Lil Wayne lil' better than TMZ claimed

Last night, TMZ was writing Lil Wayne off, finger hovering above the button to post the prepared obituary:

Wayne's mother is currently on a plane flying to Los Angeles -- and we're told all major decisions about Wayne's health (including the decision to discontinue life support) will not be made until she arrives.

What TMZ have quietly, and shamelessly, dropped from their story is their claim that Wayne had received the last rites. Because it simply wasn't true.

You'd think TMZ, of all people, would know that you can't do something like that without people noticing - they might have taken down the fact-that-wasn't, but all the gossip sites that leach off them had already copied the story and written 'TMZ say Wayne getting last rites' into the permanent record. And a gazillion tweets also caught the error:

BREAKING: TMZ reports that rapper Lil Wayne is in critical condition and has been read his last rites. wp.me/p2OIU3-7bj

— FOX17 (@FOX17) March 16, 2013

The reaction to TMZ's early dispatch on Lil'Wayne's final dispatch hasn't been warm, it's fair to say. The Huffington Post captured TI's response:

That shit surely got his mama hurtin,his kids hurtin,& he got true to da game patnas like me & Othas who ready to RIDE bout all da fuck shit

Which, funnily enough, is exactly the same thing Leveson said in his report in the section on the Express' coverage of The McCanns.

To be fair to TMZ, their crack team has realised that something is odd about the whole story:

Wayne is sleeping right now ... which is odd, because he just tweeted saying he's OK and thanking people for the prayers and love.

Yes, the attempt to try and pretend it hadn't killed him off is being built around an attempt to make something out of the idea that someone might be tweeting from his account.

You know what, TMZ - the really astonishing thing about Lil Wayne's official account saying he's OK isn't that it contradicts what you heard about him sleeping, but more that it contradicts the thing you published about him having the last rites.

Sure, everyone makes mistakes and - in a bid to outrun the hearses, you're going to be liable to make mistakes of this nature. But surely - as self-appointed guardians of showbiz behaviour - an admission and an apology is what's called for, not a silent deletion and a hope nobody noticed?

Bonus bogus: TMZ collect a bunch of reactions to Wayne's hospitalization, not one of which mentions last rites, nor the site's part in the exaggeration of his death.

TI - he's like a latter day Dostoevsky

Because his contract (or, possibly, need for some cash) forced TI to continue making his MTV reality series even while he was being measured up for a suit with arrows on, the rapper-turned-gunman was in a unique place to share his views on crime, and punishment and all that sort of stuff.

Share with us, TI:

"Some things in the past that I got involved with and got myself into just weren't worth my time; it didn't involve me," Tip explained. "If I'm here [he puts his hand above his head], and I'm involving myself with something down there [he puts his hand by his waist], it's just not worth my time. The energy and the effort and the thought and the time I put in it is useless."

Aha. So it's not that he shouldn't mess around with guns because it's wrong, or illegal, or anything old-fashioned like that. It's because it's a waste of his time.

It's not entirely clear why TI sees anything below waist-level as being a waste of time - perhaps he was just thinking of those long, lonely nights on Block D; or maybe he's just trying to not get involved in a massive paddy that Kanye West got to design some terrible sneakers.

The MTV series he's been making has been some poorly-thought-out attempt to teach being good to what we're apparently supposed to call "the Road To Redemption kids" - think The Mickey Mouse Gang if they'd been brought up the Beagle Boys instead.

What message, TI, do you want to give to those kids?

"In speaking to them and checking up on them and speaking to the people who are around them every day, I get the understanding that they're different people than they were before we did the show," T.I. said. "That they think about what they do before they do it. And even if they choose to do the wrong thing ... at least now, they have a conscience. Before they didn't even think about it. They didn't feel bad about it. At least now if they do something wrong, they feel something. I think it started something. It's not the end all, be all, but I think it inspired and promoted change, and I think that's what it was there to do."

TI is only one convicted felon, he can't be expected to do it all, can he? He can't pretend to have the end all, be all simply because MTV have given him a show about things.

At least the people throwing rocks through your windows now feel something when they do it. TI has done that. Before, they'd just feel cold and empty. And they'll think before they push over your nan and steal her shopping. If nothing else, TI has made sure that their crimes will not occur spontaneously, but after a period of reflection. We must all the thankful to TI.

GM drops TI

Getting busted for waggling his guns about has proved expensive for TI: GM have decided that they really don't want to be associated with him. In total, TI reckons his crimes have cost him somewhere in the region of twelve million dollars.

Which means he's made an expensive mistake. And that he used to be totally over-valued.

"I'm sorry I can't be with you, but I'm banged up"

TI added a little drama to the BET Hip-Hop Awards, managing to get himself arrested just before the ceremony and thereby turning yet another occasion which was supposed to be a celebration of hip-hop culture into one which had the taint of criminal behaviour all over it.

It didn't help that TI won two awards.

On a brighter note, Kanye West won a prize, which he accepted with modesty:

"I didn't deserve this award above them. They do instead of me," said West, who is typically known more for comments that critics call arrogant.

But Big Boi of OutKast returned the favor to West by giving him the award back saying, "You worked too hard for this. No, you deserve it."

Kanye's charming modesty might be a little more convincing if he didn't stop around like a bear with a bee in his foreskin every time he doesn't win.