DISGUSTING LUXURY IPHONE/PAD CASES

People are prepared to pay through the nose for an Apple device. It stands to reason then, they will not hesitate to buy expensive but distasteful accessories. Here are some of the worst-looking luxury embellishments on the market.

Oscar de la Renta Degrade Python iPad Clutch | $399

What they think it says - So fierce. As fierce as a lion dressed as Paris Hilton, dressed as RuPaul getting euphoric on PCP.

Looks like a gigantic version of something Lil' Wayne would cap his teeth with. Conspicuous and disgusting.

DeBethune DBM iPhone case | $thousands

What they think it says - A call back to an earlier, better age. Lose yourself in the chestnut brown, full-grain alligator leather. Luxuriate in the blue steel clock hands.

What kind of self-hating pseud feels the need to play dress up with gadgets? This is just the fraudulent Shoreditch-gentleman equivalent of putting dolls in pretty dresses.

Personalised steel iPad case | £50

What they think it says - Show fellow cafe-dwellers your cold, hard man-soul. And let them know your name.

Aside from the fact that this probably makes the iPad at least as heavy as a small laptop it also looks like shit.

Dolce and Gabbana iPhone Case and Coin Purse | $545

What they think it says - ACTUAL SALES BULLSHIT: Shimmering sequins and gold chains surround an Italian calfskin carrying case that keeps your phone safe, while a logo medallion dangles form the front.

I'm not an aggressive or violent person but you took one of these out in a public place I would definitely mug you. Not because I wanted the case, or even the dangling logo medallion. But simply because you'd deserve to be harmed.

BONUS RETARDED IPHONE ACCESSORY!

The iVictrola | $400

What they think it says - You'll be the talk of the town once the other over-moneyed nostalgia freaks get a load of your novelty toy. Parp! It's old-timey!

This is an expensive visual gag. One which you will resent having to look at after about three weeks.

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GADDAFI: WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

At this very moment Italian politicians are allegedly trying to find Colonel Muammar Gaddafi a way out of Libya. Reports suggest he may be granted asylum in another African country.

If these plans were to fall through here are six suggestions the Colonel might want to consider:

COUNTRY France
JOB Bistro-dwelling writer / alcoholic
ASSUMED NAME Augustin Lavroche
LIKES Publishing slim volumes of poetry. Discussing la condition de la Francaise while smoking rolled-up cigarettes. Leching over teenage girls in the town square.
DISLIKES Crushing ennui. Le petit salaud Sarkozy. These new authors who write like peasants.

COUNTRY Britain
JOB Controversial news pundit
ASSUMED NAME Malcolm Fadge
LIKES Telling the Question Time audience they "don't have all the facts". Making Chantelle from Big Brother cry when they both appear on Celebrity Come Dine With Me.
DISLIKES People who bang on about the Holocaust. Polly Toynbee calling his Fadge The Facts column in the Sunday Express "a weekly purge of unreconstructed fascism".

COUNTRY Colombia
JOB Judge on Colombian Idol
ASSUMED NAME Danny Pintomunoz
LIKES Flamboyant hand gestures. Calling women "fat bitches". Referring to his 1986 smash hit single Jumbo Jumbo Let's Get Jumbo. Cocaine
DISLIKES Ugliness. Girls in jeans. The other judges on Colombian Idol, especially the whore Nina Vasquez.

COUNTRY America
JOB Talk radio host
ASSUMED NAME Lou "Lou-Boy" Fauttuso
LIKES Steering conversations around to the subject of race and immigration. Novelty horn sound FX. Cutting callers off mid-sentence. Ridiculing his sidekick Gooey Mike on-air.
DISLIKES Healthcare. His stomach ulcer. Stuck-up women who don't earn shit but act all superior.

COUNTRY International Waters
JOB Pirate King
ASSUMED NAME Cap'n Strangeface
LIKES Leading the nomadic water tribes of Africa to great victory against the vile, imperial French fishing expeditions. His special crew of voluptuous, Ukranian cabin boys. Elaborate and thoughtfully-customised military uniforms.
DISLIKES Sea air making his hair go frizzy. Everything seems less fun with scurvy.

