Throughout a typical season several competing girls learn to take their overall dearth of life-skills and fling them at the camera like a monkey flings fecal matter that’s been picked clean of all its nutritional value. It’s an ode to humanity if you think about it; girls come from nothing, Tyra intervenes, girls receive the potential to make loads of money all over the place by blankly staring into the business end of George Eastman’s big glass eye.

But what happens if a would-be contestant just has too many penises? Would his bulgy bikini shots be a life-long demerit.  Not if Tyra has anything to say about it. Which she does, especially in this case – she’s paying to have one of the show’s contestants get their man-hammer cut off with knives.

Seriously. Sounds like a ratings winner.

The thing about gender is it’s very fickle. Why, in New Guinea there’s an entire tribe of people whose gender for the day is decided by whatever melon they choose to eat for breakfast. It’s potent stuff. Has something to do with seed count. Science can’t explain it, and so we don’t feel obligated to either.

The point being when someone is born into this world it’s never with a specific masculine or feminine destiny in mind. The human race was not meant to be dictated by the little stick figures that grace most public bathroom doors. Just ask Stu.

Think about it – why else would the male penis be so easily detachable. The only thing really separating man from becoming a more genderless woman is getting caught naked in a strong gust of wind too near a pile of loose shingles.

Is that vague?

Tyra Banks understands this all too well. That’s why she’s taking the opportunity to help the first gender-bending contestant on America’s Next Top Model get a free sex change. As Hollyscoop puts it:

“Isis [the transgender contestant from ...Top Model] appeared on Tyra to talk about her struggles with her situation, and that she tried not to let it affect her time on Top Model.

“Tyra Banks then introduces Isis to Dr. Marci Bowers, a leading gender reassignment surgeon who has experienced the surgery herself. Isis hasn’t been able to pay for the pricy surgery, which is why Dr. Bowers offers to pay for it herself. Pretty nice of her, huh?”

Well, hecklerspray just hopes Isis understands this surgery could have heavy-handed consequences when it comes to his/her right to vote in several countries around the world.

Also it’ll probably reduce his/her lawn mowing ability. These are the kind of things pre-op transgenders just don’t ever really think about.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

166 days after he went to prison for crashing his car spectacularly enough to require his friend John Graziano to receive constant medical attention, Hulk Hogan’s son Nick Hogan has been released from jail. And, with soul-destroying inevitability, Nick Hogan is now thought to want a reality TV show about his life on the outside.

It’d be a good show, though, because Nick Hogan is bound to have been though new experiences during his jail sentence and sharing those experiences will be Nick Hogan’s way of giving something back. The only question is the name of the show – there’s already been a Hogan Knows Best and a Brooke Knows Best so… wait! We’ve got it! How about Nick Hogan Remembers Getting Anally Brutalised By An Arsonist? You know, provided that happened.

As all sorts of crappy films are wont to telling us, sometimes life can really change in an instant. And that couldn’t really be more true of Hulk Hogan’s son Nick Hogan.

One day, Nick Hogan was simply the alarmingly square-faced and overprivileged son of a professional wrestler, and then it all changed – the exact moment when Nick crashed his car during an alleged makeshift drag-race and injured his friend John Graziano to the extent where he’ll need medical care for the rest of his life was the exact moment when everything went wrong for everyone.

First there was the immediate knock-on of the crash – Nick Hogan went to jail for it, then ended up in solitary, then got sued by Graziano’s family which made him look even more of a callous sod than he did before. It must have been hard, but not as hard as what the crash did to his family life – his mother and father divorced in the wake of the crash, and then both started to get off with people his own age.

Harbouring the mental image of his mother – who looks disturbingly enough like a man as it is – having it away with someone who he went to school with is probably punishment enough for his crime, but now Nick Bollea has served the prison part of the punishment as well.

