You were? Well relax. This is Britney Spears we’re talking about – a woman who’d have trouble boiling an egg without ending up in a mental hospital because she’d had a hysterical breakdown and attempted to dip one of her own son’s ankles into the water halfway through – so of course it hasn’t gone smoothly.

In fact, the Britney Spears hit and run trial has managed to foul itself right up, with the jury completely unable to decide if Britney is guilty or not after four separate votes. Oh, if only Britney Spears’ was charged with being the adorably kooky queen of American pop, it’d be much easier to reach a unanimous guilty verdict. In fact, she’d be so guilty that we’d probably have to sentence her to the electric chair. That sweet, sweet electric chair.

Do you own some tenterhooks? Well if you do, this Britney Spears hit and run trial probably has you on them – it’s literally the most nail-biting trial about a celebrity doing something so pathetically minor that nobody even noticed it when it happened so long ago that everyone’s forgotten that it even happened ever.

To refresh your memory, last year – when Britney Spears was still in her bald-headed weepy phase – Britney allegedly knocked into a car when she was parking her car and walked away, only for the police to discover that she didn’t even have a valid California driving license anyway. And last week it finally went to trial.

Over the course of the trial we heard all the arguments – the defence’s argument that Britney Spears didn’t need a California driving license because she didn’t live in California, and the prosecution’s argument that, yes, actually she did live in California and that she definitely did the hit and run because there were about 150 paparazzi who filmed her do it – and on Friday the trial went to jury.

It was a simple enough request – go away, think about what happened and reach a unanimous decision. It didn’t even matter one way or the other, because even if she was found guilty Britney Spears would most likely be hit with a tiny fine and everything would be forgotten about instantly leaving her to concentrate on her ongoing comeback – but it’s all turned into a bit of an embarrassing failure, because the jurors can’t make their minds up. AP reports:

Jurors left for the day after saying earlier that they were hopelessly deadlocked. A foreman said they had voted three times since Friday, and each time failed to reach an unanimous conclusion. The three votes were all 10 to 2, the foreman said. The jurors appeared glum after lunch, with many on the panel telling Superior Court Judge James A. Steele that they didn’t think an agreement could be reached.

So that’s two days of deliberation and they still can’t decide. That’s longer than it took a jury to send OJ Simpson to jail for the rest of his life. Maybe the jurors need some more persuading – can someone please go and stand outside the jury room window playing Womanizer on a loop at full volume? We get the feeling that it’d only take three spins for everyone to reach a unanimous verdict.

True, it’ll probably make all the jurors mentally ill for the rest of their lives, but a little thing like that shouldn’t stand in the way of justice.

In fact, we miss the old red-eyed, crazy British-accented Britney Spears who was allowed to stumble around everywhere followed by a pack of screaming paparazzi. And that’s why we’re clinging to the last remnant of that era as hard as we can – Britney Spears’ hit and run trial. Even though it’s plainly rubbish.

So far, the trial has lasted about 30 seconds and Britney Spears hasn’t once been anywhere near the courtroom – and now it’s down to the jury. After deliberating furiously over the trial, jurors expected to return soon with their verdict. And, given the special nature of this trial, the verdicts open to them are ‘Shut up’ and ‘Nobody even cares’.

We’re so happy that Britney Spears is number one in the charts again – it means that now, when she annoys you, you don’t feel waves of guilt because you essentially hate the mentally ill. Which is just as well, because thanks to this poxy hit and run trial of hers, it’s almost a scientific impossibility to not be annoyed by Britney Spears a little bit.

It’s hard to describe the importance of the Britney Spears hit and run trial, but we’ll have a go. Imagine the Phil Spector murder trial but, instead of murdering anyone, Phil Spector was accused of gently hitting a car with his car and then walking off. And the case lasted about a day rather than several weeks. And Phil Spector didn’t turn up in court. And nobody cared. That’s roughly the sort of level of importance that the Britney Spears hit and run trial currently occupies.

It didn’t even have to go to trial. Britney Spears allegedly knocked into a car over a year ago, and a plea deal was set out so that she’d take the rap but avoid any real form of punishment. But Britney Spears turned that down because she didn’t want a criminal record, so everything got forced into an actual criminal trial that could actually result in Britney serving a jail sentence.

