Side show

WAR. WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? ABSOLUTELY TOO MANY WAR SONGS: Every musician has a war song: warring with significant others, warring with parents, warring with drugs and alcohol, warring with the contractors who worked on his house.

Some songs are even about the war in Iraq. And if you've been having trouble keeping track of which songs are pro-war and which are antiwar, we have help: the Daily Show's guide to war-song differentiation:

If the singer wears cowboy boots, the song is pro-war.

If the singer wears vintage cowboy boots, it's antiwar.

If the song sounds like a truck commercial, it's pro-war.

If the song sounds like a commercial for an extreme sports drink, it's antiwar.

If you can understand the words and wish you couldn't, it's pro-war.

If you can't understand the words but wish you could, it's antiwar.

HAMMER OF THE GODSMACK: Godsmack is the group doing angry songs about home contractors.

On its new album, Faceless, lead singer Sully Erna vents about the people who did the work on his new home. He filed two lawsuits against them, claiming he was overcharged and then had to have repairs done, the Boston Globe reports.

He won the first one.

HE'S NOT A CRASS OPPORTUNIST. REALLY. JUST ASK HIM: More than a few eyebrows were raised when R. Kelly released a song supporting U.S. troops as the fighting in Iraq began. As sincere as his sentiments in A Soldier's Heart might be, cynics thought that it was a nice good-PR-generating move by a singer facing multiple child pornography charges in two states.

Kelly now is taking pains to point out that he wrote, recorded and initially released the song a year ago for the troops in Afghanistan. That was while rumors about him having liaisons with underage girls were flying around but before he was charged with anything.

"This song is my way of saying thank you to everyone protecting us," Kelly says in a press release. "It's their sacrifices that allow us to sleep comfortably at night and send our children off to school in the morning."

BETTER THAN MATCH.COM: Robbie Williams is a huge recording artist in the rest of the world but a minuscule one in the United States.

This is a problem for him when he tries to pick up women in Los Angeles, where he has been spending time trying to improve his lot without having to resort to American Idol. But he has found that the problem has a simple solution: Google.

After women do an Internet search and discover his worldwide hugeness, they return to him more than happy to be picked up.

"So hurrah for googling!" he tells London's Daily Mirror.

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