50 Cent was brought up on the streets, and therefore he’s not a man you want to mess with – he’s gangsta, he knows how to hold a grudge.

Cross 50 Cent and you’ll know. You’re entire family will know it. Everyone you’ve ever cared for will know it. Unless, you know, it’s a dispute that can be peacefully mediated in a courtroom within the space of about five minutes, because if that’s the case 50 Cent will probably just do that instead.

And that’s just what 50 Cent did yesterday, to settle a custody agreement over visitation rights to his 12-year-old son Marquise. In the agreement 50 Cent will spend more time with Marquise, and that’s important. Not because a boy of Marquise’s age needs a strong father figure, though – but because now 50 Cent has even more time to relentlessly apologise for deciding to name him something as crap as Marquise.

If you’ve seen Get Rich Or Die Tryin’, you’ll know how much 50 Cent has been through. But you haven’t seen Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ because you can read, and we suspect that the movie was for the medically illiterate only.

So, to fill you all in, 50 Cent has been involved with guns and drug dealing, his mother was murdered when he was eight, and 50 Cent himself got shot once. Keep that to yourself, though, because Fiddy likes to keep that a secret.

But recently 50 Cent had found himself saddled with the hardest problem of his entire life – custody visitation rights. You might think that we’re joking, but we’re really not – look at what it did to Alec Baldwin. The custody saga of 50 Cent’s son Marquise has already stripped 50 Cent’s gangsta credibility to its bare bones – he even had to go to court to admit that he doesn’t take drugs at one point – and now tragedy has struck.

That’s right – a judge has ruled that 50 Cent is allowed to see his son more often than he currently does. That means before long we’re likely to see 50 Cent taking his son to the park or feeding ducks or – worst of all – showing traces of actual kindness towards another human being. MTV reports:

The judge in the case granted 50 one weekend visit a month (he had requested two a month), as well as half of Marquise’s winter and spring breaks from school. TMZ reported that 50 was also granted one month in the summer. “50 is pleased this has been settled and looks forward to spending some quality time with his son,” the rapper’s attorney, Brett Kimmel, told People.

Although giving up his credibility as a hip-hop hardman – look, even his lawyers are too scared to call him anything but ’50′ – is going to be hard, at least little Marquise will be able to spend some quality time with his father from now on, and that time will be too precious to put a price on.

Right up until puberty hits Marquise full force, that is, because living with a hormonal boy who’s just realised that girls won’t talk to him because his dimwit parents decided to name him Marquise will easily be the most formidable opponent that 50 Cent has ever faced. If we were Fiddy we’d get our bedroom doors reinforced – that boy’s a timebomb.

Typical – first 50 Cent releases an album and it’s upstaged by Kanye West’s album, and now his house fire’s been upstaged by the Universal Studios fire.

Not that a little thing like the Back To The Future clocktower burning down will stop people from being curious about the 50 Cent house fire, though – especially as it came right in the middle of an ugly public feud between 50 Cent and his ex-girlfriend Shaniqua Tompkins, who was living in the house at the time.

And now the mystery has got a little deeper, because Tompkins is claiming that 50 Cent hasn’t bothered to call their 10-year-old son Marquise after the fire, even though he was treated for smoke inhalation. But you know what they say – better to have no contact at all than to record a mawkish vom-inducing Eminem-style ‘Daddy loves you’ track about it.

Good news – after owning little tiny dogs and being in drunken automobile accidents, the hot new celebrity fad to sweep America is the terrifying uncontrollable fire. Since Friday, 50 Cent’s house has burnt down and Universal Studios in Los Angeles has burnt down – leading to hopes that Paris Hilton and the cast of The Hills, eager to jump on board the fad while it’s still fresh, will soon deliberately set themselves on fire and run through the streets until their charred remains can only be identified by dental records.

But that’s something to look forward to. For the time being, however, let’s concern ourselves with the 50 Cent house fire, because it’s still so gloriously suspicious that we can only imagine it’ll be solved by a moustache-twirling detective pacing up and down an Edwardian drawing room.

If you missed them first time round, here are the details – a house owned by 50 Cent and occupied by his ex-girlfriend Shaniqua Tompkins and their 10-year-old son Marquise burnt down on Friday right in the middle of a bitter legal battle between 50 Cent (who wants to evict Shaniqua and Marquise for not paying rent) and Tompkins (who claims that 50 Cent promised that the house was a gift).

And with the fire department calling the fire suspicious, it seems as if everyone’s got a motive. 50 Cent could have wanted to intimidate Shaniqua into leaving, Shaniqua could have wanted to destroy the house that she was being made to leave, any number of third parties could have started the blaze, or there’s our current favourite theory – that Marquise started the fire because the pain of being a boy named Marquise has turned him into a warped, fire-obsessed sociopath.

Whatever the cause, though, it doesn’t look as if 50 Cent is in any hurry to make sure that his son’s not too badly shaken by the fire, as the New York Daily News reports:

The mother of 50 Cent’s son angrily slammed the superstar rapper as an uncaring father who didn’t check on the boy after a suspicious fire ripped through his Long Island mansion. Yesterday, she returned to the charred $2.4 million house to retrieve some belongings – and scorch her former lover. “Tell him to call his son!” Tompkins screamed at reporters gathered near the Dix Hills house. “He didn’t even attempt to call his son to see how he was doing!” she said. “A good father would do that!”

How dare Shaniqua Tompkins accuse 50 Cent of being a bad father. He works hard to ensure that there’s food on his son’s table – sometimes he’ll put in gruelling three-hour shifts mumbling to himself about that time he got shot over an insultingly derivative backing track in a state-of-the-art recording studio to keep Marquise in stale bread and second-hand shoes.

However, this is still just one person’s word against another. As things stand at this point in time, there’s no way of knowing if 50 Cent or Shaniqua Tompkins or anyone else had a hand in starting the house fire. And there’s only one way to properly, officially get to the bottom of a squabble this deep and wide-ranging – Maury.