So that makes Brad Pitt a lunatic. Reports are zinging around about Brad Pitt taking his adopted sons Maddox and Pax to Las Vegas to eat burgers and play Nintendo together. Without question, this is clearly the biggest news of the decade, if not history.

Let’s just be thankful that it was Brad Pitt who did this and not Angelina Jolie, because then Jennifer Aniston would feel obliged to counter it by suckling a wolverine or something, and we’re getting so tired.

Without question, this is going to be a very trying weekend for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. At the Oscars on Sunday, both Brad and Angelina will be tested to the very limits of their ability to smile serenely in the face of defeat, as The Changeling and Benjamin Button will almost definitely get passed over in favour of Depressing Kate Winslet Holocaust Vehicle and Depressing Mickey Rourke Mumbling Vehicle.

So, because they’ll be spending most of next week having the brittle grins massaged out of their faces with a combination of pumice stone and coathanger, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have decided to cut loose.

Well, Brad Pitt has decided to cut loose.

If your definition of cutting loose involves spending hours on end playing a videogame that makes your arm hurt with some infants in the noisiest, most needlessly brightly-coloured city on Earth, that is.

Which it almost certainly doesn’t.

Basically Brad Pitt has gone to Las Vegas with some of his adopted children and that’s the entire story. TMZ reports:

Brad decided to take his sons Maddox and Pax for a guys-night out in Sin City, where we’re told the big highlight of the trip was a trip to In-n-Out Burger — followed by a serious Nintendo Wii bonding session in their hotel room at the Hard Rock. We’re also told the man-Pitts hit up the MGM Grand at some point in the evening because they wanted to check out the lions.

We’re sure that Brad Pitt is having a whale of a time with his kids in Vegas, but where’s Angelina Jolie in all of this? Why, she’s in New York – possibly househunting and almost certainly saddled with changing her twins’ shitty nappies and stopping Shiloh and Zahara from trying to kill each other all the time.

Maybe that’s just how it rolls in the Jolie-Pitt household – the women stay at home wiping up each others’ fecal matter while the men go off gallivanting. Let’s hope so, anyway, because otherwise it’d totally spoil Brad Pitt’s plans to mark Maddox’s tenth birthday with a cigar and brandy party, and also his wishes that the onset of Pax’s puberty should be marked by an awkward, permanently-scarring all-night visit to an unlicensed backstreet stripclub. Probably.

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That’s why Angelina Jolie has taken the only sensible option and bought seven-year-old Maddox his very first knife. It’s a kind gesture, and it’s sort of made us wish that Angelina Jolie was our mother, too – once, when we were seven, a boy at junior school took our Monster Munch, and that situation would have been resolved much more swiftly if we’d have just stabbed them through the neck with the knife our mum gave us.

But don’t worry, outraged citizens – Angelina Jolie isn’t stupid. That’s why she deliberately had the knife blunted before giving to Maddox. Now, instead of hurting someone with the knife, Maddox can merely foster a lifetime fascination with knives that culminates in him chopping up a pensioner with a katana one hour into his 18th birthday.

Did we mention that Angelina Jolie has a new film coming out soon? It doesn’t matter if we did or we didn’t, because the signs are pretty obvious anyway. Angelina Jolie has been ticking all the movie promotion boxes over the last few weeks – getting covered in tattoos, bringing traffic to a standstill in New York, getting a photo taken with a baby hanging off her tit. It’s textbook stuff – almost exactly the same way that John Wayne publicised The Fighting Seabees in 1944.

But that’s probably not enough – after all, the film that Angelina Jolie is promoting looks exceptionally dull – and that’s why Angelina has gone all out to make headlines by deciding to buy her seven-year-old adopted son Maddox a knife.

True, knife crime among youngsters may have skyrocketed lately with hardly a day passing without news of another tragic death, but it’s alright because Angelina Jolie had a fascination with knives when she was younger and she turned out OK. Sure, she’s got a string of broken marriages, a history of self-harming, an estranged father and a bizarre compulsion to give all of her children awful names behind her, but they’ve probably got hardly anything to do with the knife thing.

Anyway, according to The Telegraph:

The Hollywood actress says son Maddox has developed a fascination with blades, which she and partner Brad Pitt are happy to indulge.”My mom took me to buy my first daggers when I was 11 or 12. And I’ve already bought Maddox some things. We take him to a special shop. We also talk about samurais and about the idea of defending someone as good. We talk about everything.”

Actually, although it sounds like a massively irresponsible thing to do, Angelina Jolie buying a knife for her seven-year-old son is actually a perfectly good idea. After all, the world can be a scary place, and Maddox needs to know how to defend himself in any situation. For example:

PROBLEM: You’ve been kidnapped and held to ransom because of your moviestar parents. SOLUTION: Stab!

PROBLEM: The paparazzi are hounding you and your family. SOLUTION: Stab!

PROBLEM: Your rootless upbringing means it’s hard for you to make new friends. SOLUTION: Stab!

PROBLEM: Your newborn brother and sister are getting marginally more attention than you. SOLUTION: Stab!

PROBLEM: You’re in a crowded shopping centre and lashing out with a knife is the only way to hush the screaming voices in your head. SOLUTION: Stab!

Actually, given the tensions between Angelina Jolie’s children, handing Maddox a knife does seem a little bit dangerous. At least that’s what we thought, anyway, but since Angelina Jolie has also given Zahara a gun, Shiloh Nouvel a spiked medieval mace, Pax Thien a horse and jousting stick and Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline a little packet of anthrax each, it all balances out in the end.