According to reports, Nick Hogan was released from Pinellas County Jail early this morning, two months before completing his sentence for good behaviour. While Nick Hogan hasn’t made a statement yet, his mother Linda has already done it for him, as MTV reports:

“This is our time as a family to come together to support Nick’s adjustment back into the public life, keeping it as normal as possible. Neither Nick, nor we as a family, has any interest in making this anything but private. We respect the media’s role and only ask that they respect our privacy. Nick went into prison as a juvenile and has experienced something that will mold and affect him for the rest of his adult life. His focus is to make a positive difference in this world, media-free. Since his future actions will speak louder than any words, there is no need to speak to the media at this time.”

Quite right. There is no reason to speak to the media – especially since doing that will nudge down the price that Nick Hogan can demand for his inevitable sad-faced OK! magazine covershoot and accompanying interview in a couple of months’ time.

And the matter of the reality TV show is still a bit fuzzy. Although Linda Hogan says that Nick’s life will be ‘media-free’ from now on, Nick himself was thought to be keen on finding a reality vehicle upon his release, and the TV networks are bound to be knocking at his door with offers soon. It might just better a matter of when, not if.

Besides, what can Nick Hogan do for a living other than star in reality TV shows? He’s probably not going to be accepted as a bus driver now, that’s for sure, and we’re not sure that the only other job he’s qualified for – using his skull as a template for industrial rectangular birdhouses – even exists.

But that particular memo doesn’t appear to have reached Minnie Driver, because she’s just done the unthinkable – she’s posted a photo of her new son Henry on MySpace. For free. What a massive idiot.

Doesn’t Minnie Driver know what she’s missing? With all the public interest in her, Minnie Driver could have secured herself a huge cheque for the exclusive rights to those photos instead of spunking them away for free on the internet. She could have bought herself something really nice with that photoshoot money, like a plastic watch or a pair of flipflops or a couple of loaves of bread or something. Tsk.

Minnie Driver is a rubbish celebrity, and that’s solid fact. She hasn’t been in any decent films since… well, she hasn’t been in any decent films. Her attempts at songwriting all sound like soggy Dido queef. And she’s handled the birth of her baby like – oh God, we think we’re going to throw up – like a civilian.

To be fair, Minnie Driver had a bash at the celebrity baby thing to begin with – when her giant baby was born last month she decided to name it Story. Which sounds good, until you realise that she also called it Henry. That just displays a lack of focus – Henry Story hardly counts as a celebrity name because only half of its name isn’t a real name. Bogantwaii Story we could have dealt with. Grapefruit Story we could have dealt with. Mmmbop Story we could have dealt with. But Henry Story? Ugh. Get out.

And, just to make sure she’s really rubbing our noses in it, Minnie Driver has decided to shun the traditional celebrity pursuit of selling baby pictures to a magazine for millions of dollars in favour of just bunging a snap on MySpace instead. It’s a bloody disgrace. The New York Daily News reports:

Big photo shoot? Psh! Minnie Driver doesn’t roll that way. The notoriously un-Hollywood actress has posted a photo of her infant son Henry Story Driver on MySpace. Driver’s rep told the Daily News on Monday that her client wasn’t trying to make a statement with Henry’s public debut – she simply wanted to share the photo with friends and fans.

That’s right Minnie Driver, you try to be all clever and anti-establishment. See if we care. Look, if we can’t pay a couple of quid for a rubbish magazine just to gawp at a photo of you holding a baby that’s completely identical to every other baby ever born, then we don’t want to look at the poxy thing at all.

And, oh, MySpace. How very modern of you, Minnie Driver! Why didn’t you go the whole hog and post a video of your baby happyslapping a pensioner on YouTube? Huh? Because… OK, actually we would quite like to see that.

Anyway, good for Minnie Driver. She’s proved once again that she doesn’t buy into the trappings of celebrity life easily, and we can’t help but respect her a little bit for that. Although we can’t help feeling that there’s another, much more obvious, reason for her sticking her baby photos on MySpace – celebrity baby apathy.

It’s simple – the public is so fed up of being force-fed celebrity baby photos that they even react with boredom to pictures of the pictures of megastars like Christina Aguilera and Jennifer Lopez. And if pictures of famous babies reduce people to boredom, then imagine what they’d do if they saw Minnie Driver’s baby in a magazine. Riots, looting, the messy destruction of civilisation as we know it. No, Minnie Driver deserves a medal for her good citizenship.

