This might be the most absurd thing to happen in the final quarter of 2008…

Now, some people may question why OJ Simpson’s sentencing is being blogged about. And here’s the rub: the OJ Simpson trail (the first one, not the current one) was the flash point for the melding of tabloid news and actual news.

Think about where you were when Orenthal J Simpson was declared not guilty by a jury. I was in a classroom, because they literally stopped class for the verdict. Not only that, but because of the media circus surrounding the day-to-day in the trial, the sudden celebrity status for the lawyers, and SNL skits of Judge Ito transformed the process in the public eye. When OJ got off, some saw it as a man getting away with murder and others as vindication that a jury of random people also saw inherent racism and misconduct by California Police.

If the OJ Simpson trail didn’t convince local and cable news shows that tabloid journalism sells when human interest stories come about, we wouldn’t have the same news we have today. Type “missing girl” into Google. 80% of those stories would go away, or at least be relegated to local news where reporting on them does some actual good, outside of locking people to the nightly news broadcast so you can pull on their heartstrings. Britney Spears being hospitalized would have gotten some coverage, but CNN wouldn’t have cut in with a live feed.

Paris Hilton going to jail? It wouldn’t have been that big of a deal.

Regardless of OJ being innocent or guilty of murder or this Vegas theft is irrelevant (though we’ll post full details under the cut), what’s important is that American Pop Culture’s news/tabloid focal point couldn’t stay out of trouble and learned the hard way that tabloid journalism has spun out of control in the years since his first crime.

We’ve never cared about OJ Simpson, but we’ll always care about murder trials, celebrity racism, mental breakdowns, cautionary tales of rehab, infidelity and missing children.

We bet that when OJ gets released, no one will write about it…

How’s this for something really, really stupid?

Around late-March of this year, Sean Gleason, senior VP of the brand action team at Cadbury Schweppes decided that he really wanted to hear Chinese Democracy by Guns N Roses. Where as GnR fans had been waiting 17 years for the album, Gleason thought he could urge Axel Rose to finish the project as well as drum up some free PR for Dr. Pepper, the company’s most music-centric soft drink. Dr. Pepper has seen Flava Flav provide the voice of a can and they paid internet-sensation Tay Zonday to sing “Cherry Chocolate Rain” in promotion of Cherry Dr. Pepper.

So, it was interesting when Gleason promised a free can of Dr. Pepper for everyone if Chinese Democracy was released in 2008. Best case scenario for the consumer: both a new Guns N Roses album and a free can of Dr. Pepper. Best cae scenario for the company: Axel sits on his laurels for another few months and free publicity wins out over new music.

Thing is, Axel shot off Chinese Democracy in November, and we haven’t heard anything about free Dr. Pepper. Until now…

There’s a city in Turkey named Batman that has recently drummed up some press in the area for a rash of unsolved murders and a severely elevated number of female suicides. Hüseyin Kalkan, the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party mayor of Batman needs money to face these issues, so when it was suggested to him by a reporter that he try to pull some money from the Western world’s Batman, he thought it’d be a great idea to sue someone.

Thing is, he’s suing Christopher Nolan, the only Batman filmmaker to make a movie without the name “Batman” in the title. Batman is not suing DC Comics, who own Bob Kane’s Batman character, nor are they suing Warner Bros, who owns all Batman’s film appearances.

The genius points go to Hüseyin Kalkan today.

More inside…

Don’t feel so bad if you have no idea who Adrienne Bailon is. She wasn’t important until this weekend when nude pictures of her hit the interwebs. Now, we’ve awoken and spent enough time surfing around Wikipedia and various other celebrity sites to know that she’s the eldest member of a group called The Cheetah Girls.

Said Girls are one of those Disney pop groups that exist to cross media, so The Cheetah Girls have a TV movie called - no surprises here - The Cheetah Girls. Together with other feline females Kiely Williams and Sabrina Bryan, Adrienne has released 6 albums, with a solo effort on the way.

The woman is 25, and perfectly capable of having naked pictures of her online without any sort of peodophilia scare, it’s just that Disney stars and nakedness seem to be going hand-in-hand these days. The photos in question were taken for Adrienne’s boyfriend, Rob Kardashian (Kim’s brother), and were on a laptop stolen from her at New York’s JFK airport earlier this year.

The official statement from Bailon’s rep goes like this:

“The photos that have surfaced of Adrienne Bailon were stolen from her laptop over a week ago at an airport in NY and sent to several media outlets. These photos were taken in private. Adrienne will be pursuing legal action against the person or person’s sending these private photos out.
Adrienne is deeply sorry for any pain this may have caused to her fans.”

Get primed with a few clothed thumbnails, then “Read More…” so we can show you some NSFW nudity…

This Friday sees the release of Bernie Mac’s posthumous comedy Soul Men, where he teams up with Samuel L Jackson to play a soul duo that reunites for a reunion tour after many years and some bad blood.

Now, Sam Moore, half of the Grammy-winning duo Sam & Dave (the group who wrote the song “Soul Man”), has his panties in a twist over the film, suggesting that it is a “defamatory account” of a reunion he tried to set up with Dave Pratar in 1982. Which would just be an interesting story if he didn’t make these accusations in legal letters to The Weinsein Company, they are having a really bad couple of weeks…

Remember those sexy photos of Miley Cyrus that hit the internet earlier this year? Turns out they were from a “hacker” who called himself TrainReq. His real name was Josh Holly and he is 19-years-old.

And he would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids and their dog his constant bragging about his “accomplishments”…