High-profile spats are part of the Hollywood landscape, but rarely are we treated to a bust-up so gloriously bitchy as the one being fought by Megan Fox and Michael Bay. In one corner: a sultry starlet desperate to prove she's more than a pretty face. In the other: the big-budget blockbuster director who launched her career.

Christopher Bridges is perhaps most famous for having "hoes in different area codes" but it appears that the Grammy Award-winning rapper better known as Ludacris also has a heart. He's just given away 20 shiny new cars to people struggling to get jobs.

In the late 1990s, he was the king of fashion, the man who put Kate Moss in skinny velvet flares and male models in micro shorts. He also put Gucci, formerly a naff Italian leather goods brand, on the style map – and the catwalk crowd in Milan cheered on each of his collections. This week Tom Ford is hoping to thrill the art-house audience at the Venice Film Festival with his latest creation: a full-length feature film, A Single Man, due to be unspooled on the Lido this Friday. Five years after walking out on the Italian fashion house he transformed, the mahogany-tanned, artfully bestubbled Texan is finally making good his promise to reinvent himself as a movie director.

As a child I used to get called "Duracell", "copper-coloured top", "ginger-nut" and "Orangina", admits Jordan Adams. "When I was a teenager groups of boys used to hang out of their car windows and yell at me, 'gingaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar!'"

Before they divided into separate embryos, Bob and Mike Bryan existed, briefly, as a single zygote. Thirty-one years later, the identical twins have become the greatest doubles pair of their generation. Now gunning for their 55th pro title and eighth grand slam at this week's US Open, the Americans have been described as playing as if they were still a single organism. While most pairs talk strategy between points, Bob and Mike rarely appear to communicate. "The Bryans have an unfair advantage," Daniel Nestor, one of their rivals on the doubles tour, said this week. "They have that little ESP thing going."

The dig to the ribs by the guy next to her told Rose Schlossberg her great uncle's funeral procession probably wasn't the best place to be seen giving someone the finger.

Channel 4 unveiled its autumn schedules yesterday, one of the highlights being Alone in the Wild, in which Ed Wardle, a cameraman of no previous experience of survival techniques, was left to fend for himself in the Canadian wilderness. Nice one; couldn't they throw in a couple of globe-trotting comedians while they're at it? "I guess I'll have a long haul of eating fish in front me", Wardle had blithely remarked before his departure, although it seems that, seven weeks into this experiment, he had to be airlifted out of the Yukon. The fish weren't biting and he was near to starvation. His girlfriend back in London had noticed on his Twitter feed that Wardle had apparently become delirious and started talking to the insects, which, let's face it, is darned-sight more exciting than the vast majority of Tweets.

Why would Gordon Brown think it sensible to comment on England's Ashes victory while keeping shtum about the Lockerbie bomber? Or to call Simon Cowell to check on the post-BGT health of Susan Boyle in the midst of the MPs' expenses scandal? Probably because an eager aide had told him it was a good idea, or perhaps because reality television and sport are just two of the national conversational topics that everyone, expert or not, feels qualified to weigh in on. But the fact that the PM should stoop to add his tuppence worth is also symptomatic of the rise of the inexpert commentariat. Today, celebrities, politicians and pretty much anyone else in the public eye can comment on any subject and have their opinion given the reverence usually reserved for specialists.

Nobody likes being labelled for their romantic preferences. Not even the "womanisers" and "heartbreakers" and "ice queens", who at least sound like they're having fun. The "cradle snatcher" and the "gold-digger" come off badly, though Hit & Run always thought there's something pleasantly reliable about the "serial monogamist".

While naked breasts, bottoms and spread-eagled legs are splashed across men's magazines with impunity, it seems that Britons are more reserved when it comes to seeing the male form in all its, ahem, glory. This shocking discrepancy has been highlighted by women's magazine Filament, which is campaigning to break what supporters are calling "the final taboo" in British publishing: printing pictures of erect penises. But who, or what, is stopping them?

Call it a career move, but Sienna Miller is no longer the starlet with the dubious morals, dirty mouth and distinct reluctance to play the fame game fairly.

You know, it's probably the new thing to be pregnant," the supermodel Karolina Kurkova has told New York magazine. "It's not to have the Chanel python bag. It's to be pregnant."

You might have heard of airbrushing and retouching, but there's another, less ubiquitous weapon in the photographers' war on flaw – solarisation. And Madonna is the latest subject to try out its perfecting powers in Louis Vuitton's autumn/winter ad campaign, shot by fashion photographer Steven Meisel.

Long gone are the days when appearing on rival Australian tea-time soaps Neighbours and Home and Away was a passport to a panto engagement in Bournemouth or Hull. These days Aussie soap veterans bypass Christmas in the British provinces and head straight for Los Angeles. In fact it seems you can't watch a high-end US TV drama without coming face to face with a former Erinsborough or Summer Bay favourite – most recently in HBO's vampire saga True Blood. This has Ryan Kwanten – formerly Vinnie Patterson in Home and Away – as Sookie's priapic younger brother Jason, and when in 2003 Kawatan got himself an American agent he was simply following a path trod by Neighbours/Home and Away alumni Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Naomi Watts, Isla Fisher and the late Heath Ledger.

When Marilyn Monroe died in 1962, Joan Holloway was so devastated that she had to go and lie down in a darkened room for an entire afternoon. "This world destroyed her," she wept to her uncomprehending boss. Joan is fictional – the sad but sassy secretary whose sexuality dominates the offices of Sterling Cooper in the TV drama Mad Men – but her reaction to the star's demise is entirely realistic.