We’ve seen 300, so we know Gerard Butler isn’t a man to mess with. That felt-tip drawn-on sixpack means business, you know.

And because we’ve seen 300, we know that provoking him will lead to one of two outcomes. Either Gerard Butler will tilt his head back and bellow in slow motion for what seems like 45 minutes or he’ll do something so absurdly homoerotic that you’ll need to go home and scrub yourself clean afterwards.

Or – if you’re a photographer – he’ll punch you in the face a couple of times. Because that’s what Gerard Butler has just been charged with allegedly doing.

Gerard Butler is one of our finest actors. He can star in any type of film you like, provided that it’s either a boneheaded action film or a romantic comedy so dire that you’ll want to go home and burn your face off on the kitchen hob afterwards.

Because, really, Gerard Butler has got everything a big movie star needs to succeed – he’s good-looking, charming, able to play one of two almost cartoonishly-defined roles and, most importantly, it looks like he’s quite good at punching photographers in the mouth. oh, he’s an up-and-comer alright. BBC News reports:

Actor Gerard Butler has been charged by Los Angeles prosecutors over a scuffle with a photographer. Butler, 39, faces up to six months in jail if convicted of misdemeanour battery. Los Angeles City Attorney spokesman Frank Mateljan said the incident happened after a premiere party for the film RocknRolla in October.

Well there you go then. Charges dismissed, surely. Gerard Butler was angry after the premiere of a Guy Ritchie movie? That’s just human nature – if we suddenly realised that we’d just starred in a Guy Ritchie movie we wouldn’t just punch the nearest person to us, we’d beat them unconscious with one of our buttocks and then go and kick down an hospital for poorly orphans.

But apparently that isn’t the defence line that Gerard Butler plans to use – his lawyers are saying that the paparazzo in question had stalked him, chased people through the streets and almost killed a pedestrian. If that’s the case, the paparazzi deserved all he got, on the basis that he’s literally Godzilla.

All in all, then, good work from Gerard Butler – you’re just one expensive induction into an embarrassingly bullshit religion away from being a real A-list moviestar now. Not that your alleged paparazzi-attacking technique couldn’t do with a little finessing here and there, you understand. Just to make your own.

You know, like how Pierce Brosnan screams “Get a real fucking job!” before he lunges in for the attack, or how Keanu Reeves favours the slow-motion car-bump. That’s the sort of signature paparazzi-thump that Gerard Butler needs to set himself apart from the crowd. Maybe he should wipe his dirty beard in their faces, or set his new co-star Katherine Heigl on them instead. Anything to stop him constantly being confused with the angry one off Gladiators, anyway.

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So Madonna fell off that horse because a photographer – possibly working for Old Bags On Saddles magazine – spooked it.

And it’s true. It’s true because Madonna’s rep Liz Rosenberg said it was true, and everything she says is true, with the possible exception of most of the things she says. But apparently, according to the incident’s police report, the paparazzi played no part in Madonna’s little topple whatsoever.

It’s a shame, because we assumed that Madonna now hurts herself whenever there’s a photographer around. Oh well, we’ll just have to cancel her photoshoot at the rusty spike factory, we suppose.

The poor paparazzi. Whenever anything bad happens to a celebrity, they’re always the first to get blamed. Honestly, it’s like there’s something about people who spend their lives conspicuously intruding on people’s privacy in the desperate hope that they’ll start crying or get their knickers out that just rubs people up the wrong way. How strange.

And if you believe what you read, it’s not just human beings and Pierce Brosnan who dislike the paparazzi, it’s also horses.

Ever since Sleipnir, the eight-legged horse god from Norse mythology, was snapped drunkenly vandalising a park bench with Quick Draw McGraw, the dim but well-intentioned wild west cartoon sheriff horse, all horses have had it in for the paparazzi. This hatred manifested itself most recently on Saturday when a horse who was carrying Madonna around saw a photographer in the bushes and deliberately flung Madonna from its back, causing her enough distress and injury to be hospitalised.

This definitely happened. Madonna was injured because a paparazzo leapt from the bushes, perhaps dressed as something that horses dislike such as a tub of glue or the Cliff Richard-performed theme tune to the early 1990s BBC horse-based drama Trainer, and spooked the horse she was riding.

Except, according to the police report into Madonna’s fall, the paparazzi didn’t play a part in the accident whatsoever. E! Online reports:

“She was a victim of a fall from a horse. We have no mention of the paparazzi,” Officer Chris Brenner tells E! News. “We got a call that the subject fell off the horse and treated it as an aided case…. Above complainant was a victim of fall from horse. Unknown injury. Bridgehampton Fire Department/ambulance responded and transported to Southampton Hospital,” said Brenner, quoting the police report.

So if the paparazzi didn’t make Madonna fall off her horse, what did? It’s just like a whodunnit, isn’t it, or at least it would be if it wasn’t for the very heavy suspicion that Madonna did it because she’s rubbish at riding horses.

