tim14smith's blog: "paris hilton"

She may be trying to attract less attention, but it seems Paris Hilton has a strange way of going about it. The blonde socialite, who has vowed to change her ways after spending 23 days in jail, chose to wear a black wig and straw hat as she flew from LA to Hawaii - immediately putting her back in the spotlight
TAGS: socialite, Paris Hilton

LINK: Paris Hilton in disguise jets off to Maui Daily Mail - UK from Boxxet News

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SIMILAR STORIES
Celebrity Gossip: snippets - Fametastic
Paris Hilton heads to Maui - Earthtimes.org
MORE FROM Celebrity Gossip; A Dish Best Served Cold! | This is London | Hollywood Life | The Money Times | Blogs: Celebrity News | Reality TV World | The Hilton Files

Filed under: Deals, Private equity, Sprint Nextel Corp (S), D.R.Horton (DHI), Lennar Corp'A' (LEN), Hilton Hotels (HLT)

The last few quarters have seen a remarkable number of takeovers, buyouts and mergers. M&A activity is near an all time high, as the staggering amount of money sloshing around the global equity markets looks for something, anything, to buy. Interest rates are low, the money supply is growing (see this analysis of the now stealth M3 data over at the bigpicture), and private equity funds are competing with each other to find profitable investments. All of this adds up to a manic takeover market, and savvy investors are looking for a way to profit from it.

The Wall Street Journal speculates today [free link to AOL Money & Finance] on the latest potential takeover targets. The housing sector provides some interesting targets, since many housing stocks have been beaten down amid all the talk of the housing bubble. The article cites builders Lennar, Ryland Group and D.R. Horton as stocks to watch. Real estate investment trusts (REITs) may also be of interest.

Potential targets also include very large companies with good cash flow. These include Sprint Nextel, Hilton and Avis Budget Group. All of these stocks are up recently, perhaps due to investor speculation about possible takeovers.

One interesting note: The article points out that takeover activity is not as profitable as it once was. The takeover premium has fallen from 30% in 2001 to 17% in 2006. I would guess that this is largely a result of high levels of competition -- there's so much free-floating investment money out there that wildly profitable acquisitions tend to get snapped up right away, leaving less lucrative deals for later. The lower premium suggests that we may be in the late stages of takeover mania, and that takeover activity may fall after the next few quarters.

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"The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine, befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcasts as scapegoats." —Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough

Each version of the scapegoat ritual has its own peculiarities, but the essential structure is constant. A person or group is chosen to bear a society's sins or sufferings, and then is killed or exiled, leaving the community purified. In Uganda, Frazer writes, the victims were "maimed and left to die." In Siam, "a woman broken down by debauchery" would be publicly insulted, showered with soil, then thrown "on a dunghill or a hedge of thorns outside the ramparts, forbidding her ever to enter the walls again."

In the United States, by contrast, Paris Hilton received just a few weeks in jail and a few dozen media cycles of personal humiliation. Compared to people who committed commensurate infractions, that's a travesty of justice. But compared to those poor Ugandans, she's getting off easy.

Hilton was sentenced to 45 days' imprisonment for driving with a suspended license. When the local sheriff did something that has been done for thousands of other nonviolent offenders in L.A. County's overcrowded jails, releasing her early to serve her term under house arrest, the cry went up that this was unconscionable, and a tearful, hysterical Hilton was hustled back to a cell. After L.A.'s city attorney joined the chorus calling for her reimprisonment, it came out that his wife had gotten off with a fine after committing a similar offense. He insisted the situations were not comparable, and indeed they weren't: When his spouse got in trouble, no mob was baying for her blood.

Hilton, by contrast, is almost universally hated. I'm not setting myself above everyone else here—I can't stand her either. She plays a very specific public role: the bad girl, spoiled and stupid, privileged and irresponsible, hedonistic in the most dull and predictable ways. Different viewers have different reactions to this, but the typical response is extremely negative. Like Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears, Hilton lets her tabloid audience feel both resentful and superior. Unlike Lohan or Spears, Hilton hasn't accomplished anything that might offset that contempt. Lohan and Spears became famous for acting and singing, respectively, and only then spilled into the more open-ended entertainment of the gossip press; millions of fans have a residual affection for their work that keeps them from being as despised as they could be. But Hilton debuted in the gossip columns. She has appeared in movies and has made an album, but those came later: She isn't a celebrity because she recorded a CD, she recorded a CD because she's a celebrity. And she's a celebrity because people like to loathe her. Being a scapegoat is part of her job.

