Kanye West is a man with a rather high opinion of himself. Is that something of an understatement? In fact, don’t answer that because it clearly is. Kanye West is a man who sees himself as a renegade… a seeker of the real… a man with no fear.

Sadly, to anyone with even the vaguest trace of a braincell can see that he just needs a hug. For some time, West has been thrashing around, swatting away imagined threats. Sometimes, he’s bang on the money but, unfortunately for him, he most looks like someone trying to stab the night sky with a pitchfork.

And just when you thought he might settle down and just get on with being a musician again, he goes off on a 10 minute meltdown, wagging his finger at the world before sticking up his arse in some horrific mixture of self-abasement and foamy knuckled onanism.

Kanye took to the stage in a Not-Very-Secret-At-All New York show on Tuesday to celebrate the release of his new album ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’.

All the while, at pains to point out that he is just someone trying to create something and that he’s not in ‘it’ to slate people or churn out numbers, he promptly went about not singing or rapping in favour of slating everyone else and churning out stats and figures about the sales of his new album.

This obsession with angry anecdotes and number crunching would of course make Kanye West an ideal person to guest on Countdown’s dictionary corner.

He found time to slag off Taylor Swift, again.

“Taylor never came to my defense in any interview! And she rode the wave and rode it and rode it!”

“When you do things like what happened last year, it’s disrespectful to everyone that’s creative! It’s a smack in the face to everyone who tries to do something real.”

“If I wasn’t drunk, I woulda been on stage longer!”

Get that? Make sense to you? If so, go seek medical attention immediately where white-coat wearers will attach electrodes to your failing brain.

“I ain’t here to talk in no stupid interviews, for some guy to ask me some stupid ass questions!”

But guess what he started to talk about?

“Matt Lauer’s not a bad guy, I’m sure. But if you are a child that’s being abused by your parent, or you are a girl being abused by your boyfriend – the greatest win that you could ever have is for that person to hit you in public. You SEE! YOU SEE! I TOLD YOU!”

He wasn’t there to talk about numbers either. Nope. According to Kanye, that’s not what he’s about. Oh. Wait. What’s this? He hasn’t finished talking yet.

“I always felt like I could do anything, but now I feel so fearless – after the year I had, to come back and do 100,000 on the first day, digital alone…to do 600,000 in the first week…and I don’t talk about the numbers. But what the numbers say is that the people want me to keep making music and never give up.”

Such is the thirst for Kanye’s music, you’d hope that, at some point, he might realise that they might prefer it if he spent 10 minutes of a gig (which is how long he enthusiastically dribbled on for) actually performing a track or two. Instead, what everyone was treated to was the world’s worst pastor, preaching self-aggrandising, wounded bollocks about himself.

It seems that, should West’s head vanish up his arse any further, gigs will soon be a 3 hour long speech about how hurt he is and how it won’t defeat him, finished off with one song. Then an encore of 2 hours where he points out how many sales he’s had with the help of a Powerpoint presentation.

Still, he’s got an answer for sneering shits like us.

“Everybody needs a villain, don’t we?”

Yep. And sometimes Kanye, they make it really fuckin’ easy for us too. Still need that hug you massive baby?

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There’s a funny thing that sweeps through celebrities who open their mouths without kicking their brain gears into action first. Basically, what happens is, is that you say something stupid or controversial, everyone kicks you about a bit, and then you can emerge with those glorious words of “I’ve grown.”

Of course, famous people never ‘grow’. They’re in that suspended childhood reality of ‘celebrity’, which is great because it means we can continue to take the piss out of the stupid things they say and do.

And the latest are the odd-couple that is George W. Bush and Kanye West, who have both completely missed the opportunity to say something worthwhile in favour of reaching out their arms and demanding a cuddle from every single human on Earth.

As you probably know, Kanye angered Dubya by basically calling him a racist. George Dubya managed to forget the huge pile of cadavers that have come about as a result of That War, and decided instead, that the ill-thought out words of The Slowest Rapper In The World were the lowest point of his presidency.

Hmmm.

And so, to try and restore some balance, Kanye appeared on the Today show which left West even more wounded and needy for our affection.