The trial mainly revolves around Britney’s lack of a valid California driver’s license at the time of the crash. But Britney Spears’ lawyer J Michael Flanagan claims that she didn’t need a California driver’s license because she’s from Louisiana, not California. AP reports:

Flanagan tried to establish that Los Angeles is a temporary home for Britney Spears and that she will likely leave once she has custody of her young sons. Flanagan gave jurors three examples of her ties to Louisiana: she is registered to vote there; she takes a homestead exemption on her property taxes there and until late last year, she had a Louisiana driver’s license.

That’s all well and good, bar the facts that Britney Spears isn’t registered to vote in Louisiana and just about every piece of legal documentation she’s ever had anything to do with over the last few years – including divorce records that were signed right before the alleged hit and run – says that she lives in California.

The jury is due to give its verdict soon, but Britney Spears doesn’t have to worry, because even if she’s found guilty she’s unlikely to go to jail. She would get a criminal record though. Just like the one she’s got already, except this new one wouldn’t repeat the word ‘womanizer’ 42 times in the space of three minutes.

Criminal record. Because, you see, Womanizer is criminal, and it’s a record, so, you know… oh, forget it.

By now you’ve probably realised that OJ Simpson has been found guilty on all 12 charges of armed robbery and kidnapping, and that he could face anything up to life in jail for it. However, OJ Simpson now plans to appeal the decision from jail, where he’s being kept away from other prisoners to protect his own safety.

But still, OJ Simpson won’t find himself at a loss for anything to do now that he’s been found guilty on all charges. He can finally write that book he’s always wanted to, for example – the hypothetical If I Didn’t Do It, Here’s How It Didn’t Happen; a breathtaking account of how OJ Simpson was actually doing a spot of Sudoku and thinking about kittens when he was supposed to be holding some men up in a hotel room.

So that’s that, then. The jury in the OJ Simpson has found OJ guilty of all 12 charges. Who knew angry white folk could be so mean? Thanks to the jury’s verdict, OJ Simpson could be looking at life in jail when sentencing rolls around in December.

It’s an epic fall from grace for the man who, just last year, was living the high life only achieved by the select few who dare to write books on how they’d like to stab their already-murdered ex-wife to death if they had the chance. And now he might just spend the rest of his life behind bars.

The lesson from this is clear – if you ever want to burst into a hotel room with a gang of armed men to steal hundreds of sports memorabilia items, try to make sure that nobody’s secretly taping it at the same time. Because ultimately, as the jury pointed out, that’s what did OJ Simpson in. Sportingnews reports:

Jurors who convicted O.J. Simpson of armed robbery and kidnapping said Sunday they did not trust witness testimony in the case, and instead relied on audio and video recordings and other documented evidence to convict him. Jury foreman Paul Connelly said it was perhaps a waste for prosecutors to have given plea deals to several Simpson co-defendants in exchange for their testimony, since the jury did not rely on it.

What? You mean the court could have simply played the audio tape to the jury and they would have reached the same verdict? And we still had to wade through weeks and weeks of watching flabby old hasbeen wiseguys stumble around on the verge of heart attacks? That hardly seems like the most efficient way to go about business, does it?

Anyway, OJ Simpson is said to be ‘melancholy’ at the verdict, and he’s planning to appeal based on several factors including the racial mix of the jury and that some jurors may have believed this conviction was payback for his double murder acquittal five years ago.

That won’t happen for a while, though – appeals can’t be processed until sentencing, which won’t happen until December – so until then, OJ Simpson will have to remain in jail. That won’t be especially fun for OJ, because he’s apparently being kept away from other prisoners for his own safety.

Not because they want to kill him or anything, you understand, but because all the other prisoners are such big fans of OJ Simpson’s hidden camera prank DVD Juiced that they’d be constantly pestering him for an autograph at all hours of the day.

In fact, that’s what saddens us most about this conviction – it means OJ Simpson won’t be able to make any more volumes of Juiced. He could try it in prison, we guess, but having each prank end with the furious victim anally brutalising OJ Simpson in the municipal showers as a horrifically violent revenge act would probably get quite old quite fast.

The closing arguments were a nice reflection on the trial that had just passed – in that they weren’t really as exciting as they could have been and everyone present looked as if they’d rather be anywhere else on Earth. But that’s not what matters. What matters is that soon a jury will finally – finally – make the OJ Simpson trial slightly exciting.

So now we wait. How long will the jury take to decide OJ Simpson’s fate? What will the fate be? How many badly-written OJ Simpson: My Part In His Downfall books will the jurors release between them? Can’t they just hurry up and make a decision? Seriously, we’re losing all sensation in our feet.