Or maybe Madonna fell off the horse on purpose. After all, if we were Madonna we’d fling ourselves off horses as often as we could, purely because then movie acting would be automatically promoted to the thing we were second-most hopeless at. Smart move, Madonna. Smart move.

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Gisele and Tom Brady are the new Brad and Angelina – which at least means we can ditch the old Brad and Angelina.

But the comparison is apt. Gisele and Tom Brady have got Brad and Angelina’s model good looks, plus they’ve got a kid that’s not completely theirs, plus – and here’s the dealbreaker – they’ve both got a violent hatred for paparazzi.

How violent? Enough for their security guard to allegedly fire a gun at a couple of photographers outside Gisele and Tom Brady’s second wedding ceremony this weekend. Fair enough – God forbid Gisele should ever be photographed actually wearing clothes.

When a professional sportsman like Tom Brady marries a supermodel like Gisele, two things are guaranteed – firstly, any children they have will be preposterously beautiful. And secondly, 97% of their conversations will be about their own hair, with the remaining three percent being used up trying to remember how to pronounce the word ‘hair’.

So if you were either Gisele or Tom Brady, how would you choose to pass the time without looking like a couple of lumbering, medically braindead cackheads? Remember that you can’t have sex, because you’re so stupid that the last time you tried to have sex you spent three hours trying to stick it inside your own ear before giving up and crying. That’s right – you’d pass the time by getting married all the time.

Although Gisele and Tom Brady already got married once in February, this weekend they decided to get married again. But at least Gisele and Tom Brady made the two weddings different – the first was in Malibu, the second was in Costa Rica; the first was small and private, the second was larger; the first didn’t contain any moronic, potentially-fatal gunfire, the second one, um, did.

According to reports, a pair of paparazzi covering the Gisele/ Tom Brady wedding ‘narrowly escaped death’ after a security guard started firing a gun at them. The Telegraph reports:

Security guards for the wedding spotted two paparazzi taking photographs of the nuptials from a bush. The security guards rounded up the men and brought them up to Bundchen’s villa. However, the men refused and decided to make a run for it. They jumped into a waiting SUV, which one of the guards allegedly fired at. They men claim the bullet broke the rear window and bounced off the windshield.

Move over Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie – the best you can do is pay people to choke photographers with their hands, but it takes a special sort of power couple to actually try and mortally wound the paparazzi.

The only real problem left is how Gisele and Tom Brady will be able to top this next time they get married. SPOILER ALERT – we hear they’ve already ordered 15 cagefuls of radioactive death monkeys. As soon as they’ve trained them to drive exploding tanks, wedding number three will be GO!

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Well, you’ll never guess what he thinks of them.

In an interview with The Today Show, Brad Pitt has announced that he hates the paparazzi, but he loves his family. Steady on there, Brad – much more of this controversial ‘good things are good and bad things are bad’ talk and there’s a decent chance that you’ll end up literally melting our mind. What? You like your family? That’s literally crazy. Video after the jump.

We’re starting to think that Brad Pitt is a lost cause. The poor man just doesn’t know how to promote a movie. Later this month, Brad’s new film The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button is released, and it looks like it could be one of the best films of the year. Or at least it would be if Brad Pitt could sell the ruddy thing convincingly.

Now, if Angelina Jolie was the star of Benjamin Button it’d be a different story. She’d be rolling out stories of how many weapons her children have and how much she hates Jennifer Aniston and seeing how many babies she could clip onto each tit and the end result would be, well, nobody would watch the movie because it’d be an Angelina Jolie movie and nobody’s that mental, but at least there would be loads of headlines about her. Sometimes that’s enough.

But Brad Pitt? His promotion of Benjamin Button is just wildly dull. It started badly – with a dreary anecdote about his kids – and now it’s inexplicably managed to get worse. Brad Pitt has been interviewed by The Today Show, and the two main thrusts of the outcome are that a) Brad Pitt loves his kids and b) Brad Pitt doesn’t love the paparazzi. First the quotes and then the video:

“I’m really proud of this family. I look at my sons and my daughters – one is from Vietnam, one is from Cambodia, one is from Ethiopia and here are these kids who were born in Namibia and in France, and they’re brothers and sisters… Truly, I feel rich being around them. Each one of them offers so much to the mix.”

“Let me be very blunt, I hate them. I hate these people. I don’t understand how they do that for a living. We have to make a distinction between people who photograph celebrities at events and people who climb over walls wearing camouflage… calling out your kids’ names as you try to take them to school so they’ll look that way. I have no respect for these people. There should be laws against it.”

Really Brad Pitt? You hate the paparazzi? We would have never guessed – all this time we thought you were ordering your security to hug them when they got too close. Hug them hard. By the neck.

