Paris Hilton has, at this point, been around long enough, and consistently enough, that there's something comforting about her. Whatever's happening in the world, however bad the economy, Paris abides. She's like some kind of oblivious heiress from a 1930's screwball comedy, so maybe it's no coincidence that it feels really good to read her words of wisdom right now. It seems almost unfair for Esquire to just compile a bunch of sound bites: it would make anyone sound ridiculous. And it's not like, historically, Paris Hilton has been such a difficult target in that regard. Does she say absurd things? Yes. But she also says some reasonable ones! Get your death, taxes and Paris fix here:

Asinine:
"I put pheromones in a lot of my fragrances, and that attracts people to you. My new fragrance is called Fairy Dust. I'm dressed kind of like Tinkerbell."

"Trust is just a feeling that you have."

Thoughtful-ish:
"I always send thank-you notes. If somebody has done something really special for me, I'll make them a collage of pictures or a little piece of art."

"You may not be able to be hot when you're seventy-five in a conventional sense. Like, young people won't think you're hot. But your husband will, and so will people your own age."

"I'm not jealous. I don't understand why people are jealous. You have so much better karma in life when you wish other people the best."

Ludicrous:
"Having a nightclub in your house really helps for having a party, because then you don't need to go out."

"Once I've worn a dress, I can never wear it again. I give them to charities and they auction them off to help people with breast cancer, multiple sclerosis, and AIDS. Some that are really, really special, I keep in storage for my daughters. They'll be vintage by then. I think my daughters will love them."

"Because of my last name and the way I look, some people think I'm a spoiled brat. But I'm not like that at all. I'm one of the most down-to-earth people I know out of anyone in Hollywood."

Paris Hilton: What I've Learned [Esquire]

Dr. Rod Martin, a psychologist who wrote The Psychology of Humor, says that conservatives are happier than liberals in general, and therefore more prone to a good chuckle. “A conservative outlook rationalizes social inequality, accepting the world as it is, and making it less of a threat to one’s well-being, whereas a liberal outlook leads to dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and a sense that things need to change before one can be really happy," Martin tells the Times.

Or maybe, as Tierney posits, social scientists are a hugely liberal group and while they think they're noncomformists who are dissatisfied with the world, they're actually just as closed-minded as conservatives! "Maybe the stereotype of the dour, rigid conservative has more to do with social scientists’ groupthink and wariness of outsiders," Tierney says.

Another explanation: the jokes that researchers told the study's participants were completely lame. I mean, has anyone been entertained by a joke about golfing since the Ford administration? Either way, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives alike can giggle at the above picture of George W. molesting a bunny.

Obama and McCain Walk Into a Bar… [NY Times]

First, Schoff. He slipped into the septic tank in his backyard while trying to get a piece of toilet paper unstuck. The writer fantasizes about punching Joel Osteen in the face the whole way to Schoff's house but Schoff doesn't have much to tell him about the experience:

"Didn't smell s'bad. Smelled like dirt, mostly. I was covered in it. Dirt, and some other stuff. I'm a celebrity. There goes the guy from TV. Last time I went to church was probably thirty-five years ago…No, I wasn't angry. I'm pretty active. I was thinking I was dead. Got m' good days and m' bad days.

Then, Gisele. Did you know Gisele owns some sort of extended-stay hotel in Santa Monica? That's about the most revealing thing we learn here:

Look, I know who I am, and I know where I come from. I think there is danger obviously when you're really young and they make you all glamorous and then you start thinking you are that… This is exactly how I would describe my work: I get there, I put on the clohtes, I leave it on the hanger, and I go home. And that's what I do.

And finally, Michael Caine. Would you believe he's been married to his wife for 35 years? That's just one year longer than the amount of time Bob Schoff has been married to his wife! Caine is in a higher tax bracket, of course. He talks about that. The tax rate used to be 82% in California, you know. (Wait, can I get the math on this? And think we could try it again sometime?) What else does he say? Not a whole lot. But this passage stuck out. For obvious reasons.

Is it true that in the '60s you used to drink two bottles of vodka a day? My God, that's impossible I used to drink a lot. Yeah. Vodka's very easy to drink and very nice. You can drink it with a lot of stuff.
Yeah, but two bottles a day. How would you work or sleep? Or eat? When would you have time to do anything? Along with eighty cigarettes!
It's a very long day. But I didn't do that when I was working. And I don't do that now That was a long time ago.

And he probably doesn't remember any of it. Anyway, that GQ, they sure tried! But I guess for now it's summer, and the only thing to do is drink it away.