Why that’s just great, because Michael Moore’s new movie Slacker Uprising is now available to view for free on the internet, provided that you’re American and literally have nothing better to do with your time.

Slacker Uprising is, of course, Michael Moore’s way of urging the young voters of America to wake up and vote in the coming general election. Well, at least that’s what he says. It’s clearly Michael Moore’s way of urging young voters to vote Democrat, otherwise it wouldn’t be called Slacker Uprising. If he wanted people to vote Republican he would’ve called it something else, like Hey You! Get Off My Yacht! My Father Owns This Bay, You Dirty Mexican!

We can’t wait for the American general election to be over, because everything’s getting so bloody politicised at the moment. Celebrities are talking politics, the MTV VMAs were absurdly political and we’re pretty sure that the last episode of Sesame Street we watched was brought to us by the letter K and the concept of off-shore drilling.

What makes us most angry about this is that all everyone’s sudden interest in politics is effectively taking food from Michael Moore’s table. Now, admittedly Michael Moore could probably do with eating a bit less anyway, but that isn’t the point.

The point is this: politics is Michael Moore’s thing. When Michael Moore is angered by something political, he makes a movie about it and the problem goes away, like when George Bush didn’t get reelected after Fahrenheit 911 or when all medicine was banned after Sicko.

So, to remind everyone that actually he’s the one who invented politics in the first place, Michael Moore has decided to release his new movie for free online.

Entitled Slacker Uprising, the film follows Michael Moore’s 2004 college tour, where he shouted the word ‘vote’ at lecture halls full of students for three hours, threw a packet of noodles at someone and then brought on Michael Stipe to silently nod until everyone got a bit freaked out and sort of politely tried to edge towards the door. Or, as The Washington Post puts it:

The 97-minute flick, as subtle as a sledgehammer, is Moore’s account of his barnstorming tour of the country in advance of the 2004 presidential election, an effort undertaken to “save John Kerry and the Democrats from themselves.” Its message to Democrats in 2008 — implicit, but screamingly so — is, don’t let this happen again.

Anyway, Michael Moore’s Slacker Uprising is now available to watch for free online at Slackeruprising.com, provided you live in North America. Since we don’t, we haven’t got a clue if the film’s any good or not. That’s why, if you’re American, we want you to watch Slacker Uprising and then explain it to all us non-Americans below in exactly five words. Or an emoticon.

Nothing too taxing, please. We wouldn’t want to to think we actually care about any of this.

You do? Then does Michael Moore have a treat for you! What with this being an election year, it’s Michael Moore’s duty to ram hectoring, boorish, borderline propagandaish political information down everyone’s throats until they literally fart tedium. Only this time, he’s going to do it for free.

Michael Moore has announced that his fans can watch his new movie Slacker Uprising for free on the internet. Provided they do it in a designated three-week window and live in North America, that is. If this doesn’t include you, don’t get upset – you can probably achieve the same effect by going up to a fat tramp and getting him to whine about the government for a couple of hours and then shout at a building through a megaphone.

As things stand, there’s quite a big chance that America won’t have a Republican president by next year. And, as such, there’s quite a big chance that Michael Moore will be out of a job.

Michael Moore’s really come into his own over the last eight years by churning out films and books all about the various ways that the Republicans have narked him off, so if Barack Obama gets into power he’ll be reduced to making documentaries about kittens and writing books called I Essentially Agree With Everything Now: The Dumb Noddings Of Michael Moore.

So, on the off-chance that happens, Michael Moore needs to go out with a bang. But not the old sort of Michael Moore bang – the sort where he’d deliberately break the law and then bitch about it for months after – this time Michael Moore wants to go out on a completely new type of bang.

That’s right – Michael Moore’s doing a Radiohead.

Not literally, obviously – Michael Moore isn’t going to make one of his eyes go all squinty and wail about existential alienation in a manner that depresses a teenagers – but he is going to give his new film away for free on the internet. BBC News reports:

Oscar winner Michael Moore is to release his latest documentary free of charge on the internet. Slacker Uprising will be available as a download to North American viewers for three weeks from 23 September. Moore said he had considered a cinematic release to coincide with the current presidential race, but decided the internet would best “help get the vote out for November”.

