The National Youth Agency: Comment - Guns vs helicopters

The last thing I want to do is lose weight. I need a once profoundly unfit but skinny role model to inspire me.

Good role models are always hard to find, and when they come along they're often overshadowed by negative alternatives. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why rapper 50 Cent is now fronting a video game in which players shoot gangland rivals with an arsenal of illegal firearms. That's right - you can actually play the game as the mumbling, musclebound lummox himself, shooting rivals dead. Surely the maligned rap world - with its sometimes unfair association with violence and misogyny - should be angling away from this type of thing, not encouraging it. I'm reminded of "Fur Q", the mythical rapper created by satirist Chris Morris on spoof news programme The Day Today - that wasn't any more ridiculous than this.