As if you needed reminding, Britney Spears had a full-on kerb-sitting dog-clutching sobbing meltdown on Monday night after a fight with her manager Sam Lutfi.

Nothing particularly unusual about that – Britney Spears seems to be contractually obliged to have a weird public meltdown every couple of weeks these days – but is Sam Lutfi really the steady hand that he's claimed to be?

Apparently not – it turns out that Sam Lutfi might be a weirdo with a bunch of restraining orders against him and a history of urging people to kill themselves. Which is, you know, inevitable.

It says a lot for the current state of Britney Spears that Kevin Federline is emerging as the most well-rounded character of the lot. And, seriously, the sight of the words 'Kevin Federline' and 'well-rounded' in the same sentence scares us as much as it does you.

Because look around at everyone else. There's Britney Spears' boyfriend Adnan Ghalib, a married paparazzo who immediately did all kinds of tell-all interviews about Britney when they split up for a day last week. Then there's Britney Spears' family – a slapper, a teenage almost-mother and some bloke respectively. And then there's Britney Spears' manager Sam Lutfi.

But Sam Lutfi is OK, because he's the man who phoned up Barbara Walters to tell her that Britney Spears is actually mental the other day. And even if that triggered off a public argument between Britney Spears and Sam Lutfi that ended up with Britney Spears crying on a pavement, Adnan Ghalib being refused entry to Britney's home, Britney's family trying to keep Britney away from Sam Lutfi and Sam Lutfi trying to keep Britney's family away from Britney, it was obviously the right thing to do because he's Britney's manager. Obviously.

And as Britney Spears' manager, it's Sam Lutfi's responsibility to protect Britney from danger, which mainly seems to involve telling people that Britney's family "have an agenda. Their agenda is jealousy," and texting Adnan Ghalib to tell him that he'll kill Britney. But despite his obvious sterling work at keeping Britney Spears on the straight and narrow, MTV has discovered that Sam Lutfi might be a teensy bit higher up the Creepy Weirdo scale than we thought:

According to three requests for restraining orders against him that have been obtained by MTV News — and are unrelated to Spears — Lutfi also has a dark side… Before Lutfi hooked up with Spears, he was a fixture in the life of Danny Haines, a former friend who claimed that their association turned sour when Lutfi allegedly sent nude pictures of him to his family, friends and employer, and tried to convince Haines to kill himself. "Seriously, sleeping pills, lots of them," Lutfi allegedly wrote to him, Haines told Blender magazine.

But, you know, other than the restraining orders and the whole suicide-convincing thing, we're sure Sam Lutfi is just lovely.

Seriously, though, we've looked at this from every possible angle and there's only one explanation for Britney Spears' current dire crisis – she has too many friends with shit facial hair. Honestly, both Sam Lutfi and Adnan Ghalib have those stupid little beardette things that run in a line from their bottom lip to their chin. Everyone – everyone – knows that people with beardettes are dickheads. So as soon as someone passes that memo onto Britney, we're sure everything will get straightened out nicely. 

Read more:

Britney Spears' Manager/Friend Sam Lutfi: Prior Restraining Orders Paint A Dark Picture – MTV 

If there's a new season of American Idol starting, it must be time to begin our annual 'Paula Abdul is a flipping loon' blowout.

But, no, actually perhaps things will be different this year. Perhaps Paula Abdul will be able to get through a season of American Idol sanely, sensibly and without drawing attention to her worst characteristics like she usually does.

What? Paula Abdul's gone and had a 10-minute emotional breakdown in an airport? And she started talking like a poltergeist? Lordy.

Maybe we should start acting mental all the time, you know. Look at Paula Abdul – hardly a day passes without her managing to claw through the walls of logic and do something genuinely stupefying, like punch herself in the nose with a chihuahua or scream about diarrhoea into a telephone, and all the American Idol contestants are like "Woooo! Ohmigaaaaaah! Paula Abdul, you totally mean so much to me!"

And, despite spending our entire lives trying to avoid public displays of wibbling emotion, what do we get? The occasional comment from people calling us biased pricks, that's what. Where's the justice?

Anyway, a new season of American Idol is set to start, and that means Paula Abdul will have to crank up her derange-o-scope if she wants to make the public worry about her mental wellbeing nearly as much as in previous years. Remember that last year Courtney Love almost replaced Paula as an American Idol judge? Courtney pissing Love! So it's fair to say that Paula Abdul has her work cut out for her if she wants to keep up that juddering level of instability this year.

So hats off to Paula Abdul, then, for announcing the start of American Idol 2008 by apparently having a bewildering emotional breakdown in an airport where she started wailing like a poltergeist in front of everyone. A source told Radaronline:

"She had an insane nervous breakdown that lasted 10 minutes. One minute she was hyperventilating and on the verge of passing out; the next she was yelling into her cell phone in this deep, rage-filled Poltergeist voice. She kept screaming three names over and over—Michael, Sidney, and Leslie. Everyone was staring at her, but she didn't care."

Perhaps, if this report is true, there's more to this than Paula Abdul just being Paula Abdul. Perhaps it's a thinly-veiled warning to Amy Winehouse to make sure she knows who the crazy airport behaviour patch belongs to.

And, just think, this is Paula Abdul right at the beginning of American Idol. Who knows what zany, slightly disturbing antics she'll have gotten up to by the time American Idol skids to an exhausted close in the middle of the year? We know it's improper of us to ask but, Paula, you'd make us the happiest people on earth if you could tailor one of your episodes around holding a turd like a biro and writing on the walls of your house.

Read more:

Paula Abdul's Airport Flip-Out – Radar Online 

Oh, how we love chain reaction games – we love them so much that once we set off a chain reaction meltdown in our local nuclear power station just to see what'd happen. What happened? We bloody died, that's what happened.

But, to our knowledge at least, nobody has ever died playing Meltdown. That's not to say it isn't exciting, though – Meltdown might just be our favourite 'inflate green globs until they explode and inflate other surrounding green globs until there aren't any more green globs left' game ever. Or second-favourite, at least.

Play Meltdown now