website ranks 13 former celebrities according to income and proves that death is no obstacle to making money. The group collectively earnt $232 million in the past year.

Second to Elvis Presley this year was John Lennon, a man who started selling his songs online and got a giant beam of light named after him. Not that the light beam earnt him much money, of course, although Lennon is expected to top the Forbes annual 'Dead Celebrities With The Most Pointless Carbon Footprint' list when that's published next month. As for the rest of the list, it's mainly the usual suspects – Einstein, Schultz, Warhol – with the added inclusion of recently dead James Brown making his debut at number 11 with $5 million. We're sure that James Brown is thrilled by this, and thinks it more than makes up for the way congestive heart failure resulting from complications of pneumonia killed him on Christmas day.

Here's this year's list of the richest dead celebrities, according to Forbes: 

Elvis Presley $49 million
John Lennon $44 million
Charles M. Schulz $35 million
George Harrison $22 million
Albert Einstein $18 million
Andy Warhol $15 million
Theodor Geisel $13 million
Tupac Shakur $9 million
Marilyn Monroe $7 million
Steve McQueen $6 million
James Brown $5 million
Bob Marley $4 million
James Dean $3.5 million

Read more:

Dead Rich List All Shook Up As Elvis Returns To Top – Times