COUNTRY Deep space
JOB The unsleeping cosmic mind
ASSUMED NAME Nameless and intangible
LIKES Knowing everything and nothing. Existing beyond the realm of conceivability. Playfully disregarding the concept of "time".
DISLIKES Long periods spent alone. Seeing galaxies born, produce life and then die gets boring after a couple of times.

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I SAW SOME THINGS

Imagine you're a jobbing, middle-aged actor. You haven't had paid work in a while. Then your agent calls and says a hip, new company called Microsoft wants you to play a leading role in one of their promotional videos. A year later and you're still trying to work out if it's better not to have the words "vest-wearing paedophile" on your resume.

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ARNOLD GOES TO RIO

About 30 years ago someone decided to send celebrated anti-actor Arnold Schwarzenegger to Rio De Janeiro. We shall never know why. All we know is that while Arnie was there he made an oddly sincere, yet wholly execrable documentary about the experience.

It would be easy to meekly point the finger of blame at Arnie himself. But this is hardly fair. Like a richer, stronger Paddy McGuinness going through the wrong door and ending up on Newsnight Review, Arnold is simply trying his best. It's not his fault that the "documentary" has no structure and looks like a soft-core pornographic film. It's not his fault that the whole thing is just five minutes long. And it's not his fault he's been corralled into teasing an on-screen romance with a woman (his guide) who looks both repulsed and terrified by him.

The film does however contain Arnold Schwarzenegger's greatest ever line of dialogue, delivered at 2:11. And yes it's even better than the wonderful "cumming" monologue from Pumping Iron (quoted here for posterity): "I am, like, getting the feeling of cumming in the gym, I'm getting the feeling of cumming at home, I'm getting the feeling of cumming backstage when I pump up. When I pose out in front of five thousand people, I get the same feeling, so I am cumming day and night."

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THERE IS NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS EXCEPT FOR CHILD PROSTITUTION

I recently finished working at one of Britain's best-known celebrity magazines. I learned a lot during my year and a half at the showbiz coal face. I learned that not knowing about your subject matter will eventually get you exposed as a fraud. I learned that unless you really put the hours in and listen to all the Westlife albums in sequential order until you "get" them, your colleagues will see through you. They'll cast you out. A cuckoo in the nest. A paedophile on the bus.

Now free to cast aspersions about everyone I worked with and everything I worked on, I hereby present to you Five Completely True Things I Learned While Writing For A Celebrity Weekly.


Celebrities love the zoo

If ever you want to secure an exclusive, two-hour interview with a famous person you'll need to offer them a trip to the zoo. It's that simple. The showbiz carousel would have ground to a halt years ago were it not for zoo outings. Money, influence, copy approval, a cover line; these are all viable bargaining tools, but at the end of the day every celeb is desperate to go to the zoo. All the time. The number of contracts I saw being passed between lawyers and editors that simply had the word "zoo" at the top beggar's belief.

There's nothing "hot" about black people

Unless you work for a black-interest magazine (Source, Voice or Nintendo Power) sooner or later you'll have to come to terms with this simple fact of publishing. There's no room for your liberal race guilt in the cut-and-thrust world of celebrity journalism. If you're presented with a photograph of a famous black person and a famous white person you must put aside the woolly niceties and go with the former. A blurry camera phone image of a coke-bloated Mischa Barton? Yes please. What about this agency shot of upcoming African American superstar Ciara? No thanks. Try again when she's a little less black.

Make no mistake: you're a star too

A lot of people get antsy trying to define the line between "celebrity" and "writer who writes about celebrities". Well let me break it down for you. There is no line. As far as the magazine-buying public are concerned if you write about the stars you are a star. I remember turning up as a reporter to my first awards ceremony and being greeted by flash bulbs, screaming fans and more red carpet than a metaphor about Julianne Moore's vagina. All for me. It didn't make sense to me then. To be honest it doesn't make sense to me now. But I learned to ride the silver tiger. And I rode it across my very own dream rainbow.

The Jewish conspiracy is real

A lot of people will tell you Jews control the entertainment industry. A lot of people will tell you that the Jewish hand hovers above our beloved stars of stage and screen, controlling their every move like the eczema-afflicted appendage of a Hebrew puppet master. A lot of people will tell you that Jewish fixers pay off the Russian police so that when Duncan from Blue gets onto a crowded Moscow subway train wearing his bespoke "frotting shorts" no charges are brought against him. The people who say all of this are correct. The magazine which I worked for may not have had any Jewish people working in it or near it, but let's not fool ourselves: it was dancing to the wicked tune of the Semite. Elders of Zion? More like Elders of Lee Ryan (from Blue)!