In all of history, mean-looking white people have never made a decision as important as this one. And not the decision about whether OJ Simpson burst in on a hotel room with a gang of armed men as part of an armed robbery, or merely burst in on a hotel room with a gang of men who were armed against his knowledge to recover some of his own belongings in a legal yet somewhat heavyhanded transaction.

No, the important decision that the OJ Simpson jury has to reach is this – can they all reach a unanimous verdict as quickly as possible. They really should, you know, because everyone’s bored and autumn’s drawing in and the days are getting shorter and we’ve all got better things to do than watch what’s essentially a version of the plot of the Disney movie Wild Hogs that culminates in an alleged armed robbery.

Honestly, if the OJ Simpson trial has convinced of anything, it’s that we’re never going to pick a bunch of middle-aged men to be our goons in any of our future hotel room raids. First they all stab you in the back and then their litany of cardiac problems mean they’re basically too doddery and confused to actually be of any use to anyone anyway.

But hey, all this is in the hands of the jury now and, as BBC News reports, they’ve been sent away with the same of dreary cack they’ve been listening to for weeks ringing in their ears:

Prosecutor Chris Owens urged the jury to convict Mr Simpson, denouncing him for “arrogance” for thinking he could commit a crime “against the dignity and the peace of the state of Nevada”. “The kind of arrogance… that would make them think they could come in and get away with this kind of crime and that nobody would report it and they thought they could spin it that, ‘It’s all OK; It was my stuff’,” he said.

So we just have to wait and see what happens. But, actually, you know what? We’re probably going to be held in contempt of court for this, but we’d really like it if OJ Simpson was found innocent, please. That’s because we want him to keep releasing several more installments of his hilarious hidden camera pranks show Juiced.

That way, if he really is innocent, he’ll get to keep entertaining the public the way he always wanted to. And if he’s really guilty he’ll get to live the rest of his life knowing that he’s been reduced to churning out piss-weak, zero-budget DVDs that make a mockery of all his prior achievements and that nobody will ever genuinely enjoy. That’s probably worse than prison, to be honest.

Only joking. That’s got nothing to do with the outcome of OJ Simpson’s trial at all. Well, technically it probably has got a bit to do with it, but let’s not get into that. In actual fact, the whole OJ Simpson trial revolves around a secret tape of the whole shebang, recorded by an auctioneer.

Sadly, though, as the court found out yesterday, the tape is just vague enough not to mean anything at all. Oh OJ Simpson, why couldn’t you have stormed into the hotel and said, clearly and within earshot of the microphone “What-ho, I’m OJ Simpson and these gun-wielding chaps here – boys, say hello, there’s no excuse for rudeness – are here to take these items which don’t even belong to me. Pip pip!” or whatever the opposite of that is that proves you’re innocent? You’d have saved us all a lot of time either way, you selfish git.

The OJ Simpson trial has been sort of interesting so far, but only because of all the berserk old men who keep pretending to have heart attacks on the stand and the way that somebody’s going to cry racist whatever the verdict. Other than that, things have felt a little staid.

Why’s that? Because there was one piece of evidence that the lawyers had been holding back on. One impossibly vital piece of evidence – the secretly-recorded tape of the alleged armed robbery.

It’s been a frustrating wait, because everyone has known about the existence of the tape ever since a clip of OJ Simpson bellowing “You think you can steal my shit?” leaked out onto the internet. And yesterday the jury at the OJ Simpson trial got to hear the tape.

Well, some of the tape, at least. The man who recorded the incident – auctioneer Thomas Riccio – seems to basically make weird little secret recordings of everything he ever does on the offchance he’ll be able to sell bits of it to TMZ. And the clips played yesterday were of an encounter with OJ Simpson prior to the alleged robbery and of the police officers who were combing the hotel room after the incident but didn’t find Riccio’s recordings.

First, OJ Simpson’s tape. What the prosecution would have really loved is a long discussion about guns and how none of the sports memorabilia he was seeking actually belonged to him. What they actually got was this, according to the LA Times:

“I’m gonna show up with a bunch of the boys and take the [stuff] back,” said the man prosecutors contend is Simpson… Prosecutors played the jury a second recording, made in Simpson’s Palms room after he returned from the pool, in which Simpson said, “I gotta be at my intimidating best.”

Now, although your vision of OJ Simpson’s intimidating best will vary depending on if you thought the book If I Did It was a work of fact or fiction – hint: one’s got knives in it and the other one hasn’t – to be fair, the tape recording doesn’t actually prove anything. But nor does the recording of the police officers, either, other than that they sound quite a lot like glory-hunting bellends:

“This is great. John said uh, yeah — he is like California can’t get him. . . . Now we’ll be like . . . got him.”