Anyway, we can sort of see Brad Pitt’s point here – his family does deserve a base amount of privacy from time to time, if only because it’d keep them out of the poxy magazines once in a while – but come on, you’re promoting a film here! Can’t you dredge up some kind of huge inappropriately personal aspect of your life and endlessly drone on about that instead?

Jesus, it’s almost like Brad Pitt wants his potentially Oscar-winning movie to be judged on its merits or something. That’s literally disgusting.

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Did Kanye sip his lemonade without any problems whilst sitting in the corner of the VIP area? Don’t be daft, something went tits up of course.

It seems that Kanye West has a recurring problems with people who like to take people’s pictures. Granted they may get in the way and stop you from doing day-to-day activities such as getting some milk and waiting for a plane, but never mind. In the Tup Tup Palace nightclub – a place that doesn’t exactly scream class – a member of the paparazzi elite got to close to Kanye and ended up getting his face busted up. Was it Kanye’s fault? Of course not, and he’s explained why in a (nother) big pissy blog rant.

We all remember Kanye West getting a bit angry and throwing a Hulk-like strop in an airport a few months ago. Sadly he didn’t turn green and grow into an enormous beast, but instead smashed up a camera and then attempted to do the same to someone filming the whole incident. Silly Kanye. In Newcastle the same thing appeared to have happened again where Kanye West + paparazzi = rubbish fight and pointless conflict.

Thrown into the cells for a night to talk to the local heroin addicts, Kanye West emerged with no charge and sadly won’t have to turn up to Newcastle magistrates court for a hearing and a fine of £30. Not letting the incident lie, he of course had a big cry about the event for his minions to read. No doubt they will side with Kanye and spit at all the haters who diss their homeboy.

Choice quotes from his blog include:

“Let us not forget the paps killed Princess Diana. When will there be a law passed that simply enforces that someone has to ask to take a photograph of you? That would seem like common courtesy. Right now the paps are above the law and the people they shoot are below it.”

“I put my hand up to the camera in self-defence! Here’s what happened…when I left the club, I was encountered by a thirsty paparazzi as usual. He felt he had more rights to my space than me, so I put my hand up to prevent him from taking my image.”

“I didn’t assault him but merely putting my hand up to cover his lens. My security yelled, ‘get the camera off him’. I guess in all the commotion the camera scraped his nose.”

Ok – A) If the photographer was thirsty, why didn’t Kanye West offer him a rum and coke or a good old English pint of imported lager? B) Only Elton John can bang on about Princess Diana. It’s the law. C) Of course he didn’t assault any photographers. Kanye said so.

With this incident happening in Newcastle, it will no doubt go down in Geordie folklaw as one of the major things to have happened in the city alongside inventing Newcastle Brown Ale, Stottie bread, getting electricity a few years ago and finally converting from horse and cart to automobile.

But we’ve been too scared to do that, because of that paparazzo who claimed that Keanu Reeves mercilessly mowed him down while he was doing that exact same thing. But our days of worry are far behind us, readers – Keanu Reeves has been cleared of liability over the accident.

You know what that means? It means that Keanu Reeves didn’t run over photographer Alison Silva last year, yes, but mainly it means that we’re all allowed to be as infuriatingly intrusive towards Keanu Reeves while he’s in his car as we like, and he almost certainly won’t drive into us as fast as he can, shattering our pelvis into a million pieces. Almost certainly. Result!

It’s best to think of the paparazzi as big game hunters. That way you’ll realise that Lindsay Lohan is a common prey, like a slurring elk that hardly ever wears knickers, while Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are more like elephants because they’re massive and they’ll quite often attack anyone who gets too close to them.

And then there’s Keanu Reeves. Keanu Reeves is more like a mountain lion, for two reasons. One, he’s slippery and hard to track down and, two, he’s never knowingly displayed a recognisable human emotion. But let’s concentrate on the first one for the time being.

Because Keanu Reeves deliberately shuns the limelight as much as possible, the paparazzi can often find themselves getting over-excited in his presence. That’s what happened to photographer Alison Silva last year, when he attempted to grab a picture of Keanu Reeves in his car and ended up splattered across the tarmac.

At the time Silva claimed that Keanu Reeves had run him over, while Reeves himself said that Silva fell over of his own accord because he was so busy over-zealously clicking away into his little camera. With a depressing amount of inevitability the argument went to court, with Silva demanding $640,800 for medical bills and loss of earnings.

But yesterday Keanu Reeves was cleared of any liability in the accident, which means that Alison Silva can go and shove his loss of earnings up his tarmac-destroyed bottom. Reuters reports:

Actor Keanu Reeves was cleared on Monday of any liability for injuries a paparazzo claimed he suffered when he was struck by the actor’s car. A Los Angeles jury deliberated for about an hour in the civil lawsuit brought by photographer Alison Silva against the “Matrix” star before clearing Reeves.

Keanu Reeves hasn’t commented on the result of the case yet, and he really doesn’t need to, because just about everyone on the planet will assume that he’d just blanky murmur “woah,” and that’s probably about three or four times as eloquent as whatever he was planning to say anyway.

