Apart from the myriad of famous people, the insane volumes of high quality Class A drugs, the alcoholism, casting couches, gangster dollars, movie productions and deviant sexual tastes, Hollywood is a bit of a snoozefest isn’t it?

NOT NOW!

See, there’s a massive investigation under way in LA after two dogs found a human head in a plastic bag next to the Hollywood sign! And of course, because only celebrities live in Hollywood, everyone who has ever been in a film is now very much a suspect!

The Police (no, not Sting’s group) said two dog walkers with about nine dogs (only in Hollywood, arf!) came across the bag on a trail near the Hollywood sign in the Hollywood Hills yesterday.

Sergeant Mitzi Fierro told KCAL-TV that two dogs began playing with the bag. Then, brilliantly, an object fell out and the dog walkers realised it was a severed head!

Dogs eh? Always messing around with decapitated heads!

Sgt Fierro, who really does have a wonderful, wonderful name, said the bag was visible from the trail and it did not appear to have been in the area for very long. Of course, coroners will attempt to identify the victim through dental records and detectives are expected to search the area today.

Meanwhile, someone else will be hastily battering out a script based on the Head In A Bag and firing out to everyone in Hollywood in the hope that it will become a quality daytime straight-to-TV movie where everyone in the entertainment industry is a suspect!

Of course, anyone who doesn’t put an option on it is obviously guilty as hell! This is a sure-fire winner! Happy pitching writers!

December 26th of every year hecklerspray starts compiling its Christmas list for the next holiday season.

Thus far our 2008 compilation consists of things like a baby dolphin, a man-servant to drag said dolphin around and help make our parents jealous, and a life-size bust of George Michael‘s head made completely out of gold, diamonds and a deliciously nougatty center.

We’re 90% sure there’s a baby dolphin in a box under our mother’s bed, and we’ve noticed someone put man-servant.com on our internet browser’s favorites list, so we really think our first two examples are covered. As far as the gold and diamond Michael bust goes though – we’re quickly losing hope. The singer himself is said to be ordering the only one available.

It’s a good idea if you think about it though, because the statue can sit at the steering wheel with its eyes propped way open if he wanted another boozy parked car pass-out. That’ll mean less tickets.

The next time George Michael meets a congenial truck driver underneath a bush in the shady part of London, he’ll do so baring non-fleshy gifts. Sure, the fleshy gifts will probably be there too, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.

Also, the next time he issues a public apology for injecting puppy blood under his hairline to tighten up his sagging scalp (or whatever), he may just do so through unmoving golden lips covered in specks of diamond.

That’s because rumour has it he’s going to get him a £1 million statue of his own fat head. If what we heard is right, the way Michael’s favorite sunglasses sit on the bust is gonna be the deal clincher.

We didn’t hear that. We did hear this (The Daily Star):

“The king of bling George Michael is to buy a £1million gold and diamond model of his face…Art lover George, 45, has already eyed up a £50m diamond encrusted skull by Damien Hirst, 43…A source revealed: “George is very keen on getting a gold and diamond- encrusted statue of himself. “He loves the idea of having something so permanent.””

A golden statue of George Michael’s stupid head. Nice. That’ll look real good on the coffee table next to his George Michael’s stupid-head tea set, his George Michael’s stupid-head actual tell-time table-clock, and the plaster cast of his dead dog’s balls.

That’s just what we imagine he has in his house.

Because he’s famous and sentimental. And eccentric.

David Blaine’s big new stunt – the one where he hangs upside down for a while and then stops and goes home – is fully underway in New York.

And it seems to be a case of so far so dull because despite what all those elaborately-named doctors seemed to think yesterday, David Blaine hasn’t gone blind yet. Nor has blood started seeping from his tear ducts. He hasn’t even coughed up a single internal organ yet. David Blaine is rubbish. We want our money back.

Or maybe we should wait a while, because David Blaine has revealed that being upside down makes him think that his “head’s about to explode.” Yeah, well that’s nothing. We once ate three bunches of grapes in one go and it made us feel like our bum was going to explode, but you don’t hear us banging on about it, do you?

David Blaine has always risked injury for his art. When he stood in that cave of ice, David Blaine risked dying of hypothermia. When David Blaine submerged himself in water for several days he risked water suffocation and muscle atrophy. And when David Blaine sat in a box over London he risked having his eye taken out with a gay sausage.

