Jingle bell crock

Just when you thought that nothing could be as undignified as Johnny Logan giving his Eurovision winners a hip-hop makeover (www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou-9bDGuzI0), Billy Idol has chosen to revive his ailing career with a Christmas album.

Managing to sound even worse than you’d imagine, Happy Holidays finds Idol, who last charted in 1993, Bing Crosby-ing his way through such arthritic fare as ‘Frosty The Snowman’, ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’, ‘Jingle Bell Rock’, ‘Silent Night’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’.
Time has been thoroughly unkind to the aging punk who looks like he’s been embalmed, buried and dug up again in the accompanying promo film. His folly can be seen and heard at www.billyidol.com/v1/news_2006_oct.html.
Sticking with the same theme, and what ghoul could resist the 2007 Men Of Mortuaries calendar that’s available, appropriately enough, from www.menofmortuaries.com?
Bringing a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘dead sexy’, it features 12 of America’s buffest funeral directors in the type of poses that would make The Chippendales blush.
While other academics fritter their time away on trying to find a cure for cancer, the eggheads at Stirling University in Scotland have been carrying out lifesaving research into ‘The Perfect Face For Comedy’.
Explains the blurb at www.commanddev.stir.ac.uk/news/news_stories/index.php#one, “179 different aspects of each of the nation’s top 20 comedians’ faces were mapped and then blended to produce a composite portrait. The study goes a long way to explain why we find some comics funny before they even speak. It reveals that we find a combination of a round face, small forehead, wide nose, big lips, large eyes and high cheekbones absolutely hilarious. And whilst the investigation revealed that our nation’s favourite funny people have many of these common characteristics, it is Ricky Gervais’ face that has the strongest representation of the prototypical funny face.”
We reckon that the composite looks more like Harry Enfield and Jeremy Clarkson’s bastard love child but, hey, we’re not highly paid professors.
Were you to hypothetically be in an Irish nightclub and see a hypothetical rock star, model or TV personage hypothetically taking drugs, you should capture the moment on your camera-phone and send it to www.mrpaparazzi.com who will do their best to flog it for you.
Given that the going rate for Theo Wolcott with a shotgun is £200, you could earn yourself a tidy little sum. And really get up some Z-list celebrity's coke-caked nose.
Which just leaves time for quick visits to www.myspace.com/gyroscope (one of the coolest photos in the history of rockdom); www.marmart.co.uk/vote.php?image_id=217 (A new and, for once, non-deviant way of using Marmite); www.spareroom.co.nz/2006/11/08/one-bank (U2's 'One' gets the real life David Brent treatment).