Friday distractionfest

Here's a round-up of things you may have missed, overlooked or ignored from the last week. It's almost as if this is a real blog, or something.

:: Gasp! Bruce Wayne is dead. Who will be the new Batman??

:: Actually, if this Rolling Stone photoshoot is anything to go by, Britney's already got her audition tape ready. Someone call Chris Nolan!



:: Leona Lewis goes all Blair Witch in the video for Run.



:: Remember the (literal) cliff-hanger from the end of the Italian Job? Well, here's Michael Caine to explain what happened next.

:: Here's what happened when I telephoned former X Factor contestants Same Difference. Sarah said something about pushing people down the stairs when she was in the X Factor house, but the recording mysteriously cut out at that point when I played it back. Spooky.

:: US 3G network Sprint has put together a webpage full of widgets telling you everything that is happening right now - from the number of babies being born, to your share of debt and the number of emails being sent worldwide. But the best bit is this:



:: Oooh, oooh, oooh! A Camp, the side project of Cardigans' singer Nina Persson, have a new single in the Swedish charts. It's called Stronger Than Jesus and it's almost as good as their awesome country-tinged ballad, I Can Buy You, which is a permanent fixture in the Discopop Directory all-time Top Ten. You can stream it here. The album, Colonia is out in February, fact fans.

:: "Reviewing Chinese Democracy is not like reviewing music. It's more like reviewing a unicorn. Should I primarily be blown away that it exists at all? Am I supposed to compare it to conventional horses? To a rhinoceros?" The most entertaining 1,000 words you will read about the new Guns N' Roses' album.

:: In case you missed it, here's Nicole Kidman's achingly awkward interview on David Letterman's US Chat Show on Tuesday. It's hard to decide whose fault it was (lots of the questions only elicited "yes" or "no" answers), but one thing's for sure: Kidman would have looked furious if her paralysed face was capable of expressing emtion.



:: Sad news: Annie has left Island Records, which means we'll never get to hear her touched-by-genius Don't Stop album.

:: And, finally, a new internet "craze" to keep us entertained for three (maybe four) minutes - static non-powered objects with faces. EG A bin



Have a super-dooper weekend!
Mrdiscopop

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Batman returns?

How many ways are there to make a Batman movie?

Fans of Christopher Nolan's bleak, shadowy Batman Returns would like to think that his "re-imagining" of the franchise has saved it from the camp, comic book excesses of the Joel Schumacher era.

But The Dark Knight, Nolan's hotly-anticipated sequel, deals with the same villain as Burton's first movie - The Joker. Can he really deviate that much from the template that gothic auteur Tim Burton laid down?

The answer, according to this superb mash-up from College Humor.com, is "not much".

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If you keep pulling faces, the wind will change and you'll look like that for ever

Michael Jackson has been out with his kids in London (he took his family to see the Billy Elliot musical, then asked the cast back to his hotel room - doesn't he ever learn?)

As you can see from the photo, he's still making his kids cover their faces in public. Looking at it positively - Michael does seem to be going to great lengths to protect his offspring from the kind of media attention that's made his adult life a misery. But you can't help asking yourself whether these kids are hideously deformed freaks. Maybe, through some kind of awful genetic experiment, their faces morph every five seconds like that girl in the video for Black and White.

And if Jackson simply must cover their faces with tea-towels for every public engagement, isn’t it a bit cruel to nick-name the middle one "Blanket"?

Britney's bra has been pulled off (ebay)

Crazy scientists make dolphins sing the theme tune to Batman We assume they've gone for the brilliant 'dinner, dinner, dinner, dinner BAT-MAAAN' theme, and not the tuneless funk bollocks Prince wrote for the Tim Burton movie.

I've seen this clip from catchphrase 84 times now, and I still laugh milk out of my eyes every time. What's Mr Chips doing now? (right-click and select Save As... to download).

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