Maybe this will change in days to come, when the meatier chunks of Riccio’s recordings will be played for the jury. Or maybe they’ll just play all of Riccio’s secret recordings from beginning to end, starting with a recording of his kindergarten teacher on the toilet and ending with a recording of the jury listening to a recording of the jury listening to a recording of the jury listening to a recording of the jury that Riccio recorded when the jury were listening to a recording of another recording Riccio had recorded in secret earlier.

Great, we’ve broken our brains. Thanks a lot, OJ Simpson.

That’s because it’s true. The Eurovision Song Contest has got so political these days. The proof? The UK hasn’t won Eurovision for over a decade, regardless of whether we’ve entered a rubbish holiday camp cabaret act or a hamfisted reality TV show runner-up. It’s a flipping disgrace.

But Eurovision won’t be political for much longer, because Eurovision bigwigs are bringing back national juries in a bid to end the tactical voting that’s destroyed the contest’s credibility in recent years. At last! Now when the UK comes last at next year’s Eurovision we’ll know for certain that it was because our entry was genuinely awful and not because everyone’s quite scared of Vladimir Putin.

Another fact: the UK was robbed at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. No, we were. Andy Abraham’s song Even If came joint last out of 43 countries, when everyone knows that turgid rehashes of I Believe In Miracles sung by binmen with all the charisma of wet toilet paper deserve to come at least 39th.

Instead of watching Andy Abraham lift the Eurovision trophy we had to watch in disgust as Russia won – not because they entered a globally-renowned heartthrob who’s sold tens of millions of records and whose song was produced by Timbaland and featured a dance routine by a world champion figure skater, but because of tactical voting.

Oh you know. Tactical voting. It’s where all the Scandinavian countries vote for each other, all the former members of the USSR vote for Russia and nobody votes for the UK because we’ve spent the last decade humping America’s leg like a randy dog instead of concentrating more on countries like Andorra.

Tactical voting has destroyed Eurovision to the extent that Terry Wogan even threatened to quit earlier this year unless it was nipped in the bud.

And, terrified that a red-faced Baileys-stinking old Irish bloke would quit his commentary job, Eurovision has decided to do exactly that, by reintroducing national juries – the process of electing a panel of experts to judge each country’s Eurovision entry rather than letting it become a public phone-vote free-for-all. Ruurd Bierman, chairman of the Eurovision reference group, said:

“We strongly believe in televoting as a way of measuring the opinion of our millions of viewers across Europe. After the public debate about neighbour and diaspora voting, we decided to give the national juries a say in the outcome of the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest.”

That’s perfect in principle – it means that next year the continent’s finest scholars, taste-makers and musicologists will be able to detail exactly why the UK is so staggeringly bad at Eurovision – but let’s think about this seriously.

If, say, Russia wanted to win Eurovision again, wouldn’t it be far easier and more cost-effective to go and personally intimidate the national juries of its neighbouring countries, rather than maintaining a vaguely menacing military threat over the entire east European/central Asian region?

But now’s not the time to be cynical. Perhaps by bringing back national juries, Eurovision can restore itself to its former glory. True, not winning Eurovision might cause Russia to lose its temper and nuke the entire continent into the boiling sea, but compared to the thrill of seeing the UK come sixth or seventh at a singing contest that nobody really cares about anyway, it’s definitely worth the risk.

They’re all white. Every single one of them. Now don’t get us wrong, it almost wasn’t an entirely white jury. It’s just that one prospective black juror was quite religious and therefore capable of forgiveness so she had to go. We’re not making this up, you know.

So, here’s how OJ Simpson stands before his trial properly starts on Monday. He’s being tried for the first time since he was acquitted of two murders he’s widely believed to have committed, for a crime with several witnesses that he was actually recorded participating in, and the only thing stopping him from spending the rest of his life in jail is a group of 12 white people who’ve been specifically chosen for their lack of forgiveness.

Yeah, we’re sure he’ll be fine.

Since he was acquitted of a double murder in 1995, OJ Simpson hasn’t exactly gone out of his way to endear himself to the public – apart from the time he tried to stab Ruby Wax in the chest with a banana, obviously. He’s not a total monster.

Anyway, since his last trial OJ Simpson has tried to keep a low-profile, only popping up occasionally to get banned from a steakhouse or write hypothetical murder books in the worst taste possible. But then OJ Simpson just had to go and get himself arrested on suspicion of armed robbery, didn’t he?