“VERY BRUTAL”

That’s what our Kanye said on Twitter after filming the show. He added

“I feel very alone very used very tortured very forced very misunderstood very hollow very very misused.”

Bloody hell. So what caused all this then?

Well, after being asked to clarify his position, Kanye spluttered and squirmed like a martyr for fuck-all. It seems, the thing he doesn’t like is the formatting of television. It seems, Kanye West is a big cry-baby who doesn’t like it when people call him up on his lack-of-brains on television.

Annoyed, Kanye mewed:

“I didn’t need you guys to show me the tape in order to prompt my emotions or whatever.”

“I don’t need all the jazz…Can we be quiet for a second?”

Yeah, we should show reverence when someone has been asked to speak shouldn’t we. Like, say, WHEN SOMEONE IS ACCEPTING AN AWARD?

He noted

“I’m here to man up to different mistakes that I made, and speak to the moment when I pegged George Bush as a racist. I came here to say that I made mistakes and I’ve grown as a person.”

Then, showing just how much he’s grown…

“Yo, how am I supposed to talk if you’re going to run the thing in the middle while I’m talking?…Please don’t let that happen again. It’s ridiculous.”

So, if you haven’t seen the footage, here it is. Witness first hand just how an egotistical dunderhead reacts when he’s asked to act like a grown-up.

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You know how Brad Pitt is constantly getting stalked by the paparazzi wherever he goes, much to his clear annoyance?

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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Ask anyone which band they'd most like to see reunite and they'll probably say The Beatles – but if you drug their water or concuss them a bit there's a chance they'd say New Kids On The Block.

And if that's the case then their dreams have been answered, because New Kids On The Block are back!

After a few months of sly non-commitment, New Kids On The Block are expected to officially announce their reunion on Friday's Today show. And, as an appetite-whetter, New Kids On The Block have released the first group photo of the reunion. At least that's what we think it is – it could just be a page ripped out of Middle-Aged Weekend Father At A Court Appearance magazine that someone published as a belated April Fool joke. Who knows?

What with war and recession and global warming and Jessica Simpson's stinky piss, the world needs cheering up. And there's no group of people more likely to do that than New Kids On The Block. Not because New Kids On The Block are cool or good or anything, but because it will make the entire world briefly come together in a universal sense of brotherhood and think "Whew! It doesn't matter how bad things get for me, because at least I'm not in New Kids On The Block."

Quiet murmurings of a New Kids On The Block reunion started in January, quickly followed by a snatch of a new song. But then everything suddenly went quiet. We'll admit that part of us hoped that the New Kids On The Block reunion had come to a premature end, possibly because they all started punching each other until one was dead and the others had dislocated jaws. But more fool us, because New Kids On The Block are definitely back and raring to go.

All of them – Mark Wahlberg's Brother, Captain Dungaree, New Geek On The Block, Frankenstein and Generic Other are all set for their big comeback. And that's a comeback that starts on Friday's Today show, where the group will make their first joint televised appearance in an age – to announce a new album and tour to mark the 20-year anniversary of Hangin' Tough.

But Friday is, like, so long away! We want to see a decade of failure etched across their old faces now. Lucky, then, that Yahoo has published the first group photo of New Kids On The Block since before all of them had pubes, or something. And from the sight of it, you'd think that they've all spent the last 14 years hanging out in Marks And Spencer trying to land a job as a catalogue model instead of appearing on British reality TV shows with the skinny one from Little And Large.

What hints about the reunited New Kids On The Block can we glean from this new photo? Well, all five of them are wearing suits instead of ridiculous bandanas and nasty Michael Jackson-style leather jackets, so that probably means that they want to be taken seriously as mature singer-songwriters this time around. Plus four of them have their hands in their pockets, so it looks as if one of them may have become a pickpocket in the years since the band split up.

What else? Nothing. That's literally it. For other clues, we'll all have to watch New Kids On The Block on Friday's Today show. But we've heard one of them now has a voice like Estelle Getty from The Golden Girls and at least two of the others loudly whistle every time they try to pronounce a word with an 's' in it thanks to their ill-fitting dentures. 

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New Kids On The Block release first group photo in 15 years - Yahoo