And, if you don’t live in America, plan to observe the three-week Karlstad treaty memorial internet boycott that starts on September 23 or just don’t like Michael Moore very much, here’s the closest you’ll ever get to Slacker Uprising – the trailer…

Clever huh? It looks to us like Michael Moore spent all that money filming his political tour of America but couldn’t really release it as a film afterwards because everyone ended up voting for George Bush – ultimately making the tour a failure – only to later realise he could pin it to Barack Obama’s upsurge in popularity and make it look as if he invented getting young people to vote all along. But we could be wrong.

Either way, it’s nice to be given stuff for free – even if we’re not geographically allowed to watch the poxy thing anyway – so just imagine how much nicer it would be if the film was about something other than two hours of people congratulating Michael Moore for being such a bloody decent person.

One thing is that people will play anything: penguin launching, paper throwing, dog shuffling.

Another is that the games are generally tripe, only good for a few minutes before you move on.

One other thing is that sometimes you stumble on something that could be – should be – a full, retail release, but is instead free to play. This time it’s Naked War and even ignoring the fact that it’s free to play (you can pay if you want extra privileges) it still manages to be an absolutely stunning game.

Playing like an even more cartoony Advance Wars – one of the finest series on the Game Boy Advance/DS – this is a play-by-email strategy game that will eat up more of your time than you care to imagine. Thing is though, as it’s email-based you don’t have to commit to one session in one sitting – it can be stretched over a period of days or weeks, even months.

There isn’t much room to go on here, but we couldn’t recommend Naked War enough – go and sign up, download the client then accept your challenge from one of the game’s creators. Oh, and prepare to get battered by them. It is a bit unfair, but you can go on to play other people who aren’t as good.

Get It Here:

Naked War

But why bother, when you could just kill yourself? Well, maybe that’s a bit far, so instead why not just play the game Five Minutes to Kill Yourself? It manages to tick the right boxes – you work in an office, you’re pissed off, you want to kill yourself. Textbook.

Travelling around the workplace you can talk to people, pick stuff up and interact with objects, all with the goal being to stop yourself from being alive. It’s quite funny, if we do say so ourselves. It’s also very simple and a great timewaster – though only in five minute blocks.

Play it and help suppress the fantasies of actually killing yourself.

Play It Here:

Five Minutes to Kill Yourself

Well, apart from the times when it’s funny. But it’s certainly never fun. Well – again, it is. Sometimes. But still, shut up.

Anyway, it’s more fun now, with Dad ‘n’ Me coming to waste a bit of your day in fine Slackerjack fashion. A scrolling beat ‘em up – like the classic Streets of Rage – the game sees you being the school bully, kicking the snot out of kids simply for being there.

As it’s made by that lot who did Alien Hominid, it obviously looks lovely and it has a sense of humour about it. Oh, and it’s violent – shouldn’t forget that. Nor should we forget that it’s a lot of fun, because it is.

Play It Here:

Dad ‘n’ Me

So here it is:

Just play it.

Download-o Here:

Charles Barkley: Shut Up And Jam Gaiden

Marge is trying to the kids to do the gardening, but they refuse on the grounds it’s boring – later in the same episode Bart gets really excited when he sees a videogame called ‘Virtual Gardener’ or something along those lines, and rushes to play.

Great joke, of course. And then you get confronted with Throw Paper, and you feel a bit guilty. Because you’re doing the same thing. Instead of actually throwing paper balls into a wastebasket, you’re doing it virtually, on your computer.

But enough of the irony/comedy/forgetting classic moments of The Simpsons – this is a classic, addictive and fun game to waste a good few minutes on. Or hours, if you have that compulsive a personality.

Throw the paper, compensate for wind speed, get as many in the bin in a row as you can.

And that’s it.