And, in time, Alison Silva will come to appreciate the fact that he lost his case. After all, had he won, Keanu Reeves would have taken on more work to recoup his losses, and we’re pretty sure that knowing you were ultimately responsible for Johnny Mneumonic 2 would be far more painful than the injuries you picked up slowly falling over in front of Keanu Reeves’ car.

We can hardly bring ourselves to tell you this, but here goes – on Saturday night, Jessica Simpson’s hairdresser Ken Paves got caught in the middle of a paparazzi crush while out with Simpson, and ended up bleeding out of his face a little bit because he got socked with a camera.

This incident is a sign that the war between celebrities and the paparazzi has just taken a turn for the worse. Jessica Simpson’s hairdresser getting donked in the face is how it begins, but we dread to think what’ll come next. Lindsay Lohan’s manicurist getting kicked in the shins? The little old lady who Ryan Seacrest employs to water his plants getting a nasty Chinese burn and a wedgie? Where will the madness end? WHERE?

You know what Jessica Simpson would be without her hair? A bald bloke with big tits, that’s what. That’s why wherever Jessica Simpson goes, she’s followed by Ken Paves.

Ken Paves is the man who not only taught Jessica Simpson that having hair that flicks out wildly like Farah Fawcett’s Basset Hound operating a Van de Graaff Generator can draw attention away from her massive jaw, but also potentially knows the secret to bulletproof hair. And because of this, Jessica Simpson and Ken Paves have become firm friends.

How firm? Firm enough for Ken to take a camera in the face to protect Jessica. That’s what happened on Saturday night anyway when, following paparazzi scuffles featuring everyone from Pierce Brosnan to Kanye West, Ken Paves was left horribly injured by some photographers. The LA Times reports:

Jess’ mane man was leading his  star client out of the restaurant, when the cameramen closed in… One guy hit Ken near his eye with a part of a camera. Blood trickling down his face, Ken still managed to get Jess inside their waiting ride.

Judging by that account, the injury to Ken Paves seems like it could have been a genuine accident. After all, if you were paid to take photos of the world’s biggest stars, you’d carelessly bundle forward regardless of casualties if you saw the star of Blonde Ambition and one slightly underwhelming country album too, wouldn’t you?

On the other hand, this injury to Ken Paves might have been cruelly premeditated, and for good reason. After all, Ken Paves is responsible for the hair of several Hollywood stars, and if he suddenly got injured, they’d all start going out in public looking bedraggled. That equals better pictures – and therefore more money – for the paparazzi.

It’s true – just look at Britney Spears. The paparazzi made the most cash from Britney Spears when she looked her worst. And why did she look her worst? Because she sacked Ken Paves. And now that Ken has a tiny gash under one of his eyes, we can expect Jessica Simpson to go through a similarly horrifying transformation.

That’s right – she’s going to go from a woman who looks like a radioactive transvestite to a woman who looks like a radioactive transvestite with slightly scruffy hair. How dreadful.

Or it’s because Keanu Reeves is quite private and stuff. One or the other. But photographer Alison Silva probably thinks it’s the first one, because he’s suing Keanu Reeves for allegedly hitting him with his car last year, causing career-threatening injuries to his wrist which, coupled with the fact that he’s got a girl’s name, must have really ticked him off.

But yesterday Keanu Reeves showed up in court to spread some of the trademark Keanu Reeves moviestar razzle dazzle around and convince everyone otherwise. Sadly, the Keanu Reeves version of razzle dazzle involves standing around looking blank-faced and a bit confused and occasionally saying “woah.” We aren’t anticipating a good outcome for him.

There’s a deeply complex relationship between celebrities and the paparazzi. On the one hand the paparazzi financially gain from essentially endorsing the lumbering self-worth of the celebrities they follow and the result in beneficial to everyone. But on the other hand, sometimes Pierce Brosnan will thump a photographer in a car park.

It’s not just Pierce Brosnan, though – every now and again Kanye West will get angry and shove some photographers around too, or maybe Matthew McConaughey will get his surfer mates to rough them up a bit. Or, you know, Keanu Reeves could run them over or something.

Or not, because there’s a chance that Keanu Reeves doesn’t run photographers over. But that hasn’t stopped paparazzo Alison Silva from claiming that he did. Last March it was reported that Keanu Reeves bumped into Silva with his Porsche, and now Silva has sued Keanu for all the injuries and whatnot he gained from slowly falling to the floor in front of a barely-moving vehicle.

The upside of this is that Keanu Reeves got to go to court yesterday to refute Alison Silva’s claims, and it was a rare chance to see Keanu Reeves saying some words that he’d thought up himself, and that therefore didn’t obviously confuse him the instant they came out of his mouth. E! Online reports:

Under cross-examination, Silva’s lawyer, Joseph Farzam, tried to nail down the Matrix man on whether he really made an effort to avoid hitting Silva, asking Reeves if he used his horn or hand signals to get Silva to move. “He was in front of a starting car,” Reeves replied. “It’s common sense to me.”

