Paris Hilton: What Is Her Opinion On Drunken Elephants?

It's a rare boon to have the opportunity to legitimately use one of the world's top ten search terms in my blog title and content but, seeing as the opportunity has presented itself, it would be churlish of me to let is pass. So here goes:

Paris Hilton. Paris Hilton. Paris Hilton.

So, for those of you who are regular readers of my blog, a warm welcome back. For the guys who hazarded upon this site looking for naughty pics of Miss Hilton, there's a treat for you in the top-right corner.

Yes, it seems that the delectably pleathered Paris has hit the news for a pro animal rights comment she made. Or was it a pro animal rights comment? Her PR person says it wasn't.

You see, Paris recently expressed concern for the welfare of Indian elephants which had gone on the rampage after imbibing quantities of home made rice-beer.

Until Paris made her comments in Tokyo last week, very few of us were aware that there is an epidemic of elephant alcohol abuse endemic to North East India which is resulting in death and injury to elephants when they are in a state of alcoholic abandon.

For which comments Paris has been commended by conservationists. Oddly though, her publicist Lori (presumably by nature as well as by name) Berk, denied that Miss Hilton had ever made pro-pachyderm proclamations.

I think this is a great shame if one of the world's biggest celebrities (and search terms) is discouraged for the sake of "PR" from being anything other than politically neutral. But this is typical of the celebrity culture we live in, where the majority of celebrities (especially in the States) are coached in being apolitical everymen (or do I mean everywomen?).

Or maybe it's to pre empt people like me from drawing unhelpful parallels with Paris' own alcohol-soaked rampages and the elephants'.

Anyway, if Paris Hilton genuinely has concerns for these unfortunate elephants, she should be applauded for speaking her mind. I would hope, also, that it may give Paris a chance to derive some esteem from something other than that of being a vacuous, pampered socialite.

I am hoping that my use of the words Paris and Hilton will give me that little extra traffic. I suspect that there is one word which is often used along with Paris and Hilton which, should I use it, would bring me even more traffic.

Seeing as Sementivae is all for a good cause and deserves as many visitors as possible, I'm sure my regular readers will forgive me this opportunist streak:

Paris Hilton Sex.

The Petrified Forest: A film not to be forgotten

The Petrified Forest, released in 1936, is a remarkably prescient film. After watching it this week for the first time, it instantly became one of my favourite films.

One of my reasons for recommending this film on Sementivae is because of, as I say, its prescience - specifically its prescience on matters of the environment.

Leslie Howard - who gives such a fantastic performance that I forgot I originally watched the film for the posthumously better-celebrated Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis - is the protagonist Alan Squier, an Englishman rambling in the Arizona desert, who meets and falls in love with Gabrielle Maple (Davis), a waitress at the cafe (and gas-station) found, geographically and metaphorically, on the edge of the expansive wilderness.

Their brief acquaintance is only allowed to deepen from passing infatuation into love when fate intervenes and escaped prisoner, sociopathic killer Duke Mantee (Bogart) and his fellow gangsters, take them hostage.

It's an excellent film with an engrossing set-up. It's a seminal gangster movie, it's a romantic movie, it has shades of noir, it is magnificently, wittily scripted and acted. For these reasons the film deserves more advocates, deserves to be remembered. But for those with a ripe environmental conscience, the film takes on another level of meaning. And all because of Leslie Howard's protagonist.

Alan Squier is a thoroughly modern man; he wishes to escape the rat-race which is how he wound up in Arizona. He is a man of capacious intellect who has never made productive use of it. He could have been a great writer, had he chosen to play the game.

His theory of modern existence, I say, is astute and even more relevant now than, arguably, back in the '30s.

That is, modern man is arrogant, he believes he can rule nature, that he can subject nature to his will. Modern man is winning the fight, but nature is fighting back. And nature's weapon of choice is neuroses. Nature is giving modern man neuroses.

How true. There is copious psychological literature that posits a correlation between modern society and a host of mental illnesses (schizophrenia, depression, stress, to name the most common), that it seems the more manufactured our world becomes the sicker we must become. This is Nature's way of informing us of our mistake of turning our back on her.

Modern society is too complex for man, it demands too much of his mental and physical resources. Rules, regulations and protocol of modern society are overabundant and it ruptures our self-identity and overworks our memory. How much of the self is left when one conforms to the protocols of an institution? How can one possibly remember all these overbearing rules and regulations?

Alan Squier is an enlightened, self-confident man (not in the macho way, but a virtue of his harmonious acceptance of the world), his wandering in the desert recall that of Buddha or Jesus. Squier is apolitical, his philosophy implicitly rejecting communism (that man cannot rule over nature) and, more explicitly, capitalism.

Drawing on the contemporary schools of Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytic thought, he is a physician by his assertion that Nature is fighting back with neuroses and thus cites the aetiology of modern man's illness.

I will conclude with an excerpt from Squier's quietly impassioned observations:

"And now do you realize what it is that is causing the world chaos? It's Nature hitting back. Not with the old weapons - floods, plagues, holocausts. We can neutralize them. She's fighting back with strange instruments called neuroses. She's deliberately afflicting mankind with the jitters. Nature is proving that she can't be beaten - not by the likes of us. She's taking the world away from the intellectuals and giving it back to the apes"

If you're thinking about being my search engine, it don't matter if you're black or white?

This is not exactly news - I am bedridden with flu at the moment and the grey cells aren't functioning, so my output is limited - but there's an interesting theory that Google (the search engine that most people use daily to perform searches) would be more environmentally friendly - that is, would consume less power - if it were black rather than white.

To this effect, Blackle, a black "Google" was created (NB. Blackle is not owned by Google). The theory is that a white screen uses 74 watts and a black screen 59. If Google itself were black, it is speculated/calculated that 750 Megawatt-hours would be saved per annum.

The reality is that Blackle probably only saves energy when used on CRT monitors but not LCD monitors.

However, Blackle - regardless of its black is more green than white claim - poses a problem to the vast majority of us who use computers - How do we make web-surfing more environmentally friendly, less energy-gluttonous?

For the time being, I may persevere with Blackle expediently. That is to say, when ill, bright, white screens cause my eyes to water.

And so I shall sign off with a sneeze and a promise that I will update properly when I have recovered from my seasonal ailment.