God, why do you hate us so?

If we made a human body out of all the music ever written, then Beethoven, Mozart and that lot would be the brain. The strong right arm would be made out of bits of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. The speedy legs would be stitched together from pieces of Napalm Death, Slayer and Crazy Frog.

We’d probably use U2 and Coldplay for the testicles.

And Blink-182? We’re seeing them as the long, black hair sticking out of that suspicious mole on our back, that keeps annoying us by getting snagged when we put our shirt on.

You remember Blink-182, right? They’re that band from a few years ago with the genuine, in yer face punk mentality three tits with tats.

On the scale of punk attitude – a scientific measure, which goes from the Sex Pistols and Ramones, through Green Day and right out to Ronan Keating – Blink-182  come in just below “Ambient Chillout Volume 14: Kittens Purring As They Are Stroked By A Little Girl“.

Back in 2005, anyone not being ravaged by the hormonal storm of adolescence was overjoyed by the news that Blink-182 had split up. There were street parties, free cake for all, and an international Day of Celebration was announced.

The last four years have been a beautiful time for music lovers, living free from the threat of sub-bubblegum-punk-pop-wank-rock with videos showing the craaazy Blink boys running naked through a city full of actors looking surprised. Though their naughty bits were blurred out: they may be wild punk anarcho-rockers but, y’know, their mums were going to see that.

Well, all good things must end. And apparently, shit things never do, they just keep going on and on despite literally the entire world begging them to stop. On Friday night, Blink-182 played live, and loved it so much they’ve decided to go on tour. With Weezer and Fall Out Boy as support.

We cannot conceive of a less appealing combination. If forced to choose, we would rather go see a show called ‘Yoko Ono Sings Ancient Polynesian Folksongs Accompanied By One Thousand Dental Drills And A Small Dog Being Kicked Around The Stage’.

Mark Hoppus, one of the hateful people responsible for making Blink-182’s music, released a heartfelt message of gratitude:

“Thanks to everyone who was there. Thanks to T-Mobile. And most of all, thanks to Travis and Tom.”

So there you go, Blink-182 fans. In the band’s mental listing of people who matter it’s THEM first obviously, then their corporate sponsors, then probably their sponsors’ employees, the employee’s families, the employees’ cats, a fella called Bob or Bill or Marcus they met once in a healthfood store he seemed like he’d be fun to have a drink with, then you lot.

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Did you know that Shanna Moakler and Travis Barker had got back together? No? Do you know who Shanna Moakler is? No?

Well shame on you. This is big news. How big? Former drummer of annoying pop-punk band splitting up with the wife he’d already divorced once a year ago big. That’s as big as it gets. Probably.

Anyway, Shanna Moakler has split up with Travis Barker for possibly the billionth time. Usually at this point we’d say it was the kids who we felt most sorry for, but it’s not. It’s us who we feel most sorry for. Us.

Travis Barker, it’s fair to say, has had a rubbish time of it lately. No, we’re not talking about last September’s plane crash that killed four of his friends and left him with severe near-fatal burns. We’re talking about the fact that he’s decided to reform Blink-182 which, by any quantifiable definition, is obviously far worse.

Oh, and also there’s the fact that Travis Barker seems to have swapped love lives with a spotty, timid 15-year-old boy. You may remember, if you enjoy watching bad things about idiots, that Travis Barker was once the star of an MTV reality show with his then-wife Shanna Moakler. If you didn’t see it, relax – it was woeful. However, the show came to an abrupt end a few years ago when Shanna Moakler and Travis Barker split up.

If you missed Shanna Moakler and Travis Barker splitting up, relax – they got back together again about 30 seconds afterwards. Missed that? Relax – they split up again about 30 seconds after that. And that was final – Travis and Shanna got divorced and everything. After everything they had been through, Travis Barker and Shanna Moakler had reached total closure.

Except they obviously hadn’t, because about 30 seconds after Travis Barker’s plane crash, Shanna Moakler started running around telling everyone that they’d got back together – something that Travis Barker denied about 30 seconds after that in a blog.

Since then, it appears that Travis Barker and Shanna Moakler had got back together – something that we missed due to a combination of laziness and an impulse to beat ourselves unconscious any time we think that somebody’s going to start talking about either of them. But it’s OK that we missed it because guess what? Yep – Travis Barker and Shanna Moakler have split up again. And this time, it’s Shanna who’s been blogging about it:

“I came across numerous romantic emails with MANY other women, some famous, some I personally knew, all heart breaking. You know who you are and you should be ashamed of yourself… A woman can only turn her cheek so many times… I am a human being and the bashing has taken its toll.”