I assume she knows that. "In ancient Greece," my handy Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend informs me, "the scapegoat was often a volunteer." So it is in America today. I suspect that Hilton isn't really dumb, any more than she's really a blonde—that she not only understands the role she's playing, but deliberately chose to play it. It's telling that her most notable non-pornographic performance, on the "reality" series The Simple Life, painted her as a rich twit unable to function in the real world. Hilton not only signed up for a show that was sure to portray her that way, but she kept coming back to shoot more seasons even after the program's direction was obvious. Either she's preternaturally stupid, or she's in on the joke.

In the gossip press, as in reality TV and celebrity sex tapes, it's unclear where artifice ends and authenticity begins. But if Hilton understands that she's the butt of the joke on her television show, she probably understands the same dynamics are at work in the rest of her media appearances, including the ones dubbed "news." And if she does understand that, and milks it, I'm not sure how willing I am to believe her tears at her sentencing. Is she really upset, or is she just doing what the trite script demands? Does she resent these headlines, or does she love any headline she appears in? Is she worried about what she'll face in jail, or is she looking forward to what comes afterward?

Yes, afterward. Traditionally the scapegoat was killed or exiled for good, but the modern celebrity cycle won't let someone go so easily. After her fall, the victim begins a redemption process, or as it is known in our medicalized age, a rehabilitation process. She loudly reforms herself, begs our forgiveness, appears on talk shows, pitches a product. Paris is prepared: Last week she called Barbara Walters to announce that she had found God, intends to clean up her act, and has started thinking of what's best for "the young girls who looked up to me."

There is historical precedent for this as well. There are religious traditions, most notably Christianity, in which a god takes on the sins of the world, is duly sacrificed, and then comes back. Some medieval Christians applied the same idea to their human scapegoats. Frazer describes a German town that began Lent each year by turning a selected parishioner out of the church. For 40 days he would walk the city, "barefoot, neither entering the churches nor speaking to any one." The day before Good Friday, "he was readmitted to the church and absolved of all sins. The people gave him money. He was called Adam, and was now believed to be in a state of innocence."

No one will ever mistake Paris Hilton for an innocent. But they will re-admit her to her old haunts, and oh, how they'll give her money. This woman has already become a celebrity without doing anything worth celebrating, a sex symbol without exuding any sex appeal, a world-famous criminal without committing a notable crime. Now she can be a scapegoat who never gets sacrificed: the victim of a barbaric ritual who emerges somehow with everything she wants.

Jesse Walker is reason's managing editor.

Discuss this article online.

Sarah Silverman got on Paris Hilton at the 2007 MTV Movie Awards. Everyone knows the situation with Paris Hilton going to jail, and Sarah Silverman took that and just drilled Paris when she got up to speak. Anyways, here is the video:
TAGS: Paris, Paris Hilton

LINK: YouTube: Sarah Silverman Bashes Paris Hilton! by jon8105 Current World News from Google Blogs

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Paris Hilton Gets Owned by Sarah Silverman at the MTV Movie Awards - Celeb Roundup
Paris Hilton Mocked by Sarah Silverman at the MTV Movie Awards - National Ledger
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Being locked in a cell was a "traumatic experience" and something she never expected after driving with a suspended license, a subdued Paris Hilton told CNN's Larry King on Wednesday.
TAGS: Paris Hilton, Hilton

LINK: Hilton describes jail as 'traumatic' by By SANDY COHEN The Olympian from Boxxet News

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SIMILAR STORIES
Subdued Paris Hilton describes time in jail as 'traumatic' - Detroit Free Press
Hilton Describes Jail As 'Traumatic' - The Conservative Voice
MORE FROM Kansas City Star | Miami Herald | Inside Bay Area | Tampa Tribune | San Diego Union Tribune | San Diego Union Tribune | East Valley Tribune

By RAPHAEL G. SATTER

Princes William and Harry were on hand at London's Wembley Stadium on Sunday for a star-studded pop concert in memory of their mother, Princess Diana, on what would have been her 46th birthday.

The brothers greeted singer Nelly Furtado and 1980s chart-toppers Duran Duran, two of the acts taking the stage to remember Diana almost 10 years after her death in a Paris car crash.

The princess died Aug. 31, 1997, along with her boyfriend Dodi Fayed and their driver when their Mercedes crashed inside the Pont d'Alma tunnel, while media photographers pursued them.

The memorial concert, organized by her sons, features music from some of Diana's favorite acts, including Tom Jones, but will also host younger performers including Kanye West, P. Diddy, Joss Stone and Lily Allen.

The two princes were scheduled to address the 65,000-strong crowd from the stage at some point during the show. In an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp., William, 25, admitted to nervousness.

"We'll probably be gibbering wrecks by the end of it," he said.

Security for the event was increased after the discovery of two unexploded car bombs in central London on Friday and an attack on Glasgow airport on Saturday that involved a Jeep Cherokee slamming into the main terminal and bursting into flames.