Keanu’s argument seems to be that Alison Silva was walking backwards while trying to take pictures when he tripped and fell of his own accord. It might have happened. It might not have happened. Frankly that’s not for us to decide – and a good job too, because if it was then we’d probably try sawing our own legs off as a protest to the futility of our own lives.

But we hope that Keanu Reeves is telling the truth. Not because we trust and respect him as an actor and as a human being, but because we’re scared that if he loses this lawsuit he’ll make another Matrix film to recoup his lost money. Because, if the quality pattern of Matrix movies holds, The Matrix 4 will be so bad that watching it will feel like you’re being slapped with the guts of an infected Ebola monkey. So fingers crossed that doesn’t happen.

But that’d be the easy way. Instead the Heather Locklear arrest story has chosen to get really weird. And it’s all the paparazzi’s fault.

Remember the good Samaritan who alerted the police to Heather Locklear’s erratic driving? Turns out she owns a paparazzi agency and managed to sell photos of Heather Locklear being arrested to TMZ for $27,000. So does that affect her credibility as a witness? Was she really just being a concerned citizen? Why’s Heather Locklear famous again? What was the date of the first Spanish Armada? Who are you? Why do our legs hurt so much?

The paparazzi, honest to goodness, are responsible for every single one of the world’s problems. It’s their fault that Kanye West is so angry, it’s their fault that Jamie Lynn Spears is so jumpy and paranoid and we’re pretty sure it’s their fault that the prepacked stirfry that was a fortnight out of date we had for dinner recently tasted overwhelmingly of vinegar. The paparazzi, in short are bastards.

Just look what they did to Heather Locklear. There was Heather on Saturday, minding her own business seemingly intoxicated on a cocktail of prescription medication, when all of a sudden – bam – the paparazzi are calling the police in case her erratic driving ends up killing somebody. The bastards.

It has emerged that the ‘good Samaritan’ who got Heather Locklear arrested for DUI after notifying the police of her unusual behaviour was none other than Jill Ishkanian, a photographer who also runs her own paparazzi agency. And, like all good paparazzi agency bosses, Ishkanian managed to get a few photos of the arrest which she sold on to TMZ for $27,000.

Except she didn’t make the transaction directly because she’s previously been accused of stealing information from US Weekly’s computers and as a result her reputation is so tattered that hardly any outlets will buy her photos.

But just because Heather Locklear’s arrest came about because of a woman who had a vested financial interest in securing photos of Heather Locklear getting arrested, it doesn’t mean that Heather Locklear didn’t deserve to be arrested, does it? AP reports:

CHP Lt. Dane Lobb said Wednesday that Ishkanian’s involvement would not change what was going forward as a regular DUI investigation. “We determined (Locklear) was someone who shouldn’t be operating a vehicle,” he said. Locklear’s attorney, Blair Berk, did not return an e-mail message seeking comment Wednesday evening.

Of course, regardless of who called the police, Heather Locklear’s guilt or innocence will be determined once and for all as soon as police receive the test results determining whether or not she was impaired at the time of the arrest.

Then we’ll all be able to say for certain whether Heather Locklear is a habitual drug user or a perfectly sober batty old shitbox who suffers from depression and possibly keeps trying to kill herself. And not a moment too soon.

It also explains Kanye West’s ridiculous little outburst at the paparazzi in LAX yesterday, where he pulled his hood up over his head, swung his arms about like a girl and got arrested on suspicion of vandalism and battery as a result. But now that the heat of the moment has passed, Kanye West thinks that people might have got the wrong impression of him.

Yes, he might have apparently smashed up a photographer’s camera, but that didn’t stop Kanye West from leaping onto his blog this morning and telling the world that actually “I’m cool with the paparazzi.” But did Kanye West himself really write that? Doubtful – the 21-word post only contained four exclamation marks. Kanye’s average exclamation mark tally for a post that size is roughly seven hundred million billion. We smell a rat.

A strange thing happened at the MTV VMAs on Sunday. Kanye West turned up and didn’t endlessly bitch about not winning everything. It was strange to witness – usually Kanye West throwing his toys out of the pram is as traditional a VMA sight as a pack of disgruntled virgins. Maybe, we thought, Kanye West had come to terms with the matter and found peace in himself.

We were wrong. Instead, Kanye West did what all graceful losers do and let the bad feelings systematically build up inside him, turning from a niggle to a grump, and from a grump to a strop, and from a strop to a rage, and from a rage to an alleged completely illegal camera-smashing meltdown in an airport. It’s happened to us all.

And that’s how Kanye West got arrested yesterday, more or less. And, given that he was filmed apparently destroying $10,000 of camera equipment and that the entire internet seems to have independently come to the logical conclusion that Kanye West is a turnip who can’t fight very well, we thought we knew what was coming next.