I'm to the point where it don't add up I can't say I've come this far with my guitar on pure dumb luck That's not to say i know it all 'Cause everytime I get too high up on my horse I fall

'Cause I've got
Somethin' lifting me up
Somethin' holding me down
Somethin' to give me wings and
Somethin' to keep my feet on the ground
I've got all I need,
Jesus and gravity

But I'm as bad as anyone
Taking all these blessings in my life for granted one by one
When I start to thinkin' it's all me
Well somethin' comes along and knocks me right back on my knees

I've always been misunderstood because of how I look.
Don't judge me by the cover 'cause I'm a real good book.
So read into it what you will, but see me as I am.
The way I look is just a country girl's idea of glam.

No yeah, I'm thinking way too hard.

Dolly Parton's Subversive Message [NYT]
Related: On The Scene: Dolly Parton (And the Biz's Best Stage Banter [EW]

Earlier: Dolly Parton Enthusiasts Give New Meaning To The Term "Fanatic"
Dolly Parton Blames Tits For Postponing Tour, But Is An Eating Disorder To Blame?
Amy Sedaris Stars In Dolly Parton's New Video

[Graphic design by Cheryl Campbell]

KH: I'm sure a lot of readers will know about this movie because there's a lot of pictures of you in Malibu.

MM: I heard that.

KH: In the tabloids, yeah. A lot of pictures with your shirt off.

MM: Yeah.

KH: OK, so I have another question. Explain your trailer living. Why do you like to live in a trailer?

MH: When I came back from Australia, I had life down to one backpack.

KH: Yeah, that was your thing. You wanted to fit everything in a backpack. What does that tell you?...

MM: Fine. Let me just say this. It's easier to pull it off when it is summer. But it's harder when it's wintertime. Because warm clothes take up more room.

But no, he really is like that: Anna tells me he found the motto "Just Keep Livin" in a self-help book.

Maybe I should have left right then and there. I've always had a soft spot for impunity, ever since it gave me the uh "courage" to write my first hundred word sentence. On the other hand, the "fixing broken windows" people have a lot of fair points, too. Like the Harper's folks point out:

Human experience also teaches—since the first formation of human communities—that when the state fails to enforce order, to identify crimes as crimes and to punish them swiftly and certainly, crimes proliferate.

We have a community of 180,000 contractors in Iraq...This community consists entirely neither of angels or devils, but of ordinary human beings, most of whom undoubtedly try to act honorably in fulfilling their duties.

What the Jamie Leigh Jones Story Teaches Us [Harper's]
"What, Don't You Always End Up In Need Of Reconstructive Surgery After A Night Of Good Consensual Sex?"
Defense Contractors: If It Wasn't For Diplomatic Immunity-Protected Rape, They'd Never Get Laid

Let us pause to note that Mrs. Clinton, if gamahucheed, would be the first woman to become president after her husband had sex with an intern in the Oval "Big Dick" Office.

Three wanks after Nixon was gone, we got the Watergate "Jerkoff" Congress and with it, the jerking new Democratic "Hard-on" Party. In lieu of the old Democratic "Scrotscrubber" Party, which lost wars out of incompetence and naiveté, the new Democratic "Mistress Anal" Party would lose bangs on purpose.

Let's see! Both Sicko and Paris are reflections of the side-effects of a system that has swallowed two many years of the juvenile ideology that the market is a fair and efficient and virtuous thing. Sometimes the market fucks up! How else to explain the absurd amount of intelligent manpower dedicated to covering the nonevents of the life of a total retard like Paris? The hundreds of video cameras and telephoto lenses and news organizations and bloggers and... it's not a misappropriation of resources on the scale of, say, the Iraq War, but you see what I'm getting at. At some point the American economy has to stop rewarding people simply for being pretty and hateful and making dudes want to fuck you! At some point it has to look out for its citizens and pay for their hospital visits. Because that is what grown-up countries do.

If nothing else Paris has always consistently been blond and tan and vacant and materialistic and selfish. She upheld the beauty ideal I learned from Barbie and Abercrombie & Fitch catalogs and the notion of the rational homo economicus I learned from Adam Smith. (Which is to say, Adam Smith, Wikipedia entry of.) Paris is what a real hot girl tries to look like and how a real hot girl is taught to act.

And as many of us know, across much of the land, non-heiresses who look like Paris Hilton become pharmaceutical sales reps. Pharmaceutical sales reps canvass the country in short skits and company cars doling out free Viagra and sometimes blowjobs to doctors. No, really. They also bring them candy, notebooks, pizza, beer, wine, money, furniture, vacations, and a weird form of reliable companionship. They are paid a salary and get commissions on the number of prescriptions their target doctors write.