Police said they believed Saturday's attack was linked to the car bombs, and Britain raised its terror alert to "critical" - the highest possible level. At least 450 officers were on duty to police the concert.

The show also includes a performance by the English National Ballet and songs by Andrew Lloyd Webber in honor of Diana's love of dance and theater.

A family of fans from Portsmouth in southern England said they had come to sample the wide variety of acts all playing under the same roof - but that the memory of Diana's death was also in their minds.

"I was devastated," Karen Moore, 50, a restaurateur, said of Diana's death.

Her husband, David, 52, and the couples' daughters, Lucy, 23, and Katie, 21, said they were there for the music, but also wanted to express their sympathy for the princes.

"William and Harry are the same age as us," Lucy said.

Diana is remembered for her glamour, for her extensive charity work - and for her tempestuous marriage to Prince Charles, heir to the British throne. The pair married in 1981 in a ceremony watched by millions around the world, but divorced in 1996 after admissions of adultery on both sides.

William said the concert was a chance for people to "remember all the good things about her because she's not here to defend herself when she gets criticized."

"After 10 years, there's been a rumbling of people bringing up the bad, and over time people seem to forget - or have forgotten - all the amazing things she did and what an amazing person she was," William said in the interview, which was recorded earlier this month and broadcast Friday.

Tickets for the concert cost $90 with proceeds going to causes Diana supported, including land mine and AIDS charities.

Harry, 22, said the brothers had asked Elton John to play "Candle in the Wind," the song he played at Diana's funeral in Westminster Abbey. Originally about Marilyn Monroe, its lyrics were reworked in tribute to Diana, and it became a worldwide No. 1 hit in 1997.

Filed under: Rumors, Television, Rants and raves, General Electric (GE), Walt Disney (DIS), Hilton Hotels (HLT)

General Electric (NYSE: GE) shareholders, listen up ... you may have a grievance or two for the next shareholder meeting with regard to how certain company divisions are spending their money. Today's New York Post reports that GE unit NBC Network has agreed to shell out up to $1 million for Paris Hilton's first televised interview once she is sprung from her time in the big house. Rumors from within the walls range from Paris finding religion, vowing to never drink and drive again (should she be applauded for deciding to simply follow the law?), and deciding to forgo her "dumb" act for a more mature persona.

The interview (I'm guessing, full of softball questions) will be conducted by Today Show co-host Meredith Vieira (per Paris' request) on the day (reportedly sometime next week) after the Hilton Hotels (NYSE: HLT) heiress is sprung. The Walt Disney Co.'s (NYSE: DIS) ABC Networks was assuming it had the rights to the first post-jail interview because its first lady of journalism, Barbara Walters, has become close with Paris's mom, Kathy, and has even talked to Paris during her incarceration. According to the Post, ABC was evidently the front-runner until NBC's president made a personal appeal to Paris' father.

People, we've got a years-long war going on. Environmental concerns are increasing, the cost of oil is crippling many, the housing market is in shambles. And did I mention the country has hardly been more divided? Why is this famous-for-being-famous vapid girl consuming so much of our nation's time, mental energy, and other resources? Well, I'm writing up this story, knowing people will want to read it, so I just answered my own question (although the bigger question of why Miss Hilton has created this perpetuating cycle of intrigue still remains).

Beth Gaston Moon is an analyst at Schaeffer's Investment Research.

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Photograph and text ©2007 by Julius Lester

During the 1960s people in the business of deciding what was and was not news knew that President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., were not models of marital fidelity. But the prevailing attitude was that what these men did in their private lives was precisely that ? private. Even when then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent photos to news outlets of Dr. King with women, not one released the information to the public. However, since then, the media has obliterated the line between private and public to the detriment of us all.

While I think Paris Hilton is a sad, immature twenty-six year old child who needs media attention to know she exists, I was appalled and frightened by the lynch mob atmosphere instigated by the media when the sheriff released her from jail to serve out her sentence at home. The nation was outraged! Paris was getting a break because she comes from a wealthy family. Al Sharpton, who has never seen a camera of any kind that he didn?t like, called a press conference to decry the favoritism shown to Paris. When a screaming, crying, hysterical Paris Hilton was sent back to jail, the media and the nation were obscenely exultant.

Only after she was once again incarcerated did the media begin to look more deeply into her situation and discovered that the majority of people in Los Angeles arrested for driving with a suspended license and violating probation on alcohol related driving charges served no jail time or as little as one-tenth of the sentence, which in Paris?s case would have been four days.