But all of that pales into comparison with what David Blaine’s up to at the moment. While hanging upside down above an ice rink for 60 hours doesn’t sound particularly taxing, the health risks to David Blaine are incredible. By spending so long upside down, any number of the following horrible injuries could happen to him before the end of the stunt:

*Pins & needles

*Inverted testicle

*The 60-hour gravity wedgie

*Bad hair

*Splay

*Tongue loll

*Spinal wibble

*Big pores

Worst of all, though, is blindness. Before the stunt, doctors told David Blaine that being the wrong way up might cause his optic nerves to scab up or something, and that his sight would never recover. But while he’s been submitting himself to regular upside down medical exams for this matter, there’s a chance that David Blaine has overlooked one tiny condition that the stunt could provoke – Exploding Head Disease. Digital Spy reports:

Speaking from his inverted position, Blaine said he was “doing all right” but that he had experienced an enormous push of blood which made his head feel like it was “about to explode”.

That’s more like it. Perhaps more people would have paid attention to David Blaine’s little stunt from the start if they knew that he was going to get all Scanners on us a couple of hours in.

We’re all for this head explosion malarkey, you know. True, it’ll make a horrible mess of Central Park, countless people will be left experiencing a hideously traumatic event that they’ll never recover from, and David Blaine himself might suffer a side effect or two, but look on the bright side – if David Blaine’s head does explode, then at least he won’t have anything to cry out of like a great big pansy when the stunt’s over for once. It’s completely worth it.

Note to self: Never, ever say anything bad about people from Liverpool.

Because if you do end up saying something bad about people from Liverpool, people from Liverpool will literally cut your head off. It’s true – they’ve just cut Ringo Starr‘s head off.

Alright, at this point we should probably point out that it was only the topiary head of a topiary Ringo Starr that was chopped off, thanks to some vaguely anti-Liverpool comments Ringo made in January. But it’s still a shock, because the topiary Ringo Starr was about five or six times better at singing and drumming than the flesh and blood one.

Ringo Starr has always been the second-class Beatle – just look at the treatment he gets. John Lennon, for example, was shot in the back four times by a maniac, while George Harrison was stabbed in the chest several times by a maniac who believed he was on a mission from God. But Ringo Starr?

Ringo Starr has been aggressively pruned by what we can assume to be a fairly overenthusiastic horticulturalist. Hardly matches up, does it? The New York Times reports on the shock topiary Ringo Starr beheading:

A vandal chopped off the head of Ringo Starr from a life-size topiary of that former Beatle over the weekend in Liverpool, England, above, while leaving his band mates untouched, The Liverpool Daily Post reported. The attack occurred a few weeks after the topiary figures, created by the Italian sculptor Franco Covill, were unveiled at the South Parkway train station. “This is a huge disappointment for us,” said an unidentified spokesman for Merseytravel. “Public art is important, and the topiary was put there to bring a bit of life and soul to the public-transport network.”

It’s thought that the Ringo beheading was a direct result of some comments he made about the city back in January. You see, Liverpool is the European City Of Culture this year, and Ringo Starr was chosen to open the celebrations. After all, along with Dereck Acorah, Tom O’Connor from Crosswits and one of Atomic Kitten, Ringo Starr is probably one of history’s most famous Liverpudlians.

Not content with just opening a ceremony, Ringo Starr also wrote a special song for the occasion, entitled Liverpool 8. Probably the worst song that’s ever been written, Liverpool 8 was all about how Ringo Starr wanted to stay in Liverpool but he couldn’t because he was famous and Liverpool was a bit of a shithole but it doesn’t matter because he got famous so everyone should be proud of him. Thematically you could call it a bit confused.

So Ringo Starr went on TV and told everyone that he wouldn’t ever live in Liverpool again because there was nothing he missed about it at all, just to make it completely clear. And now he’s had his head cut off for it, French revolution-style.

If anything, this should serve as a warning to Ringo Starr to have more respect for his hometown, because the people there are easily upset by everything. First Richard And Judy left them, and now Ringo Starr too? How are they supposed to cope with such a succession of bodyblows?

So be warned, Ringo. This time they just got your topiary head, but next time it’ll be your hubcaps.

Read more:

Ringo Loses Leafy Head – NYT

There's something we've missed since Lindsay Lohan got clean and left rehab, apart from all the shrieking and the cocaine-trousered DUI arrests, obviously.

And that's that Lindsay Lohan just doesn't give as many boneheaded magazine interviews that show a total absence of any self-awareness these days. But at least she knows about it, and she's trying to do something about it.

