When Jonathan Rhys Meyers isn’t running around New York unknowingly looking for his stupid musical prodigy son, he’s punching Frenchies in the face. It’s his passion, don’t you know.

Chances are you read that opening sentence and thought to yourself – “Yet another thing I have in common with that weird-eyed actor.” Well who doesn’t share that lust? Right? We absolutely love punching things that are French – be they sliced potatoes or Sarkozy ex-wives – we just want to give ‘em the ol’ salty knuckle.

Of course – we’d never do it publicly. That’s where Meyers loses us.

Chances are if you were a French man standing between Jonathan Rhys Meyers and anything that looks faintly alcoholic, you’re gonna get punched. It’s not really fair, if you think about it. After all, the French are a peace loving people who would give you absolutely anything you want. A good example of this is how they were so willing to make all their children speak German back in 1940. It’s probably a great country to border is what we’re saying.

Imagine then, if you will, the shock of a French waiter who only wants to make foreigners happy with bad food and a slight stink, but gets assaulted by an actor with a resume covered in Roger Ebert’s stomach chunks instead. It’s almost unfathomable! It’s unfair!

For the record – we don’t know exactly how a feeble Frenchman ended up on the business end of a Meyers-knuckle sandwich. What we do know, though, we learned on E!:

“For the second time in two years, the Tudors king is facing charges after an airport dustup, this time for allegedly punching a waiter at a bar in Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport on Saturday. According to Agence France-Presse, Rhys Meyers was ordered to appear in court in September on charges of “willful violence, outrage, hitting and threatening death.”"

Would you like specifics as to the threatening death part? The actor told the waiter he was gonna gut him, fill him with helium, and then attach him with a string to that North Korean rocket that’s supposed to buzz Hawaii any day now. Very intimidating, really.

That may or may not have happened. What did happen after the French-fight is this -  according to the Sun:

“Boozy TV hunk Jonathan Rhys Meyers challenged cops to a drunken fight at an airport. He bragged how rich he was, threw euros on the floor and then told the officers: “You wanna hit me? Hit me!”"

Of course the police did hit him – but it was only with scared fingertips from a distance on a fully extended and double-gloved hand. We’re told Meyers didn’t even know they were there until his skin began to itch somewhere between 100 – 120 swats.

We think that’s what we were told. When you read as much as we do things begin to blur.

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9 - Our current favourite kid’s TV show. No joke here, we just like watching it a lot – iPlayer

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6 - Top ten hip-hop videogames. Included here only for the inclusion of the Wu-Tang Clan beat ‘em up – Formatmag

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3 - The Flintstones View Master stories from the past, if you’re old – Whatmydadsaw

2 – Every single TV theme you can think of, archived and ready to download – Televisiontunes

1 - Giant explosion! – I Am Bored

Mostly through headlines on grubby downmarket tabloids, we are always reminded to hate the Germans because of the war and the Scottish due to an old butchering rivalry, with the other country that deluded working class white boys high on cider and bad drugs seem to hate being France.

Now why should we hate the French? They’ve given us plenty of things to like – from wine, through Va-Va-Vaoom and even a strange love of horse burgers (it’s like a tough steak). Granted, the last choice is more for animal protestors to piss and moan over.

But no, getting drunk off a Frenchman’s grapes isn’t good enough; we have to assume they all eat baguettes, cycle everywhere on crap bikes and wear necklaces of garlic instead of buying stuff from H&M. Thank the lord for Telepopmusik then eh?

Hanging around the music world since 1997, this trio have made some gorgeous laid-back beats that you probably have heard before. Thanks to the subtle power of advertising you’ve probably listened to one of their songs while some company attempted to make you buy a car or a tin of paint – scroll to the second track on the Telepopmusik player and you may understand what we’re blabbing on about.

