Osama bin Laden prophesies more conflict. Alex Reid wins Big Brother. Jedward hit No.2 in the singles charts. It’s the end of civilisation as we know it. Run for the hills; get down to your private bunkers, and forsake this mad, doomed world. The four horsemen are galloping into town, even as we speak…

Alexandra Burke is bad enough, but how in Hades did those Evil Irish Twins convince people to BUY their track? I’ll admit to a soft spot for the original Vanilla Ice version of ‘Ice, Ice Baby’, but this new version (which monstrously includes elements of the original original Queen song) is the most tasteless, talentless piece of bantha fodder this side of Jabba the Hutt’s faecal discharges. Clearly the dregs of the music buying population are at their all-time lowest standard of judgement; Cheryl Cole could fart into an amplifier and it’d be guaranteed the No.1 spot, at this point.

And have all these people failed to notice that the Evil Irish Twins don’t actually DO anything on the track, other than jump up and down a lot? Vanilla Ice is the only half-talented thing in the entire affair.

As for Cowell’s cynical shepherding together of ‘artists’ (translation: a collection of X-Factor contestants, plus the senile and overrated Rod Stewart) to rape and pillage a classic piece of music (specifically, REM’s ‘Everybody Hurts’)… I’ll bite my tongue on that one, on account of it being a fundraiser for the Haitian relief efforts.

So, anyway, that covers the ongoing slow and painful death of the music industry…

Popular culture in general continues to march to the rythmless beat of Katie Price’s drum. Quite why Alex Reid won Big Brother is something of a mystery (all he did, as far as I could see, was get naked a lot and sound stupid); but the great Jordan, never one to miss a trick or a profit, promptly married him (in a quick and ‘quiet’ ceremony – which, needless to say, also included photographers from a celebrity magazine). That bandwagon got to her so phenomenally quickly, it must have been drawn by the same lions that drew Mark Antony’s chariot.

Seriously, Katie Price and Simon Cowell should surely join forces; they’d be unstoppable. They could own and run the entire mainstream media within a year, tops.

As for the Iraq inquiry and Tony Blair’s recent grilling; why is everyone so shocked or disappointed that he didn’t ‘apologise’ for the invasion of Iraq? Why would he apologise for something he felt was the right decision? And, regardless of whether he was right or wrong, why would you WANT someone to apologise for doing what they BELIEVED to be right?

Another very popular world figure is has just recently released his latest video message to the West. Bin Laden has indicated that there’ll be no peace until there is first peace in Palestine. There’ll be no peace, then…

Well, not unless someone goes back through time to the First World War and prevents the British government from stealing someone’s country and giving it to someone else – and all on the basis of a few Biblical passages. Though, of course, we wouldn’t want to get mixed up in temporal complications and predestination paradoxes. Anyone who watches Star Trek knows full well that it’s unwise to mess with the past.

Of course, given considerable evidence that Osama bin Laden has actually been dead for about seven years, one has to wonder who that fellow is who keeps recording these messages.

If Bin Laden truly is long deceased, then the real threat to our civilisation remains Simon Cowell and Katie Price…