In her first post-rehab interview, Lindsay Lohan has said that most people thinks she doesn't know where her head is even though actually she does. Sigh. That's good crackpot Lindsay Lohan, but not great crackpot Lindsay Lohan. 

Lindsay Lohan is a changed woman. That third stint in rehab really did the job for her – gone is the old Lindsay Lohan who was so smashed on booze and drugs that she crashed her car and collapsed at work and ended up in jail and got off with McFly and couldn't even realise that starring as amnesiac stripper twins in a film is a really stupid idea.

And in her place is a new post-rehab Lindsay Lohan, a sensible, contrite, almost nun-like Lindsay Lohan who knows the error of her ways and is damned if she's ever going to repeat any of that awful behaviour that got her in so much trouble before.

Well, apart from the behaviour that let her shag a bunch of Italians and chug from a bottle of champagne and down enough cocktails to start a fight with the paparazzi, of course. If you take the booze and the sex and the fighting away from Lindsay Lohan, you're not left with Lindsay Lohan. You're left with an annoying attention-seeking sober shell that just looks like a bit like Lindsay Lohan.

But, anyway, apart from all of that Lindsay Lohan is back on the old straight and narrow, as the told Glamour:

"There are friends that have been hard to hang out with because they've gone done a different path, but it's hard because I'm the kind of person who wants to trust everyone… I'm fine being alone during the day, but I hate being alone at night. I like having friends around me, but now I'd much rather be at home. That's not to say I'll never go to a club again, because I'd be lying."  

Even though she's undoubtedly doing the right thing by staying sober – apart from the occasional relapse – we can't help feeling a little bit sad that sobriety seems to have quelled Lindsay Lohan's constant nightmarish quest for even a sliver of approval from anyone. What's that? There's more of the interview? And it's about what Lindsay Lohan thinks the biggest public misconception about her is? OK, apparently this is what we all think of Lindsay Lohan:

"That I don't have my head in the right place. That, and probably that I'm not a good person… because actually I am."

Phew, that's better. Still, at least now that Lindsay Lohan has asserted that she's a good person it doesn't matter what she does any more. She's a good person, you see. Lindsay Lohan can take all the delicious drugs in the whole wide world and she'll still be a good person. Heck, Lindsay Lohan could get drunk, fill her trousers up with cocaine and plough her car into a shrub again because it doesn't stop her being a good person. in fact, that's what Lindsay Lohan should probably do, just to prove it. She should probably do it right now.

Read more:

Lindsay Lohan Opens Up About Recovery – People 

The Cannes Film Festival is the most famous film festival in the world, where every year a jury chooses a film that nobody has seen and says how much better it is than all the films you've seen put together.

And this year the Cannes Film Festival is going to be extra special because the head of the Cannes jury has been announced as Sean Penn. As one of the most respected actors and directors working in Hollywood today, Sean Penn's appointment will mean that the movie he awards his prize to will get an even bigger publicity boost than usual. It also means that anyone who's recently made a movie that's funny, uplifting, deft or about anything other than how terrible the Iraq war is should probably stay at home this year because they ain't winning jack.

2008 is going to be Sean Penn's special year for awards. That's not saying a lot because Sean Penn wins awards every year – in 2003 he won an Oscar for Mystic River, in 2006 he won the prestigious World's Most Gloomily Humourless Bastard award and he's the current California State champion for that Nintendo Wii game where you ride a cow around knocking over scarecrows.

But this year – this year is certainly different. Although nobody went to see it, the Sean Penn-directed Into The Wild has emerged as quite the Oscar front-runner, picking up Screen Actors Guild nominations and Critics Choice nominations for its visceral portrayal of an annoying boy dying in the snow really slowly.

And now Sean Penn gets to award awards to other films too, because he's just been named as the head of this year's Cannes jury. And, as expected, Sean Penn accepted his appointment with a statement so needlessly wordy it looks like he must have destroyed a thesaurus just writing it:

"It seems there has been a rejuvenation of cinema building worldwide; increasingly thoughtful, provocative, moving, and imaginative films by talented filmmakers: that a new generation of filmmaking may have begun. The Cannes Film Festival has long been the epicentre in the discovery of those new waves of filmmakers from all over the world. I very much look forward to participating in this year's festival as president of the jury."

So what can we expect from Sean Penn's tenure as president of the jury at this year's Cannes Festival? Hard to say at the moment, but knowing that Penn likes brooding, intense, heavy-handed dramas with serious messages, we wouldn't be surprised if he opts for Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach. That came out this year, right?

Read more: 

Sean Penn to head Cannes Film Festival jury – Reuters