A bloggy rant. You see, when Kanye West is faced with any criticism at all he hops on his blog, bashes out some angry screed, tapes down the Shift and 1 keys on his laptop, goes off for half an hour, comes back and publishes whatever’s on the screen. It’s why, after he was eight hours late for a festival slot recently, Kanye West wrote the following on his blog:

PEARL JAM ENDED ONE HOUR LATE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  AT THAT POINT WE’RE RACING AGAINST THE SUN !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Therefore logic dictates that, since actually getting arrested on suspicion of something you’ve been filmed doing is probably a bit worse than getting some hippies miffed, Kanye West’s first blog post on the matter would just be made up of larger and larger exclamation marks culminating in one angry red exclamation mark the size of a bus. But no. Blogging this morning, Kanye West actually wrote this:

We back in the lab!!! I’m cool with the paparazzi. This guy wasn’t cool. I gotta work now… I’ll rant later!

So that’s that. Despite all the visual evidence to the contrary, Kanye West actually likes the paparazzi. That’s good to know, because we hear that whenever the paparazzi don’t like someone, they all gang up together and follow them around flashing lights in their faces and making it hard for them to see where they’re going.

That won’t happen to Kanye West, though, because he likes the paparazzi and the paparazzi likes him straight back. Incidentally, Kanye West’s about to go on a special tour of gratitude around all the professions that he’s cool with, where he plans to kick ladders out from under window cleaners, fill all the lifeguards’ buoancy aids up with cement and punch anyone who works at an orphanage square in the face.

Allegedly.

How famous? Famous enough that she gets swarmed by the paparazzi whenever she goes to an airport. Like yesterday, for example, when there were so many photographers bundling over themselves to grab a shot of Jamie Lynn Spears that she needed a large police escort to protect her.

Except she didn’t. It was all a trick. The police weren’t escorting Jamie Lynn Spears through the airport at all – they were escorting a double to fool the paparazzi while Jamie Lynn Spears could quietly slip out of another exit unnoticed. It’s awful and we demand an investigation. Not because of the waste of police resources, you understand – because people actually wanted to take Jamie Lynn Spears’ picture in the first place. Heads will roll for this, mark our words.

Not a good day for the paparazzi yesterday, really. First Kanye West went all berserk and smashed everyone’s cameras up until he got arrested, then hardly anyone got any decent underwear shots of female celebrities getting out of cars, and then – just to make matters worse – they were tricked into taking all kinds of pictures of a woman who they thought was Jamie Lynn Spears but wasn’t.

According to reports, Jamie Lynn Spears was flying into LAX yesterday to visit her sister, the absolutely definitely much better because she wore a shiny dress on Sunday Britney Spears. However, word got out to the paparazzi, who stormed the airport hoping they could snare themselves a valuable picture of Britney’s younger, less famous, less interesting sister.

And that’s what they appeared to get, after several police officers were seen escorting a young blonde lady in sunglasses through the packs of paparazzi in the arrivals lounge. Except all their pictures were in vain – Jamie Lynn Spears pulled the old switcheroo on them by sending a double through the airport in her place and then sneaking out through a more discreet exit untroubled. As TMZ reports:

For some reason, the cops wanted to fool the paparazzi, so they got a random woman on that flight who kinda sorta looked like Jamie Lynn and asked her if they could escort her to baggage claim. She said yes, and the ruse began. By the way, we’ve learned there’s an internal investigation because some big wigs in the police department are pissed.

Never mind the police department, some of the paparazzi need their heads banging together for this. After all, the first rule of being a celebrity photographer is ‘If you can’t recognise them, they’re probably not worth photographing.’ Actually, that’s the second rule of being a celebrity photographer. The first rule is ‘If you really throw yourself down as low as possible when a female celebrity gets out of a car, you’re guaranteed a shot of her muff’. But you get the picture.

Anyway, of course the police chiefs are annoyed. The only thing worse than spending money protecting a Jamie Lynn Spears decoy is spending money protecting Jamie Lynn Spears herself. She’s a mother now, so she’s perfectly capable of barging her way through a crown not caring who she injures because suddenly she assumes it’s her God-given right to do that, thank you very much.

And, anyway, we always assumed that decoys were for heads of state and other potential assassination targets, not the younger sisters of mentally-unwell popstars. Not that Jamie Lynn Spears isn’t a potential assassination target, you understand. We expect that someone’s probably thought of killing her at one point or another. But, you know. It’s Jamie Lynn Spears. Who could possibly be bothered to actually go through all that effort?

No, no more decoys for Jamie Lynn Spears. She should know by now that celebrities have a different way of getting rid of unwanted attention in airports – by urinating in their pants like David Hasselhoff. Do that and nobody’s going to take your picture. Come to think of it, nobody’s going to want to have anything to do with you, you stinking piss monster.