Don't let the naysayers get you down

Sometimes being part of the showbiz inner-circle is lonely. A lot of "proper journalists" are going to turn their noses up at you when they discover that you swim through the septic tank of celebrity excreta for a living. Sometimes people who aren't even journalists will face you down in a nightclub and call you a "wretched symptom of all society's ills". And yes, bin men, tree surgeons and janitors will throw things at you and accuse you of having no purpose in life. Small children, too young to understand the true importance of celebrity journalism, may chase you out of your neighbourhood on scooters. Even your own mother is liable to kick you hard in the face so (in her words): "you can feel all my pain and shame". But remember: none of these people have had an awkward, halting phone conversation with Peter Andre! None of them know what it's like to ask the Sugababes about which member of JLS they fancy! If your friends and family reject you it's only because of jealousy. Prove to them that you're above it all by using Facebook solely to post photographs of yourself with celebrities. The comments left by people you went to school with and haven't seen for fifteen years will make some of the sadness go away.

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SUBWAY IS BIGGER THAN MCDONALDS

How did we let this happen? Subway - the purveyors of unlovable, damp breadfoods - now has more restaurants than McDonald's. That's right, McDonald's. The wholesome hamburger chain that our mothers and fathers grew up with. Apparently Subway now boasts 33,749 eateries worldwide while Mickey D can only muster 32,737.

This is disappointing. And not because I eat at McDonald's. It's disappointing because at least in its own fetid, lardy way a Big Mac is a thing. A queasy, shiny thing, but a thing nonetheless. The same can not be said for a Subway Chicken Temptation. No one wants the Chicken Temptation. It exists only in the most basic, mundane sense, like a plastic bag lining the inside of a tramp's boot or a Kinder Egg toy lying in a puddle.

This is the future we bequeath to our children? High streets from Burnley to Beijing, lined with empty, terracotta-tiled bread dispensaries? Tiny, miserable huts in which there is usually a man - one poor man who must wear plastic gloves and stand behind a plastic wall - who's sole job is to preside over the sauces and mustards. That's not a future I want to live in.

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BRIAN MCFADDEN: ICE COLD AND EVIL

If "sound" is to be qualified as "music" all it needs to do is somehow demonstrate a commitment to rhythm and pitch. Even the most uncoordinated of children can bang a metal pot with a spoon. We can all make music.

The question then, is how Brian McFadden's new single can display all the hallmarks of "a song" and yet be something altogether different. Something undeniably hostile and poisonous. McFadden - formerly of the unattractive boyband Westlife - has penned a tune which scientists are already calling "threatening on a basic, biological level". The fact that it is about date rape (true), contains synth banjos (true), and was mixed in the bunker where Hitler shot himself (probably true) aren't even the worst things about it. The worst thing about it is the voice of McFadden himself. Leering, oddly European and smug, he sounds like a disgraced prince, returning to his homeland after 15 years of exile, completely unrepentant.

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GREAT SONGS ON FORGETTABLE ALBUMS #4

Beatles | Hey Bulldog
No middle-aged boring man in his right mind would classify Yellow Submarine as a proper Beatles album. But it is a collection of mostly shit songs released under their name. So it will do for the purposes of this badly-researched series of non-articles.

Hey Bulldog itself is a good song. It's got a proper guitar riff, John's singing sounds weird and harsh and it's got one of those awful/great outros where you can here "the guys" in "the studio" having a "great time, just "joshing about". As with everything on Yellow Submarine it actually sounds like it was recorded in a submarine (and not a magical yellow one either - a rusty, depressing one with no toilet) but that just serves to make the song sound pleasantly unnerving.

The rest of the album (in order) plays out as follows: a trying-too-hard George Harrison dirge; an infuriating and lip-bitingly awful McCartney "happy song"; the Beatles' one attempt at an overlong freak-out jam (with po-faces and shit trumpets); and then about fifty instrumental George Martin compositions which sound like the 1960s as imagined by an unseeing, unfeeling floating brain in a jar.

Great songs on forgettable albums #3

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