Britney Spears didn’t even bother showing up in court to beg for custody of her children yesterday. According to the NY Daily News

The judge refused to return custody of her two young boys but did grant Spears closely supervised visitation rights. Ex-hubby Kevin Federline – who did show up – will retain full custody of 1-year-old Jayden James and Sean Preston, 2. “This was the first day that he had custody of his children and he felt it was important for the court to see who he is and to be there should the court have any desire to ask him anything,” said K-Fed’s lawyer. As he has been for weeks, K-Fed was once more the surprising picture of parental stability [in] a grayish-blue suit and crisp, white shirt. And because of an eye infection he wore a swashbuckling eye patch.

But what could Britney have done differently?

Experts [said] it would have been a good idea for Spears to tell the judge face to face she was ready to clean up her act. Instead, she was spotted tooling around the Malibu hills with her dog, stopping at a Starbucks and a gas station.

And hunkered down and looking over her shoulder at the judge while deliberately wiping her ass with the court documents. But wait — she’s going to prove she’s serious for real by visiting rehab. Again. TMZ says

OK! magazine is reporting that Spears is planning to head back to Crossroads Centre in Antigua over the weekend “in an attempt to get custody of her children.”

Swinging by the DMV and actually showing up in court seems a hell of a lot easier than flying to the Caribbean for a stint in rehab, but then again, what do I know? I don’t even have an eye patch. Nobody ever used the words “swashbuckling” to describe me. “Sloshed” and “bucking,” which kind of sounds like “swashbuckling,” but that was just part of the bartender’s description of the events in question that night I had to be tasered for resisting arrest. So not really the same thing. I tried wearing pantaloons and carrying a sword for a while, but it turns out that bandying a sword at people can be construed as “assault with a deadly weapon,” and that just violated my probation again. Being a modern-day pirate is a really lot harder than it looks.

More of Britney not with her children after the jump

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