Breathe comes from their debut album released a dog’s age ago, but still sounds like it could have been created just the other day – the balance of the vocals combined with the majestic harmonies work ridiculously well. Not that we’re experts in advertising, but we’re positive that a fancy brand of cosmetics have used them in the background when some stick thin model slaps some product all over her stupid face.

There’s been bugger all news from the Telepopmusik camp for a while now, but a track called Ghost Girl featuring the vocals of Kim Wayman may explain where the band are headed, and the new album is set for release ‘Fall 2008′ – that’s Autumn to our British reader(s). With fine detective work like that, we do wonder why MI5 aren’t knocking down our door to hire us as fast as possible.

A selection of songs that showcase their career so far are available for your listening pleasure; from remixes to new records, there should be something to please you. If not, you’re just a bloody awkward git and we can’t be arsed with you.

No crap competition either this week, as last weeks winner didn’t come forward. Still if you want the unclaimed prize, tell in the box below. Or we’ll auction them off for gin money or something.

For more:

Telepopmusik

Yeah, that sounds about right. Well now it would seem she’s got herself into MMA – that’s mixed martial arts – with some hardcore street fighting action. Well, hardcore may be a bit far, but Lily Allen did go and try to beat up a random French girl for insulting her.

And we shouldn’t forget that she also managed to swear like a navvie, and she managed to do all of this in front of about 32,000 paparazzi and other press hounds. Not a bad effort, we have to say. But to top off all the topping offs that could be topped off, there’s a video too – and it’s after the jump.

Yes, we thought we’d managed to get rid of her to our good friends in the US, but it would seem we’ve struck out in that respect and Lily remains firmly on British soil.

Exiting Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London, Lily was apparently abused by a French passer-by, which caused her to react in a way befitting of any Brit taking issue with a Frenchie: through the art of violence.

Unfortunately, the battering took on something of a pathetic form and was easily upstaged by Allen’s hilarious foul mouth, which managed to put even the great swear-machine Brian Blessed to shame.

While it would appear Lily Allen isn’t taking her own advice, at least it looks like she is following through with her attempted crusade to rid the streets of violence. Though we didn’t expect her to get rid of it personally, nor did we expect her to get rid of violence with violence.

But we’re not questioning her logic – we don’t want to be battered, for one.

Rather than natter on any more, why don’t we just let you see for yourselves – here we have Lily Allen, attempting to punch a French girl, failing, swearing a lot and being calmed down by Miquita Oliver who used to be on Popworld.

It really does have it all – tension, violence, beauty, international appeal, a resolution and a lesson at the end of it all: “violence is bad.”

(Alright, so we’ll admit that video’s a bit rubbish, but it’s better than most of the other ones around and we couldn’t embed the one that The Sun has up – but hey, at least you can hear her swearing like a disgruntled navvie, eh?)

He didn’t stop at finding measly water though – he was reportedly so proficient police would call on him to dowse his way to murderers.

There was a time in Europe when Dowsing was considered to be one of the devil’s past times. The practice was shunned, and if you were were found to be involved with it a painful death could likely be in the cards for you.

Then came Jacques Aymar – his story is interesting. According to the book entitled The Divining Rod: An Experimental and Psychological Investigation 1926:

“While searching for water one day Aymar felt his rod turn so strongly that he felt sure he was standing over an underground supply. On the spot being dug there was found, instead of water, the head of a murdered woman. Aymar went to the house in which this woman had lived and directing the rod, in turn, upon each person there, he found that it moved for only one person, the widower. This man immediately fled, and his guilt being established, Aymar’s ability to trace murderers and other criminals because established.”

Other sources state the villain-detecting was a bit more than just the rod pointing in whichever direction. In most cases, he’d sweat and pass out once he found the culprit.

The police loved it. They’d call him in on difficult cases. For instance, according to that same book:

“July 5, 1692 – a wine merchant of Lyons and his wife were murdered…After he was asked to do so, Aymar agreed to do what he could and visited the house in which the murders had been committed. He left the house [following his dowsing rod] and following a circuitous route, arrived at the door of the city….He continued to skirt the Rhone until half a league beyond the last bridge in Lyons. Here the footsteps of three men were found in the sand, where they had embarked.

