okay everybody's screaming for Paris Hilton, here's Paris Hilton

Click, maybe the region above
the right buttock gets bigger.

Paris Hilton in a bunny costume at a Halloween 2006 party at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, California. We had to airbrush it a little to redact some dumb grafitti, but the important part is stet from the original photograph, un-doctored.

Agence-Vleeptron Presse has been hit with a tsunami of irate e-mails from all over the 5-Planet System demanding to know why the phrase "Paris Hilton" has not yet appeared on VleeptronZ.

(If I got that wrong and it has, I was drunk or on hallucinogens; 1 slice with 1 anchovy if you can remind me.)

So, in response to this screaming mob of demand, I cave in. Here's the Intersection Set of Vleeptron and Paris Hilton.

cabinet.com appears to be the umbrella website for a group of newspapers in New Hampshire, the USA New England state just north of my Massachusetts. I could buy these newspapers hot from their honor boxes with just a one or two-hour drive due north on Interstate 91.

Paris Hilton is, to put it mildly, not a New England sort of young lady, even in this day and age, even with MTV all over everybody's cable box. A Yankee's take on MTV is: "I don't want my MTV, I certainly didn't ask for it, but as long as it came free with the basic cable, I won't V-Chip it."

Henry David Thoreau invented the lead (graphite) pencil, and went to jail rather than pay a war tax to support the Mexican War (1846-1848).

Yankees are always thinking. We have sex, and we enjoy it as much as everybody else does, but we don't think it's important. (Madonna is from Detroit, not New England.) We fix our broken toasters and toaster ovens, we don't throw them out just because they catch on fire. We fix old things and keep them working, regularly for more than a century.

New England is just one fucking great and interesting Zone on Planet Earth. I'm not from around here myself, I was born and grew up south of the Mason-Dixon Line, but I took a newspaper job over the phone and moved to New England, and instantly discovered I had always had the Soul of a Yankee, accidentally trapped in a Southern body, screaming to leap out.

The Iraq War and Bush are Not Our Fault, we had Nothing to do with either of them, they came from other Zones, like Texas and California, where almost nobody ever thinks about Anything, and everybody throws their broken things away and buys crappier news ones. They have sex like we do, but they think it's Important, and even make Industries out of it.

~ ~ ~

cabinet.com
New Hampshire USA
Wednesday 16 May 2007

The other day we posted some questions about Paris Hilton. The next day, we received some answers from Robert Merkin, who doesn’t live around here but still has the inalienable right to read our website.

Our questions and his answers:
=======================

Who is Paris Hilton ...

By Michael Cleveland
cabinet.com

I wouldn’t even know that someone named Paris Hilton is going to jail but for the fact that nitwits with access to e-mail seem to feel they have an inalienable right to spew it out to whomever they choose.

So, the other day, I got an e-mail for some organization doing a poll on whether people think she should go to jail, not go to jail, or have no opinion.

I don’t even know what she did. Or allegedly did. Or didn’t do. Or might have done if she could have.

I do know who she is because she was on TV a few years ago and when one turns on the TV, one is in danger of learning something completely non-essential, such as the fact that someone named Paris Hilton was, or perhaps even is, on television.

So I sent an e-mail back to the nitwits conducting this survey of stupidity and asked them why they thought it was important enough to bother with. They haven’t responded; I don’t expect them to.

But perhaps you’d care to.

Let’s start this way:

1. Do you know who Paris Hilton is, with a bit of detail? Surely you must know more than I, so give us a bit of that knowledge.

She's an heiress to the Hilton hotel chain fortune, and videotaped herself having sex with some man, and the tape got shown all over the Internet. A paparazzo snapped another photo that showed her birth-control patch on her butt through a very sheer dress.

2. What is her purpose on Earth?

To spend vast amounts of money, to look physically attractive to equally intelligent and talented people, to shock people, and to party all the time.

3. In the grand scheme of things, what is her level of importance on a scale of 1 (the least) to 10 (the most)?

negative eight

4. If you could spend an hour with either Paris Hilton or Segolene Royal, with whom would you choose to spend it and what would you do?

Segolene Royal, and ask her what she remembers from college about Moliere and Camus, and maybe Sartre, and Beckett, he wrote "Godot" in French.

5. Assuming you know what it is she allegedly did, should Paris Hilton go to jail and what sort of time should she do — soft, hard or very, very boring (i.e., listening to one of her close friends discuss Kant without being allowed to first Google the name.)

She shouldn't go to jail. California jails are incredibly overcrowded. Reserve them for people who are a genuine threat to the public. Give her radio-monitored house arrest, blood tests for alcohol every Sunday morning, and make her check in with a probation officer three times a week.

6. If your daughter could grow up to be like Paris Hilton or like Nina Simone, whom would you choose and why? (The fact that Ms. Simone is dead should have no bearing on your choice; assume she still lives.)

Nina Simone. Stop asking stupid questions. Do you like her cover of "I Put a Spell on You"?

Let’s continue this way:

1. Does it bother you that you just spent some of your life answering questions about Paris Hilton? Why not?

Nah. The harder I work and the more serious I get, the more I need to wallow in meaningless crap. All work and no play make Jack a dull boy. Also I'm having an episode of insomnia.

2. If you had it to do over, would you realize that answering questions about Paris Hilton is akin to saying to whatever supreme being in which you believe, “I want to live a few minutes less than I might otherwise do.”

Oh crap, these dumb Q and A's aren't going to be the determining factor of the length of my life. And what kind of objective is length of life, anyway? Wanting to live as long as you possibly can is as meaningless as most of the crap Paris Hilton does.

3. Is this something you should discuss with your therapist? Why not? Don’t you trust her/him? Or is it that you want your therapist to think well of you and acknowledging any interest in Paris Hilton will destroy that dream?

I regret I am unable to disclose with an outside party what I discuss with my therapist. You know that.

4. Now that you’ve finished answering these questions, has it suddenly dawned upon you that you’ve just wasted MORE of your precious life on Paris Hilton?

Actually, your column was the first time I ever paused for Paris Hilton any longer than it takes to click my trackball and surf to something else. I never even saw her sex tape.

And, finally, this:

1. Now that you’re kicking yourself for wasting all of this time, will you re-examine your concept of time and perhaps even space as they involve the ideas of celebrity and television?

I'm not kicking myself, and I'm an old dude, so I know the entire world went down the toilet 12 years ago, and sure as hell isn't coming back to suit me.

2. The next time you have a choice between a Paris Hiltonathon and, say, “Bleak House,” will you make the choice that will actually enlarge your understanding of the human condition (and, no, that’s not the Paris Hiltonathon).

"Bleak House" is hardly Dickens' finest work. And the PBS version is really a bore. Don't be such a whore for British accents.

3. Are you willing to admit that the fact that Paris Hilton has never been a character on “The Simpsons” is a clear indication that she is, and forever shall be, a nonentity who has nothing but celebrity to her credit and that her celebrity was given to her by people like you who spend way to much time obsessing about her and, by the way, answering questions about her?

I didn't need her absence from The Simpsons to figure that out.

Send your incredibly brilliant answers to cabnews@cabinet.com and then wonder why.

Michael Cleveland is executive editor of The Cabinet Press and cabinet.com.