So that’s definitely that. Travis Barker and Shanna Moakler have definitely split up for good, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Nothing at all. They’re finished. Finito. It’s over. Do you understand? It’s the end. The definitive end of Travis Barker and Shanna Moakler’s relationship forever.

See you in 30 seconds, then.

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Between then and now, both Travis Barker and DJ AM have probably gone through more extremes of conflicting emotion than most of us could probably comprehend. And so, when Travis Barker finally decided to post his first message to his fans via his MySpace page since the crash, anticipation about what he’d write was strong.

Would it be a cursory ‘Hi everyone, I’m OK, thanks for the support’ message, or would Travis Barker go into more excrutiating detail about the crash itself. Neither, as it happens. Instead, Travis Barker decided to slag his ex-wife Shannon Moakler off a bit. We get the feeling he’ll be just fine.

Last month’s Travis Barker plane crash came as a huge shock – as upsetting as it was that four people died in the crash, it was nothing short of miraculous that both Travis Barker and DJ AM managed to escape the wreck with their lives.

Although DJ AM has since been discharged, Travis Barker has been hospitalised ever since the crash, recovering from the burns he sustained on his torso and lower body. But the silver lining to all of this seemed to be that Travis and his ex-wife Shannon Moakler had patched up their differences.

Immediately after the crash, Shannon Moakler was reported to have flown straight to Barker’s hospital to be by his side during his recovery. She was apparently going to stay there until Travis Barker was completely recovered because, according to a source, “she loves him.” She was even photographed outside Travi Barker’s hospital crying and wearing what looked like a wedding ring.

It just goes to show that, no matter what horrors have happened to Travis Barker recently, his love for a woman he’d separated from had been touchingly rekindled because of it. It’s lovely. Touching, even.

Except none of it apparently happened. Now that Travis Barker has regained movement in his right hand, he was able to write his very first MySpace blog following the crash – a blog he used to thank his fans for all their support and also to give a right old mouthful to Shannon Moakler. Travis wrote:

Despite any rumors you might have heard via my EX-wife Shanna Moakler, who I have not seen since the week I checked in, Ive been treated amazingly well, both here in LA and in Georgia. The hospitals Ive been treated at are THE BEST.

So it looks as if Shannon Moakler hasn’t been by Travis Barker’s side continuously after all, then. We’re sure that someone genuine enough to be given their own MTV reality show can’t possibly have been lying about helping her ex-husband recover – but then again, maybe you don’t have to physically be by someone’s side to help them in their time of need.

Personally we’re hoping that Shannon Moakler has gone out to try and fistfight Paris Hilton in public again, because, well, if we were in a hospital bed recovering from serious burns it’s what we’d want people to do for us.

While it’s a near miracle that Travis Barker and DJ AM – real name Adam Goldstein – weren’t killed when their Learjet skidded off a runway in South Carolina on Friday night, the pair of them have suffered serious second- and third-degree burns.

However, both Travis Barker and DJ AM are expected to make full recoveries from their injuries. Meanwhile, investigators have claimed that a burst tyre prior to take-off my have led to the crash.

Travis Barker and DJ AM have, in the past, contributed the some of the most pointless stories we’ve ever dealt with. DJ AM, for example, was once engaged to Nicole Richie, while Travis Barker might have started a fight between Paris Hilton and some other woman in a nightclub once. All utterly inconsequential, yet still not enough for either of them to deserve what happened to them on Friday night.

On Friday night, after performing a free concert in Columbia, the Learjet carrying Travis Barker, DJ AM and four others skidded off a South Carolina runway, smashed through a fence and crashed into a nearby road. The crash killed the pilot and co-pilot, plus Travis Barker’s personal assistant and a man thought to be his bodyguard.

While it’s claimed that Travis Barker and DJ AM only escaped death by managing to free themselves from the wreckage in time, the pair of them have spent the weekend in a critical condition being treated for second- and third-degree burns. Travis Barker is said to have suffered burns to his torso and lower body, while Goldstein’s burns were to his arms and head. However, it’s thought that both stars will eventually make full recoveries from their injuries.

Meanwhile, investigators seem to be pinning the cause of the crash on a blown tyre, as the Los Angeles Times reports:

Debbie Hersman, spokeswoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said investigators recovered the cockpit’s voice recorder and spent hours dissecting the relevant minutes of conversation between the Learjet’s pilots. “The crew reacted to a sound consistent with a tire blowout. The crew attempted to reject the takeoff, but they were unable to stop the aircraft before it departed the runway.”

