Say what you like about Britney, she's no shirker. While her fellow Mickey Mouse club alumni Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera knock out an album every three or four years, hats off to Britney for seeming to increase her work rate during a sequence of events - mental meltdown, disastrous awards-show appearances, lost custody battles, liaisons with dubious Brummie paparazzi - that would have imploded most careers.