Ten Things We Learned Watching Last Night’s MTV Video Music Awards

Every year in early September, America’s pop stars gather together in one place to promote their crappy albums and to try to make the terrorists hate us even more. So by that measure, last night’s MTV Video Music Awards in Las Vegas were a huge success. Here’s what we learned:

1. Britney is back!
Britney Spears may be past her prime, a bad lip syncher, an unfit mother, and just unfit in general, but … well, really, she’s just all of those things. But even though her performance was every bit the train wreck we all pretty much expected, it was still the only one of the night we can prove was actually rehearsed.

2. MTV correspondent John Norris is 48 years old.
We looked at his Wikipedia entry and very nearly plotzed — he doesn’t look a day past 162!

3. Mary J. Blige is the most charitable person alive.
When asked about the chances of a Britney Spears comeback during the awards pre-show, Blige said this: “Well, Britney is smart.� That’s an actual quote!

4. Jive Records really, really needs Chris Brown’s album to be a hit.
Tasked with the impossible burden of promoting a new Britney Spears album, Jive is really hoping that Brown’s upcoming record, Exclusive, will sell, so much so that they paid MTV whatever was necessary to get him a showcase performance. And compared to Fall Out Boy, he wasn’t bad!

5. Live-bloggers provide an invaluable service.
In case you missed the VMAs (or even if you didn’t but were somehow born without an internal monologue), they were live-blogged in excruciating detail here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

6. Justin Timberlake thinks “music is in a great place right now.�
This is an actual thing that he said. And this was after Fergie was given an award — for her music!

7. Dr. Dre & Timbaland are huge.
Pamela Anderson exes Tommy Lee and Kid Rock apparently got in a bit of a scuffle last night, but a fight we’d really like to see is one between Timbaland and Dr. Dre. Those guys are huge!

8. 50 Cent and Kanye West are pathetic.
Putting another end to what will surely go down as the very worst rap beef in all of history, 50 and Kanye presented the award last night for Most Earth-Shattering Collaboration, and just kind of stood there.

9. We hate you, Jamie Foxx.
Yep.

10. The new Indiana Jones movie is called Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Shia LaBeouf announced it before presenting a nonsensical award to some stupid idiot. We knew we stayed up till 11:30 for something!