Oh come on, you know who Travis Barker and Shanna Moakler are – he used to be in Blink 182 and she, um, she's Shanna Moakler. Anyway, even though Travis Barker and Shanna Moakler split up 18 months ago, they've only just got divorced. Still don't really know who either of them are? No, us neither really. Let's just pretend that we do, anyway. Ready?

Nope, still don't care about them.

We don't know about you, but we're only able to express our love for another human being if that love forms the basis of a badly-edited MTV reality show full of zany sound effects, and even then we'll only express it with a desperate approval-seeking look on our faces.

It's not just us this condition affects – Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey had it, and so did Travis Barker and Shanna Moakler. In fact, thanks to MTV's Meet The Barkers we'd go as far as to say that Travis Barker and Shanna Moakler were the Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey that even less people have heard of. But it couldn't last forever.

In August 2006 Travis Barker and Shanna Moakler split up to almost deafening apathy for the wider world. But if you thought that nobody cared about those two awful needy bastards back them, imagine how little anyone cares 18 months later now that they've finally got their acts together to properly divorce. E! Online reports:

Travis Barker and Shanna Moakler are officially single again. The ex-couple, whose wedded life was once chronicled in the MTV series Meet the Barkers, were divorced earlier this month, according to court documents first obtained by TMZ. After tying the knot in October 2004, Barker and Moakler announced their split in August 2006.  They later reconciled briefly, only to break it off again. They have two children together, four-year-old son Landon and two-year-old daughter Alabama. Moakler also has an eight-year-old daughter, Atiana, from her previous relationship with Oscar de la Hoya.

Honestly, we're not even sure that Travis and Shanna's kids care about their divorce to be honest. Especially little Alabama – she's probably already hatching a plan to poison them both in their sleep for giving her such a shitty name.

Although divorces can be pretty emotionally gruelling, they usually give each party change to indulge in some of the behaviour they enjoyed before they got married. However, we're hoping that this won't happen to Travis Barker and Shanna Moakler, because their main hobbies seem to include making godawful Stickle-Brick pop punk that only idiots like and beating Paris Hilton up in nightclubs.

OK, so we're only hoping that 50 percent of those things won't happen.

Read more:

Meet the Newly Single Barkers – E! Online 

Despite only disbanding as recently as 2005 (apparently), this trio of punk-pop muppets were really big in the year 1999, which led many to believe that a global technogical meltdown at the turn of the century would have been preferable to hearing All The Small Things one more time. Alas, it wasn't to be, and album Enema Of The State (do you see what they did there? Do you?) went on to sell approximately sixty million billion trillion copies the world over.

You'd think, then, that the Blinksters would be a relatively chilled-out bunch these days, happy to kick back and watch the odd royalty cheque pop through the letterbox. Unfortunately, you'd be quite massively wrong – because the band's former drummer Travis Barker is mightily pissed off about something and he wants the whole wide world to know it. 

Barker's anger lies with energy drink Rockstar, who he claims wrongfully used his picture by publishing an image of him on their website "holding a can of one of Rockstar's beverages, and identifying him and his endorsement by name".

While Barker naturally seems like quite a bizarre, relatively low-key figure for a company to use as a figurehead – kind of like 'hey, I'm Crispin Mills from Kula Shaker, and I can't get enough of Findus Crispy Pancakes', or 'hi, I'm Brad Renfro and I just love Axa life insurance'* – a big old lawsuit is all set to go ahead.

Barker's lawyers are frothing that:

'… the company unjustly used his photo and image to endorse their product,
alleging invasion of privacy, unfair competition and misappropriating
his likeness to promote the product.'

Fair enough, but they also make the claim that Barker is "a prominent figure in the rock music world" - a statement that was either a) written eight years ago or b) pushed out there by the ballsiest legal attorney in the world.

Probably a bit similar to that Lionel Hutz character from The Simpsons, except with a love of rubbish Walmart 'punk' and a bright orange Californian skin-glow in place of that yellow Groening tinge.

Hecklerspray, on the other hand, would like it put on record that we would never endorse an energy drink such as Rockstar. Except to say that – should Blink 182 be announcing a comeback gig in your local area – you'd probably be able to run away faster if you downed five cans of the stuff.

Or possibly a bottle of delicious, delicious Lucozade (available from all good supermarkets, and some bad ones too) instead. 

Read More:

Blink 182 Man Files Suit Against Beverage Company – NME

* Too soon?