On Friday OJ Simpson was sentenced to anything between nine and 33 years in jail for his part in last year’s bewildering hotel room armed robbery. If he serves the full term, we’re looking forward to reading the book that 94-year-old OJ Simpson will publish on his release, tentatively titled If I Did It, Wait, What’s My Name Again? Who Are You? Are These My Trousers? They Smell Funny.

That’s unless OJ Simpson’s appeal is successful. Oh, didn’t we mention that part?

We’ve got the right hump with Nevada at the moment, we don’t mind telling you. Why? Because it’s spoiled our fun, that’s why.

For years OJ Simpson has been livening up our gloomiest moments with his inimitable presence, either by getting thrown out of restaurants by men who think he’s a murderer, writing books so galactically ill-advised that they barely seem conceivable or losing his possessions to a family who seem convinced that a dodgy knock-off Rolex will somehow ease their grief.

But that won’t be happening any more. On Friday, during his sentencing for the armed robbery that he was arrested for last year, OJ Simpson discovered that he’d be spending anywhere between nine and 33 years in the slammer. That means that, if he’s fortunate, OJ Simpson will be released from jail in time to see work begin on an actual elevator to space and, if he’s less lucky, OJ Simpson will be released from jail in time to see the last remaining polar bear drown as the arctic icecap melts away to nothing.

The truth is that OJ Simpson will probably end up serving a jail sentence somewhere between those two dates. But he shouldn’t get down, because it still gives him plenty of time to a) cover himself in several quickly-infected self-drawn tattoos, b) befriend a long succession of rats and birds, getting driven further into the realms of disturbing insanity each time one of them dies and c) be violently bummed so often that his rectum will prolapse and hang out of his bumhole like a smelly tail or the queen’s egg sac from the Aliens or something.

Or maybe it won’t because, somewhat inevitably, OJ Simpson has decided to question his sentence with what seems like a fairly frivolous appeal. AP reports:

“This is not a frivolous appeal,” Yale Galanter, Simpson’s lawyer, said. “There were some grave errors made by Judge (Jackie) Glass, and we think they are strong enough to overturn the conviction. We also think we have a shot at bail.” Galanter has cited six initial issues for appeal. The most significant concern could be the exclusion of blacks from the jury selection.

Oh, don’t pretend that you didn’t see this coming – the court was asking for trouble when it filled the jury with nothing but angry white people. But whether or not it’s enough to warrant a retrial remains to be seen.

But if it does, the court will need to get a wriggle on – given the sheer amount of fake heart attacks that characterised his trial, the court runs the risk of losing several important witnesses to anything from fake cardiac arrests to fake spontaneous human combustion, and nobody wants that.

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Firstly, Blake Fielder-Civil’s sentence has shown that you can’t go round violently attacking pub landlords in the face; and that if you do, you definitely can’t try buying their silence with great big wads of your wife’s cash.

Most of all, though, Blake Fielder-Civil’s 27-month jail sentence shows that you’ll still get lumbered with a giant stretch in prison even if you get Amy Winehouse to bellow your name in public every six or seven seconds. Speaking of that, we’ve got another 27 months of that. Thanks, the British justice system. Thanks a lot.

These last nine months have been hellish. They’ve been an unrelenting torture, the likes of which will rarely come round again. That’s because Amy Winehouse’s husband Blake Fielder-Civil has been incarcerated for nine months. And it’s been agony.

Not for Blake Fielder-Civil, who has been plunged into a nightmarish stay in a squalid prison for those nine months. And not for Amy Winehouse, who’s slowly been unravelling to the point where she’s now nothing more than a violent drug addict constantly on the brink of death. No, we’re talking about us.

Nine months we’ve had of listening to Amy Winehouse bellow the word “Blake!” when she’s singing her songs or staggering around Camden off her face on whatever substances she’s into these days. Blake Blake Blake, that’s all we ever bloody hear. And it’s fairly annoying, we don’t mind telling you. We definitely have it worse than Amy Winehouse and Blake Fielder-Civil put together.

And it’s not going to stop until October 2010, because Blake Civil-Fielder has finally been sentenced for his crime of getting trashed on booze and cocaine, smashing up a pub landlord’s head until he needed a metal plate inserted to hold his face together and then offering him £200,000 to flee the country or change his story. And he’s been given 27 sodding months. The Independent reports:

Judge David Radford told Fielder-Civil he had behaved in a “gratuitous, cowardly and disgraceful” way. Fielder-Civil, who had looked calm and relaxed throughout the hearing, showed little emotion as the sentence was passed. But as he was taken down to the cells by court staff at the end of the hearing he looked up and smiled at friends and family in the front row of the crammed public gallery and mouthed “see you soon”.

Although 27 months sounds like quite a long time – in which Blake Fielder-Civil will miss both Albania joining NATO and the end of the Swedish pharmacy monopoly – in reality he’s already served nine of those on remand, so he could be out by Christmas.

Still, though, the next few months are going to be especially difficult on Amy Winehouse. Being without her husband has been tortuous enough as it is, and she’d been publicly pinning her hopes on his release today, so those around her must be fearing for her safety at the moment.