You know what happened by now – right up to the inflection in OJ Simpson’s voice during the last “You think you can steal my shit?” – and that’s the reason for all the jury-selecting that’s gone on in Las Vegas this week ahead of OJ Simpson’s trial.

OJ’s already up against it, thanks to the recording of his alleged armed robbery and the fact that all his hired goons have already pleaded guilty and will testify against him in court. But OJ Simpson likes a challenge, so let’s also make sure that the jury he faces are completely white and sort of mean-seeming just for the hell of it. AP reports:

An all-white jury will judge O.J. Simpson and a co-defendant on kidnapping and robbery charges after defense lawyers lost a contentious courtroom battle to include two African-American women on the panel… Both of the women who were removed had strong religious views, and the prosecutor said he thought one of them would be inclined to “forgive” Simpson while the other said she was hesitant to send anyone to prison.

Of course, back in 1995 OJ Simpson faced a jury that was chiefly black and he was acquitted, so now the fear is that – since the scientific opposite of black is white, and the scientific opposite of innocent is guilty – all the white people are going to find OJ Simpson guilty.

They probably won’t even be making notes on the testimonies, either – the only thing they jot down will be the word ‘guilty’ scrawled several times in a row and crude cartoons of OJ Simpson literally burning in hell while a lot of white people laugh and dance.

Alternatively, the jurors have been picked based on their open-mindedness and neutrality, two things which have never really been race-specific, and the notion that OJ Simpson will be found innocent or guilty depending on how many black faces happen to be present in the jury is completely offensive to just about everyone.

Oh who are we kidding? It’s the first one, isn’t it. Thought so.

Anyone? Just us? OK, well then we’re the wrong ones. In actual fact, the jury for OJ Simpson’s armed robbery and kidnap trial has almost been completely picked. What does that mean? Well, most importantly it means that the scene is set for us to plunge headlong into the nitty-gritty of the OJ Simpson trial itself next week.

Secondly it ostensibly means that there are a handful of people in Las Vegas who say they don’t care about OJ Simpson murder acquittal in 1995. But what it actually means is that there’s a handful of people who’ve either hidden their furious bitter hatred of OJ Simpson well enough to pass the jury selection process or are currently busy phoning publishers and scribbling down the first draft of their new book How I Banged OJ Simpson Up. Fun!

The best way to think of OJ Simpson trials, we’ve found, is to think of them as Rocky movies. Honestly – it fits. The first one was a sensation that captured the public’s imagination and took loads of money even though it didn’t have a traditional feel-good ending, and the second one is Rocky 2 – a bit more spurious and clumsily put-together, but more likely to give the public the ending they crave.

Or perhaps it won’t. This week has seen the jury selection process for the OJ Simpson trial take place, and the judge has gone to extreme lengths to ensure that no jurors picked have any lingering resentment over OJ’s acquittal a decade ago.

How successful they’ve been remains to be seen, but at least they’ve done it quickly. Yesterday, during the third day of jury selection, the judge declared the process to be almost over, which was especially thrilling because they’d managed to catch some real lunatics in the process. AP reports:

One man’s angry outburst against Simpson led to a defense motion to dismiss the entire jury pool because everyone had heard it. The man, who had been waiting for three days to have his say, blurted out a comment that stunned the courtroom. “I feel the case down in Los Angeles — if someone got away with that, you would keep yourself clean and you wouldn’t come back and commit another crime,” he said.

Luckily for OJ Simpson, though, this man and others who shared similar opinions were weeded out of the prospective jury pool, leaving only those with no real interest or memory of OJ Simpson’s murder trial in the running to decide his fate. So basically it’s going to be a jury comprised of elderly Alzheimer’s sufferers and some toddlers.

And that’s probably a good thing because, considering that OJ Simpson faces life imprisonment if he’s found guilty of a crime that he was allegedly actually taped doing, he might just need all the help he can get.

But back to the whole Rocky analogy again. Let’s hope the formula sticks, because that way the OJ Simpson trial after next will include a hamfisted Cold War allegory and Paulie getting a robot for his birthday. And isn’t that what everyone wants to see?

Strangely enough, these things are also associated with the jury in the R Kelly child pornography trial.

Would you believe it? Of course, this brings up a wonderful revelation – it shouldn’t be too long before hecklerspray can refer to R Kelly in whatever terms we see fit, with the full backing of the law on our side.