Doctors play along with this because their lives kind of suck. They bought into some semblance of job security when they signed up for four years of medical school, but their days are spent haggling or hiring people to haggle with patients' insurance companies. Balancing the correct number of treatments and procedures and hospital days to maximize the reimbursement a doctor gets on a patient he or she is treating can be a high art. Meanwhile doctors' own insurance, covering the malpractice, usually costs somewhere in the six figures annually. And so it has become popular for those in the medical profession to take freebies from — and throw "bones" to — pharma reps in the form of unnecessary prescriptions, in much the same way it's become popular for them to seek out specialties in which they can avoid insurance. Hence: Pillhead.

Hence: That $65 bottle of alcohol dependence pills I didn't need, to accompany the still patent-protected $85 bottle of name-brand amphetamines I use to cope with this job, which ought to provide health benefits but I still can't figure out the fucking paperwork.

Also hence: Implants!

For years the pharma reps have been worrying about/waiting to pounce on Sicko, and clucking away on their message boards over who among them Michael Moore would mock relentlessly on his film. (I read pharma message boards sometimes, for the sophomoric humor and funny porn.) They'll be disappointed to learn Moore didn't pay them much mind in his film. When he dwells, it's on the American system's more woebegone victims and various European systems' more photogenic and charmed beneficiaries. He almost ignores the pill-making industry entirely, possibly because it's big enough to fill another movie, but mostly because he's not trying to make a comprehensive (or unbiased or, ahem, prescriptive film; he's mainly, as usual, trying to rise above ideology and appeal to Americans' latent long-forgotten sense of decency. Decent citizens, in Moore's eyes, don't object to paying slightly higher taxes for a benefit all humans should have. And some pharma reps, what do you know, are decent human beings:

OP here- former Area manager, national manager, blah blah blah, lots of background in pharmaceuticals .....there is a reason that the feds, Michael Moore and the public in general are getting more militant....the system is breaking down...driven by greed... You can quote Adam Smith, Marx, the PMA, and the AMA...It's of no importence. The economy of America can no longer afford our present system...It's really that simple.

The same could be said for this pop culture we have. Where in the past, my relationship with Paris Hilton had been merely transactional — giving her hits got me hits — the moment she screamed out for her mommy in the courtroom (a scream I didn't actually hear, but it seemed to disturb Greta Van Susteren) the story turned into, well, an actual story. After years of consistent, unabashed, on-message vapidness, Paris gave us a desperate, unscripted, and for once unprofitable moment. Here was a spoiled idiot who really really really did not want to go back to jail, despite the fact that no way was any publisher going to cough up the rumored million dollar advance for a prison diary boasting two days in prison. The idea that she was legitimately afraid, or addicted, or depressed, or capable of feeling anything other than the rational greed of Economic Man, was somehow hopeful. Maybe one of these days, one felt, she would grow the fuck up. In the meantime, we could stop paying such close attention to her and maybe grow up ourselves.

Because when our insurance drops us as a patient once we come down with cervical cancer, crying out for Mommy is... well, our mommy isn't Kathy Hilton.

• Americans' chances at getting a fake Gucci bag or fake Chanel sunglasses just decreased, big time. Last night brought about one of the largest counterfeit busts in recent history, with 29 people arrested, $230 million in merchandise seized, and $1 million in cash found and collected. [WWD]
  
• We love J. Crew, but a line of apparel for dogs? Puh-leeze. [WWD, 2nd item]
  
• Jessica Simpson will debut her first fragrance in July 2008. And we suspect it will smell like a tasteful mixture of collagen, hair extensions, tears, and Nick Lachey and John Mayer's crotches, respectfully. [WWD, 1st item]
  
• Nike profits skyrocket 32%. Say thank you, China! [WSJ]

• Not so surprising news: Renee Zellweger is the new face for Saks Fifth Avenue's breast cancer awareness initiative, Key for the Cure. Really surprising news: Renee reports that she wears Juicy Couture "pretty much everyday." So Renee is starving and no better dressed than Paris Hilton? This situation is much more dire than we initially suspected. [WWD, sub req'd]
• The city of Chicago is announcing that it will be staging it's third-annual Fashion Week this year. We have a feeling Oprah will be all over this. [WWD, sub req'd]
• What? Topshop has other designers other than Kate Moss? And what? They are actually designers by trade??? Stop this crazy talk! [Vogue UK]
• Tired Lauren Goldstein Crowe question of the day: "Halston and Harvey Weinstein: Good idea or bad idea financially?" Yawn. Who cares about finances when you have Rachel Zoe consulting on design?! [Portfolio]
• Miuccia Prada goes out on a limb and refers to her designs as "very European." [IHT]