So, yeah, do that next time.

Not if you’re a surfer. Surfers see Matthew McConaughey as their hero, their dim mahogany idol. And if you mess with Matthew McConaughey you mess with the entire surfer community, as a group of paparazzi found out in June when the surfers rounded on them for taking pictures of McConaughey and shoved them around a bit.

Now two surfers have been charged for the McConaughey paparazzi flare-up. But that’s not important. What’s important are the names of the people involved in the scuffle, because they’re so stupid it’s impossible not to find the whole thing hilarious. Spoiler alert – one of them’s called Skylar.

There’s been a long history of tribal conflicts on beaches – Vikings Vs Saxons, Mods Vs Rockers, Nazis Vs Non-Nazis, whoever it was in the last scene of The Warriors – but none have been quite as upsetting as the Surfers Vs Paparazzi Malibu beach clash of June 2008.

It was an epic battle the likes of which Malibu residents haven’t seen since someone gave Mel Gibson a bottle of tequila and a photo of Woody Allen two years ago. It was the sort of day that witnesses will one eventually tell their children about – the day that some photographers strolled onto a beach and started talking pictures of Matthew McConaughey, and only stopped when some surfers sort of started effetely pushing them around and whooping and whatnot.

Worst of all were the harrowing, primal exchanges between the surfers and the paparazzi, which will chill our very souls until the day we die. Exchanges like:

Surfer: “Get a job!”

Paparazzo: “This is a job, what do you do?”

Surfer: “I fucking drink beer and party! Woohoohoohoo!”

Anyway, you’ll be pleased to know that two surfers have been charged with this incident, getting hit with one misdemenour count of battery each. One of the surfers is called Philip John Hildebrand, which is fine, but the other one is called Skylar Martin Peak. Skylar, for christ’s sake. No wonder he’s so angry.

And don’t think we’re letting the paparazzi off either. The photographer who Skylar and Skylar’s friend attacked was called Richid Altmbareckouhammou, which is less of a name and more of the noise you make when you’re tickling an adorable puppy’s tum-tum. Reuters reports:

Officials claim the two men threw Altmbareckouhammou into the water from where he was taking pictures on the beach. Each faces up to six months in jail and a $2,000 fine.

We’re sure Skylar and Skylar’s friend feel pretty crap about the possibility of spending six months in jail. Worse still – it’s six months in jail for protecting Matthew McConaughey.

Seriously, if Skylar and Skylar’s friend do get sent down for this, they may as well just wear T-shirts reading ‘Please Bum me To Smithereens’ to save them the effort of explaining what they’re in for to their cellmates.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Well now it would seem she’s got herself into MMA – that’s mixed martial arts – with some hardcore street fighting action. Well, hardcore may be a bit far, but Lily Allen did go and try to beat up a random French girl for insulting her.

And we shouldn’t forget that she also managed to swear like a navvie, and she managed to do all of this in front of about 32,000 paparazzi and other press hounds. Not a bad effort, we have to say. But to top off all the topping offs that could be topped off, there’s a video too – and it’s after the jump.

Yes, we thought we’d managed to get rid of her to our good friends in the US, but it would seem we’ve struck out in that respect and Lily remains firmly on British soil.

Exiting Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London, Lily was apparently abused by a French passer-by, which caused her to react in a way befitting of any Brit taking issue with a Frenchie: through the art of violence.

Unfortunately, the battering took on something of a pathetic form and was easily upstaged by Allen’s hilarious foul mouth, which managed to put even the great swear-machine Brian Blessed to shame.

While it would appear Lily Allen isn’t taking her own advice, at least it looks like she is following through with her attempted crusade to rid the streets of violence. Though we didn’t expect her to get rid of it personally, nor did we expect her to get rid of violence with violence.

But we’re not questioning her logic – we don’t want to be battered, for one.

Rather than natter on any more, why don’t we just let you see for yourselves – here we have Lily Allen, attempting to punch a French girl, failing, swearing a lot and being calmed down by Miquita Oliver who used to be on Popworld.

It really does have it all – tension, violence, beauty, international appeal, a resolution and a lesson at the end of it all: “violence is bad.”

(Alright, so we’ll admit that video’s a bit rubbish, but it’s better than most of the other ones around and we couldn’t embed the one that The Sun has up – but hey, at least you can hear her swearing like a disgruntled navvie, eh?)

Sadly, our stupid sense of common decency has always held us back from achieving our goal, which is why we’ve decided to live vicariously through the two camouflaged photographers who’ve been questioned by police after fighting with guards on Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s property in France.

What exactly happened is a mystery – the guards and photographers are both accusing the other side of battery – but it’s clear why the paparazzi were on Brad and Angelina’s property in the first place. Apparently the garden is a haven for a rare breed of yellow wagtail, and the photographers would have got a first-rate shot of them if Angelina Jolie’s stupid twins didn’t keep getting in the bloody way.