“Aymar then retraced the steps of the fugitives, always by using the dowsing rod, locating the houses they entered, the beds they slept in, the chairs on which the sat and the glasses from which they drunk. The search party eventually arrived at Beaucaire and found themselves at the prison where they entered and Aymar indicated a man who had just been arrested for petty larceny. This man denied all knowledge of the murders. He was led back to Lyons by the route Aymar indicated. He was so overcome by the accurate manner by which his movements were so minutely described that he confessed to the crime and described his accomplices.”

The man who confessed – he was soon after condemned to be ‘broken on the wheel,’ and Aymar became a celebrity throughout the country. So much so that he apparently caught the attention of royalty – though in retrospect he may have regretted it. According to Wikipedia:

“When submitting to testing by Prince de Condé, however, [Aymar] failed every single test.”

What specifically those tests were isn’t known by us at the moment. We will say though, that other people tested him, even with blind folds, and the man passed with flying colors.

Was he the real deal? We don’t know and frankly. we don’t care. Should his corpse ever show up on our doorstep pointing at us with a regiment of flat-feet, well then our indifference just might change.

Read More:

Aymar, Jacques – Experience Festival

X17 is the picture agency that first published reports – along with text messages apparently proving it – that Tony Parker had slept with Alexandra Paressant after meeting her for the first time at his own wedding, partly because he was fed up about Eva Longoria yammering on about how sperm gives you acne all the time. But Tony Parker denies having sex with – or even ever meeting – this model so strenuously that he's after $40 million in damages.

Incidentally, if $40 million is the going rate for not having sex with models that you've never met, then we've estimated that we're owed roughly all the money in the whole wide world. Cash is fine. Or a cheque. Or food. Scraps of food. We're so hungry. Anyone?

When you're married to someone like Eva Longoria, as Tony Parker is, there's no need to cheat. With Eva Longoria you get to see that legendary cameltoe in its actual size instead of blown up so huge that the cosmonauts can see it, plus you get to experience that world-famous irritating narcissistic rasp all day, every day, non-stop, all the time until the day you die. Why would you even bother looking elsewhere?

Tony Parker knows that you definitely wouldn't, not at all, especially with French models that he's never even met before. But that didn't stop X17's website from publishing an interview with French model Alexandra Paressant where she claimed to have had a two-month affair with Tony Parker that started when Thierry Henry introduced the pair at Tony's wedding and ended when she discovered he was cheating on her with a third woman.

Alexandra Paressant also claimed that Eva Longoria doesn't like having sex in front of a mirror and thinks sperm gives you acne. Which it apparently does, as a sperm expert told us.

Eva Longoria and Tony Parker have already denied these claims – about the affair, not the jizz-acne – but now Tony Parker has taken things one step further, by suing X17 for $40 million over it. In the lawsuit, Tony Parker claims he doesn't even know who Alexandra Paressant is:

"This is false. It never happened. And X17 had to know that the story was false, or, at the very least, it had to have entertained serious doubts about the credibility of its supposed source. No one from X17 attempted to contact Mr. Henry, who … would have told them in no uncertain terms that this woman was not at the wedding. If this woman exists, he has no way of knowing whether she is one of the many fans who have, from time to time, managed to obtain his cell phone number and called or left messages or who may have engaged him in conversation."

So Tony Parker must be fairly certain that he didn't have a two-month affair with a French model, in which case good for him. This blistering denial will only help to keep his marriage to Eva Longoria rock-solid, or at least as rock-solid as a marriage can be when your wife is a self-absorbed midget with a voice like a toy dog impersonating a machine gun.

Read more:

Parker Sues Web Site That Claimed Affair – Associated Press