So when Paris Hilton was taken out of the courtroom screaming, ?Mom! Mom! It?s not fair!?, she was right. It wasn?t fair. But the initial reporting led the nation to believe that the sheriff?s release of Hilton was an injustice. In fact, the sheriff acted justly. Indeed, it was discovered that the wife of Hilton?s prosecutor had been arrested for driving with a suspended license and had not been sent to jail.

The media is intent on the ?public?s right to know,? a ?right? I haven?t found in the Constitution. Well, if the public has a ?right? to know about the private lives of politicians and celebrities, does not the public also have a ?right? to know about the private lives of those who report on others? private lives?

If people in the media had to publicly reveal their sins, I wonder if the character of what passes for news these days would change. If people in the media were required to relinquish their privacy, I wonder if that line between public and private would be redrawn. If people in the media were subjected to the same scrutiny as they subject others, I think the media would concentrate its energies on the issues and ideas of our time rather than the behavior of millionaire, adolescent, high school dropouts who live as if it does not matter that hundreds of millions of people around the world live in squalor and hunger through no fault of their own.

But there is no institution in our society that scrutinizes the media the way peers into the private lives of others. We are dependent on the media to recognize and curb its own excesses and self-righteousness.

Thus the coarsening of our society will continue.

TODAY?S QUOTE

?The press is ferocious. It forgives nothing, it only hunts for mistakes.?

Diana, Princess of Wales

TODAY?S WORD

Medium ? from medius, middle. ?A middle quality, degree, or condition.?

TODAY'S PHOTOGRAPH

Window, New York City, 1966
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Photographs are for sale:

$25 - 4x6 on 8x10 archival paper
$65 - 12x16 on 13x19 archival paper

Prices include postage and handling.

(Please enjoy this one-act play starring Queen Latifah as "Prison Guard Sister," (PGS) OJ Simpson as OJ Simpson, Paris Hilton as Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan as Lindsay Lohan.)

(PGS brings Paris to her cell for the first time. Paris looks in, shocked and pauses at the entrance.)

Paris: I won't go! I won't! I won't! I won't!

PGS: Yes you will, you emaciated vacuous pox on society.

Paris: That totally cleared up last month!

(Guard shoves her into cell. Paris falls on her face.)

Paris: I can't believe this is actually happening. Is this actually happening? This cell is teensier than Tinkerbell. Tinkerbell? Kinkajou? WAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!! I want my illegal mini-pets!!!



PGS: Maybe you'll make friends with a rat. Yes, this is happening, now shut your trapper and listen. I know you're none too bright, but I am required to explain your new environment to you. This is your shower. This is where you will wash yourself and your own undergarments.

Paris: My what?

Guard: Your undergarments. Your bra. Your panties.

Paris: Silly, I don't wear any panties. Don't you think I look hot in this uniform? It's itchy. Where are all the people ?

Guard: You will be kept apart from the general prison population, Paris.

Paris: Um, like, why? That is not hot. I want to be seen. I want to meet some hot guys. I am totally not afraid of them. They can't be any scarier than Lindsay Lohan two days into detox.





PGS: Has Lindsay Lohan ever committed cold blooded murder?

Paris: I dunno. Once we drank bloody marys till we puked. I WANT to meet other people. Let me out!

PGS: This ain't a party Paris, it's prison. You clearly aren't comprehending anything I'm saying, so I'm just going to introduce you to your roommate, someone even more vilified and violence-inspiring than yourself.

Paris: Oh, no way! Is Nicole here too?

PGS: No. OJ Simpson.

Paris: Who?





PGS: He's a cold-blooded killer


Paris: What? I'm scared! Arnold Schwarzewhatever is totally going to call in a minute and PARDON ME!!!!


OJ: Did you just say schwarze, young lady?

Paris: Yes. No. I don't know. Don't kill me. I don't want to die in this stinky place in this ugly outfit.

OJ: I'm not going to kill you right now. I just want you to know that schwarze means black in German and some people consider it a racial slur. I will kill you if you say it again.

Paris: People are always racist to me too. Why are you in jail?

OJ: I am looking for my wife's killer. It's OK here, except they only serve chicken. It's just chicken, chicken, chicken. I want a delicious steak.

Paris: Ya, so, what do we do now? I feel not rich. It hurts.

PGS: Paris, you have a visitor. I frisked her and found 33 ounces of cocaine and five flasks of vodka. No funny business, y'all. You have five minutes.

Lindsay: Paris! Black guy! What up? I brought a DVD of my new movie "Georgia Rule." I see you have no DVD player or TV, so you can just stare at the cover!!!

Paris: Didn't your stupid movie get like negative seventeen stars?

Lindsay: Ya, something like that. But at least I'm free!! Laytaz, losers!

OJ: I don't like that girl. Not one little bit. She makes me angry.

Paris: Fabulous. Now will someone please get me the %^&(^(*^ out of here?