Will Blake’s sentence throw her back into the drug-drenched miasma she’s been struggling to recover from? Will it cripple her productivity as an artist even further? Worst of all, does it mean she’s going to get off with another ancient member of Babyshambles? Christ, let’s hope not. That poor girl has been through enough as it is.

That’s because Lou Pearlman has just been sentenced to 25 years in jail after being found guilty of conspiracy, money laundering and various other dodgy white-collar crap. Ironically, though, Lou Pearlman only got six months in jail for committing those crimes – the other 24.5 years were a punishment for inventing ‘N Sync.

Oh, we’re just kidding. Being the mastermind behind the Backstreet Boys and ‘N Sync didn’t affect Lou Pearlman’s sentence at all. He got given such a long sentence because he’s fat and creepy-looking. And you’re next, Santa!

Off the top of our head we can think of all kinds of atrocities that Lou Pearlman is responsible for. Because he put together ‘N Sync, Lou Pearlman’s to blame for that last Madonna single with Justin Timberlake not being very good. Because he managed Britney Spears‘ first girlband Innosense, he’s responsible for us having to look at Britney’s mouldy beaver every couple of minutes. And if he hadn’t created the Backstreet Boys, well, the alleged R Kelly sex tape would have had a completely different soundtrack.

But apparently you can’t go to jail for any of that. We know this because we researched it for a month back when Lou Pearlman was threatening the world with O-Town. Anyway, things you can go to jail for include conspiracy, money laundering and presenting a false claim in a bankruptcy court, and they’re all things that Lou Pearlman did as well, so it all balances out in the end.

Not that Lou Pearlman is your average money launderer, you understand – he’s apparently swindled thousands of people out of life savings worth roughly $300 million in one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in history. And then spent it all on hotdogs by the look of it, the big fat sod.

Back in March, Lou Pearlman admitted his crime – convincing the innocent to invest $2 million each in companies that only existed on paper – and now Lou Pearlman has been sentenced to 25 years in jail for it, as Reuters reports:

Boy band mogul Lou Pearlman, who launched the Backstreet Boys and ‘N Sync, was sentenced on Wednesday to 25 years in prison for swindling investors and major U.S. banks out of more than $300 million… U.S. Judge G. Kendall Sharp held up a book with letters from Pearlman’s victims, saying they included “his family, his close friends and people in their 70s and 80s who have lost their life savings. So the sympathy factor doesn’t run high with the court,” Sharp said.

It’s good that Lou Pearlman was hit with such a gigantic sentence, because his crime was undoubtedly very serious. We were going to try and work out how much more serious Lou Pearlman’s 25 years in jail were than Nicole Richie’s 82 minutes in jail here, but then we started to smell burning coming from our brain so we decided to stop.

Anyway, that’s the last any of us will hear from Lou Pearlman until the year 2033. That is at least until he gets his new artist management scheme up and running in whatever cushy white-collar jail he’s sent to. He’s going to try and put together a boyband made of grisly old institutionalised convicted insider traders, you see. They’ll be called ‘M Bezzle. ‘M Bezzle. Get it? Anyone? ‘M Bezzle? Oh, whatever.

Read more:

Boy band mogul Pearlman sentenced to 25 years – Reuters

Although Michelle Rodriguez started her 180-day jail sentence for probation violation just over a fortnight ago, it has been reported that she was last night set free for good behaviour. In total Michelle Rodriguez served just 17 days of her six-month sentence.

Michelle should count herself lucky – one day longer and she'd have had to suffer through a full 10 percent of her sentence. Imagine how hellish that would be.

Remember when Michelle Rodriguez went to jail for six months a couple of days before Christmas? Aside from the fact that it meant policeman could work over Christmas without a lairy mannish-looking woman from the Dominican Republic stumbling up to them and ordering them to put a gun to her fucking head, what do you remember most about it?

Was it, say, that Michelle Rodriguez was found to be ineligible for either work furloughs or house arrest and had to – absolutely had to – serve out the entire six months of her jail sentence, all of it, from beginning to end, with not even a sniff an early release?

Funny that, because that's what we remember about it, too.

Not that anything like that matters, though, because Michelle Rodriguez's 180-day sentence for skipping community service from a previous conviction and drinking with a SCRAM anklet has been cut to just 17 days, and she was released last night. People reports:

Michelle Rodriguez was released from the Lynwood, Calif., jail Wednesday night after serving just 17 days of her 180-day sentence… The 29-year-old actress got out at 7:50 p.m., according to her official web site.

17 days? 17 measly days? That's rubbish. Honestly, what's a decent self-respecting female inmate like Michelle Rodriguez supposed to accomplish in 17 poxy days? That's only enough time to get you a brown belt in shiv-fencing at best, plus it's nowhere near the amount of time that Michelle Rodriguez's body needed to build up an immunity to the biro-ink tattoo performed with a spit-sterilised needle that she was planning to give herself. 

Still, Michelle Rodriguez's early jail release hold an important moral for all of us – if you're going to break the law, then do it in Los Angeles. And it helps if you're the shit one from Lost as well.

Read more:

Michelle Rodriguez Out of Jail – Early! – People