Play Throw Paper Here:

Throw Paper

Wouldn’t it be ace if there were a device that did things when you thought it? Don’t want to get up and microwave last nights rotting curry? Then brainpower will solve that problem! Granted this would never happen and even if it did, it would probably be exploited for strange people to cook ants. But we can dream…

Amazingly there is a point to the above dream. We hate it when we have to go out and buy an album, as we have to trek through the crowds and get pushed around by old people who deserve respect for fighting in wars and other boring things.

The kids of today also demand respect. Not for any particular reason apart from the fact you’ll end up being stabbed and be left one kidney short.

Money is sometimes is an issue. We don’t always have the funds to spend on records and downloading soulless MP3s with no artwork is crap. So isn’t it great to know that Death By Panda has his entire discography on the internet, for free, complete with pretty images?

Following our recent look at promising young musicians with more talent than you could ever hope to pass off as you own, we return to America for another secretive figure in music land. The main player is Erik Luebs, who plays all the instruments in this one man solo project. Additional guitar work is featured by Nick Humphrey to add to the multiple soundscapes that he has created.

In just over two years, eight releases have been crafted and released for your listening pleasure. The best thing about them? They are all free. Only the release ‘House Made Of Glass’ has the option of being physically bought, with actual artwork you can smell and a CD you can lick.

Given the option, you can donate to his cause of recording and writing music, but when we look at it realistically it’s clear to see it’s to generate him some money for a project that is more then just a weekend hobby.

Only the other week we featured Khonnor, a man making ambient music that fizzed electronics, at times shattering the carefully crafted calmness. With Death By Panda, it’s almost like we can describe it as being drunk electronics.

The woozy effects ring in and out, flash from side to side and echo all around you. Built around ever growing drums and fragmented vocals, it wouldn’t be too much of a push to expect the formula to wear thin after a short amount of time. But as hecklerspray has found, there are over four hours of free music to listen to.

‘Celebration’ starts off with the kind of fuzzy noise you get when trying to tune your TV or the harsh sound you get when listening to a radio and going through a tunnel – we suppose it could be called ’static’. A piercing snap of chords kick in alongside the stomping of drums and this is soon met with a fast paced vocal that instantly reminded us of The Go! Team and their hit ‘Ladyflash’.

On the opposite side of things ‘LSD’ gives us the feeling that something big is about to begin. If we were allowed to make a video for this child, we’d simply have someone falling from a plane or of a building being constructed as this song adds background to the screen image. Well, we are a bit strange like that. Most people would probably want an image of old people eating shortbread, or something.

Despite starting off in 2006, the earlier music does not sound stale, even when compared to the last release in June of this year. Either he has been busy travelling through time to make sure it always sounds fresh, or he is a musician who has the rare ability to consistently make music without making a dodgy song.

People often say this sort of music has no warmth or feeling to it, thanks in no small part to the cold and ugly looking keyboard and contraptions full of switches and knobs. With Death by Panda, they couldn’t be more wrong.

All we know is that we have found someone who captures the beauty of Explosions In The Sky with the well crafted electronic beauty of Boards Of Canada and M83. As we’ve harped on, you can download all of his material for nothing at his Myspace.

We recommend you do so and pass it around.

For more:

Death by Panda

But then, this is a free game that you can play online with little to no commitment, so these criticisms really don’t apply. It’s just that was a reasonable way to open this article, and MSOIDS almost does exactly that – takes something old, makes it seem new.

Well, not so much ‘new’ as ‘different’.

It’s Asteroids – that old arcade shooter that many of you probably think was the pinnacle of all gaming ever – but it’s drawn using MSPaint. Which means it looks a bit crap. But it’s alright, because it’s crap in an ironic, clever, even artistic fashion. So you’re not allowed to complain.

The real kicker comes with the fact that it’s really, really hard too. So it looks daft and it’s too hard. That’s a good enough recommendation in anyone’s book, surely?

Play MSOIDS Here:

MSOIDS

The post rock outfit are one of the best in the genre, after Godspeed You! Black Emperor pretty much created the genre and Explosions In The Sky and Sigur Ros brought it to the masses.  