You’d have thought that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie would understand by now, surely. Understand that they should never leave America again, obviously. We’re being serious.

Look at it this way – in America Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie get hounded by the paparazzi, but never for very long. Give the paparazzi a few days and they’ll get bored and go take pictures of Lindsay Lohan’s knickers or something. That’s how it works.

But when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie go anywhere else, the paparazzi onslaught is furious and relentless. When they were in Namibia, for instance, Brad and Angelina had paparazzi arrested all the time, not realising that people were so only keen to take their picture because it meant not having to trail second-rate silimba players around for a living.

Then there was India, where the paparazzi was so desperate to snap Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie that one member of the press was apparently choked by their security, a boy was knocked off a bike and there was an almighty battle at a school.

But now Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are in France, and that’s bound to be different, right? After all, the French national sense of detached ennui would prevent them from getting their knickers in a twist over a couple of vulgar American moviestars, right?

Nope – just one day after Brad Pitt warned the media not to publish any photos of his babies that were secretly taken by the paparazzi, there’s been a bit of a scuffle between Brad and Angelina’s guards and some camouflaged photographers they supposedly in the grounds of their chateau.

According to reports, two members of the paparazzi were caught in an altercation with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s security guards last night, while presumably trying to take photos of the couple with their newborn twins.

It all sounds so crass, doesn’t it? A bunch of typically heavyhanded gorillas getting in a scrap with some people so desperate for cash that they’d dress up as extras from Predator to take a picture of a couple of babies that, we’re guessing, just look like sodding babies anyway? Urgh.

Luckily French police spokeswoman and brand new hecklerspray hero Capt. Olivia Poupot has more than enough bored disdain to go around. After taking the paparazzi and the guards for questioning, Poupot said:

“I won’t hide for you that this kind of thing is really not the type of problem that interests us. There are, in my opinion, far more important things than paparazzi taking photos of a glamor couple.”

Genius. We want Olivia Poupot to be the French police spokeswoman of our heart.

But still, at least this means Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie can add France to their list of countries they can’t go to without kicking off some sort of violent dispute with the press. They’re running out of options, aren’t they?

There’s always Luxembourg, we suppose. And we can guarantee that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie will definitely move there, just as soon as our ‘Hey beleagured moviestars! Have you seen how many malnourished brown orphans live in Luxembourg?’ tourism campaign gets some funding.

But you mustn’t. You mustn’t look at Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s babies – especially if you’re looking at the paparazzi photos secretly taken with a high-powered telephoto lens that were recently taken. Look at those and Brad Pitt will sue your sweaty loner arse all the way to the moon and back. He’s said so himself.

But don’t get the wrong idea – Brad Pitt isn’t going to unusually strong legal measures to protect the privacy of his family. He’s doing it to protect you. Those babies are so genetically perfect that if you even glance at them you’ll instantly leave your wife because their beauty will show her up to be the ugly old trollop that she really is.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s new twins Vivienne Marcheline and Knox Leon have really captured the world’s imagination since they were born earlier this month. They’re rich, they’re famous, they’re a little bit French and they’re probably the focus of up to eight or nine separate opportunistic kidnapping plots. What’s not to love?

Well, how about the fact that we don’t know what they bloody look like for starters? For all we know Vivienne Marcheline has a hand for a nose and Knox Leon looks like a giant boggle-eyed manatee.

Some brave members of the paparazzi have been trying to help us all out, though, by secretly sneaking into Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s French estate and taking pictures without anyone finding out. These gallant photographers deserve our praise on two counts, firstly because Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie enjoy kicking the paparazzi’s arse whenever they can, and secondly because it’s probably a bit illegal.

However, don’t start getting excited by the prospect of any Brad Pitt/ Angelina Jolie baby action just yet, because Brad has caught wind of these secretly-taken photos, and he’s just about ready to shit out an aneurysm about it. E! Online reports:

The actor’s attorney is threatening legal action against any media outlet that publishes photos snapped “surreptitiously” of Pitt, Angelina Jolie and their family, including new twins Knox and Vivienne, on the grounds of their French estate. “The taking of the Photos constitutes a malicious violation of Mr. Pitt’s privacy, including under the laws of California and France,” the attorney says.

We have to admit that we’re a little bit outraged by Brad Pitt’s threats to sue anyone who prints photos of his babies.

True, the photos do probably constitute a serious breach of privacy, and as a result Brad and Angelina will live the rest of their lives in a paranoid fug of hounded terror, but isn’t it every human’s right to be able to glance at a picture of a famous baby, mumble about it only looking like a sodding baby and forget about it instantly?

Apparently not. And anyway, it is Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s right to keep the identity of their new babies a secret, not just because of the obvious security threat but because the children haven’t asked to be photographed. They’re just unconsenting pawns in all of this, and it’d be unfair to take advantage otherwise. It’s not like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie plan to sell photos of the twins to the highest bidder, is it?

Oh wait…