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If you thought rapper 50 Cent couldn’t get any cockier, think again. Both 50 Cent and Kanye West have new albums due out on September 11th. In the past 50 has outsold West but there has recently been speculation that may not be the case this time around. Because of this 50 has made an outstanding wager. He says that if West’s album sells better than his he will stop writing and recording as a solo artist and will from then on only collaborate with others. 50 Cent has made statements in the past that West would not be successful if he had not been first. I think he’s giving himself too much credit. Kanye West’s music is greatly different from 50 Cent’s style. Though they are both rap they are nothing alike in sound. I personally think Kanye has much more groove and real musical feeling while 50 is all about the lipping off in rhyme. It almost makes me want to buy a cope of Kanye’s disc for every person I know. Why don’t you all do the same and we may be rid of 50 Cent after all?

Surveying the current Hollywood landscape – and the mounting number of youthful casualties of late – former child star Brooke Shields says she has no particular advice to offer young stars.

“I think a lot of these girls are young, and it’s all so tempting,” Shields, 42, tells Redbook in its September issue. “For some reason I wasn’t tempted. I don’t know why.”

Looking back, she says, “Sometimes I wish I was a little more tempted to have a little more fun. But then I see them” – Shields mentions no one by name – “and someone will ask, ‘Well, what do you want to say to so-and-so?’ I don’t want to say anything to them. I want to talk to their mothers.”

Shields’s own mother, Teri Shields, who originally managed her daughter, came under a firestorm of criticism for her treatment (some said exploitation) of her budding star. The two eventually separated professionally.

“People used to say my mom used me as a commodity,” the actress now says. “But you know what? She did her own version dysfunctional behavior, sure, but nothing like you see these days.”

When it comes to the sort of mother she is with her own daughters, Rowan, 4, and Grier, born in May 2006 (their dad is Shields’s husband of six years, TV writer-producer Chris Henchy), Shields says: “I always feel like the odd mom out, because trust me when I tell you I’m on my girls. And every time I am, I know from the outside it looks like I’m an overbearing, controlling parents. But I don’t think we have any responsibility to anybody else but our kids and ourselves.”

Not that Shields apologizes for being strict. “The worst part about it is when I look at my daughter [Rowan], and she’ll be fighting with some other kid, and I have to be careful not to always make it her fault. But I can only tell her what to do – I can’t tell the other kid. I’ll tell her, ‘Hey, you suck it up; you give him the toy, and we’ll talk about it later.’ ”

Admits Shields, “So she’s the one who always has to take the high road, which is hard for a 4-year-old.”