People sometimes call Mogwai moody and depressing, but anyone who presses up a line of t-shirts saying 'Blur: are shite' are winners in our eyes. This free track, The Sun Smells Too Loud is taken from their new album The Hawk Is Howling and won’t hit the shelves until September 22. So use this song as a sampler for an album which will more than likely be another success.  

Download The Sun Smells Too Loud here

Battle for Wesnoth is a totally free, open source (meaning you can get the code for it and modify it yourself, if you have the time, patience and know-how. In other words: you can’t) and feels very professionally made, even with its freebie status. Certainly something of a rarity in the world of gratis games.

The game plays like – for anyone familiar with it – Fire Emblem, a highly regarded and thoroughly excellent strategy game available on all sorts of Nintendo consoles. They’ve yet to bring the version out on Wii where even your granny can play it though, so it hasn’t exactly achieved the mass market penetration the company has been hoping for.

It’s the usual fantasy setting you should expect from many games of this ilk, but for the love of everything don’t let this put you off. Snobbery will rob you of a fine experience and one that shows the indies can do things just as well as the big guns.

For those that don’t know, the game basically involves you taking turns to move about and fight. It’s like chess, but with more variables and less Gary Kasparov.

Yes, so it is another one you can’t waste time on over your lunch hour, but it’ll exercise your bloody brain cells and last more than fifteen minutes before you get bored of launching penguins into the sun. So stop whining, download it and play it. For a thoroughly free experience it really is very well made, and it’s updated regularly to kill off any annoying bugs that may plague the thing.

Just don’t come running to us if you do happen to get hopelessly, completely and totally addicted to Wesnoth. It’s good enough to become an obsession, that’s for certain. And did we mention it’s free?

Get it here.

Don’t worry, the flash crap will come back when I’m not in charge anymore. Philistines.

As luck would have it, that’s exactly what Hulk Hogan’s son Nick Bollea has been wishing for in public all week. He’s been desperate to get out of the solitary confinement cell that he’s been kept in since he went to prison almost a month ago.

And now, even though a judge ignored his pleas earlier in the week, Nick Bollea has been moved into a communal cell, where he’ll get to experience all the heady delights that prison has to offer when you’re a 17-year-old boy doing time for crashing a wildly expensive supercar and your resentful cellmates have had to give up some of their precious personal space just so they can accommodate a spoilt little rich boy.

That Nick Bollea. He doesn’t know he’s born. For almost a month he enjoyed the best that jail had to offer – solitary confinement. It sounds perfect, doesn’t it? No awkward fake machismo-filled interactions with badly-tattooed inmates to try and find your place in the prison hierarchy. No worrying that people will see your balls when you’re shitting into a bucket. All the slot-shaped food you can eat. Lovely – if we ever went to prison, we’d want solitary too.

But nooo, solitary confinement’s not good enough for Nick Bollea, which is why he’s spent all week bitching and moaning about all the crippling anxiety that being shut in a room alone for 23 hours a day is causing him.

Nick’s been trying his hardest to get busted out of solitary, but it was all to no avail – just the other day a judge overturned his request to move out. But then yesterday, as if by magic, it happened – Nick Bollea was shifted out of his dark little fortress of solitute and into a slightly bigger fortress of public masturbation and physical intimidation. ABC reports:

Deputies at a west Florida jail have transferred Hulk Hogan’s son out of solitary confinement into a communal cell. Seventeen-year-old Nick Bollea is now sharing living space with three other juvenile inmates. Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Cecilia Barreda says housing assignments are routinely reviewed because the jail’s population constantly changes. That created an opportunity to house juveniles together.

Of course – Nick Bollea’s move is all down to the cell’s previous inmate getting released. Or getting moved to hospital because he was beaten up so brutally by his three mentally unstable cellmates. Or slashing his wrists and dying just to free himself from the unending pain of life as a juvenile prisoner. One of the three. Hooray! Well done Nick!

And with this battle won, Nick Bollea will be pumped up and confident ahead of his next fight with the prison officials – getting some curtains fitted in the cell. Nice ones, though – he doesn’t want anything clashing with his skin tone, does he, the little lamb.