Yes: the jury have heard the prosecution, the defence, rebuttals, witnesses and counter-cross-ultra-examinations, and they’ve run off to that room probably occupied by Twelve Angry Men to decide once and for all what the media are allowed to refer to R Kelly as.

And probably, more importantly, if the man is to serve jail time or if he is cleared of the charges held against him.

The future looks bright.

That’s as in ‘the future looks bright because it means we don’t have to pussyfoot around as much with our language for fear of being sued’, of course, and not some other misconstrued meaning attributed to the phrase. Obviously.

The case has been through a lot over the last few months, most recently the confusion as to who in the blue hell was in the video presented to the courts. Though whoever it was may have definitely had a mole – or did they? So no one is really sure who it was in the video, but whoever it was may have had a mole, though it may have been an ‘artifact’.

Good lord the jury must be confused by now.

It didn’t help that the defence were throwing around biblical quotes:

“Second Corinthians 11, verse 14. And Satan shall come disguised as an angel of light. That is what she is. She is a liar. She is an extortionist.”

And it can’t have made it easy when the prosecution relied on one of those pesky ‘experts’ to back up their case.

Though we would likely be the best one on the planet, hecklerspray would hate to be a juror in this case. And it’s clear that the actual jurors are taking their time on this one, since they’ve been deliberating for around a day now after starting on Thursday afternoon. According to CBS 2’s legal analyst Irv Miller this may very well be a good thing for R:

“A lot of people who have seen the entire trial say this is a slam dunk guilty and others are saying, ‘Hey, listen, there’s reasonable doubt there’.”

Time will tell. A verdict will come. And when it does, hecklerspray will know – either way – how we stand legally when talking about R Kelly. It’s been a long ride, but we’re nearly at the end of this particular legal tunnel.

Oh, and so is R Kelly. Forgot about that fact for a second there.

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

And that’s delaying the start of his child pornography trial. For the last six years, R Kelly has kept inventing clever new tricks to put off the trial again and again – but it looks as though his luck might have run out.

At last, tomorrow will see the commencement of the jury selection process for R Kelly’s child pornography trial, effectively locking a start date down for good. And, oh boy, is that going to be one lucky jury – the judge has ruled that R Kelly’s apparently incriminating underage sex tape can be shown in open court. High fives to agreeing to watch a 14-year-old girl get urinated on by R Kelly! Anyone? No?

The Phil Spector murder trial was such a golden time, wasn’t it? In fact, it’s probably hard to think of anything better than watching a tiny old man in a lesbian wig get accused of shooting a depressed woman in the face for months at a time. Except for, at a push, watching a singer who compares himself to Martin Luther King get accused of pissing on a 14-year-old girl’s face during a sex tape for months at a time.

Which is a relief, because that’s what we’ll finally get to see soon enough. After spending six years trying to wriggle out of it, thanks to mountains of pretrial motions and badly-timed births and ladder-based accidents and appendicitis and tired-looking bus drivers, the R Kelly child pornography trial is all set to get underway in Chicago tomorrow.

Or at least the boring jury selection process that precedes the R Kelly child pornography trial, anyway. The New York Daily News reports:

After six years of delays, jury selection is to begin Thursday in the Grammy-winning R&B singer’s trial on child pornography charges – although defense attorneys did throw in a last-minute motion Wednesday seeking another postponement. The case was prompted by a videotape allegedly showing Kelly having sex with a girl as young as 13.

Since R Kelly faces 15 years in jail if he’s found guilty of these charges, his lawyers will want to find the most sympathetic jury possible – a group of people who’ll understand that a man has needs, and that sometimes those needs involve apparently filming himself pissing all over an obviously underage girl’s face. But that tactic might be scuppered by Chicago’s famous lack of stereotypical cartoon Frenchmen.

However, the jury selection process is firmly weighted in the defence’s favour. Since this alleged R Kelly sex tape is the crux of the entire trial, it’s bound to be shown in court at least once – so there’s a chance that the jurors who’ll fight hardest to get on the trial will be the ones who basically enjoy watching child pornography the most. We think that’s how it works, anyway. Urgh.

But still, R Kelly’s jury selection process doesn’t start until tomorrow, so that leaves R Kelly with about 15 or 16 different chances to get the trial postponed again before then. All we’re saying is that we shouldn’t be too surprised if R Kelly suddenly gets his arm bitten off by a shark before teatime. That’s all.

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R. Kelly kid-porn trial creeps forward - NYDN

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?

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Sean Penn to head Cannes Film Festival jury – Reuters