Some of you were openly skeptical when Paris Hilton said she was going to start crusading for good after her stint in the slammer. Scoff no more – she’s taken on the issue of drunken elephants on a tear.
That’s… odd.
One of my pet peeves with the entertainment industry as a whole is that the entire industry seems to take on a single cause at the same time (which is a great thing for THAT cause) instead of spreading their fame around.
Paris Hilton went completely off the radar here, as strange as this cause seems to be, and I’m kind of proud of her for that.
Good Lord.
Drunken Elephants AGAIN.
I swear, I just heard a story about the Drunken Elephant of Salem, Massachusetts on Suday. Apparently one of the 19th century Salem merchants or captains bought an elephant and brought it back to Salem. He didn’t realize how much elephants drink – even baby elephants (which this one evidently was), and they had to supplement its intake on the voyage home with the sailor’s ration beer.
By the time they rweached Salem, the elephant didn’t want water – it insisted on beer.
For years, the family had a business going where they displayed the elephant in a tent for a price. For a further investment you could buy a beer (at inflated costs, I’m sure) and give it to the elephant to drink, right from the bottle.
Eventually, they sold the elephant to a travelling circus. One night up in Maine, the elephant got seriously soused, broke free, and got itself shot by a no doubt confused farmer. There is supposedly a monument to it there in Alfred Maine.
Maybe Paris could use this story as a cautionary tale.
This site attests to an elephant monument there:
http://www.maine.rr.com/PIRR/features/camerahunter/default6_1.asp
Curiously, this seems to be one that the folks at Roadside America don’t know about.
Wrote too soon. RA does have the story, but tells it differently than I heard it, and puts her in Somers, New York, although it acknowledged that both deatrh and burial took place in Alfred Maine:
Friends don’t let friends drive drunk elephants. Or Paris Hilton.
Anyway, she’s hardly the big philanthropist here. She just hates that the elephants are getting to her booze.
Celebrities who go on crusades tend to be concerned with cute animals than they do people. Like when Pamela Anderson kept abreast of the way KFC tortured all those poor chickens.
C’mon. That’s from the Onion, right?
That was exactly what I asked supervenusfreak when he told me about it.
Do drunk elephants see pink humans?
OK, that one got me.
Paris, baby… India is, admittedly, one of the world’s simpler cultures to understand, probably the result of it being so uniform and small and new, but you’re not really qualified to speak about it. What I’m trying to say is… we don’t want you to feel that you have to say things that are deep. We just want you to go away and not say anything at all when cameras are around.
I remember reading a story about two Yankees (here used in its original sense meaning “shrewd New Englanders”) buying an elephant, getting into a huge argument, and one demanding that his partner buy him out. When the partners couldn’t agree upon a price, the first Yankee aimed a rifle at the elephant’s right side and when his partner started screaming he told him “Don’t worry. I’m only going to shoot my half!” (whereupon the partner of course bought him out at agreed on price).
Any idea if it’s the same elephant?
YOU have to appreciate the sincerity in her statement:
Considering the lack of agreement between the story I was told and the one on the Roadside America page, I couldn’t swear that it wasn’t the same elephant. But I’m starting to look at all drunken elephant stories now with a jaundiced eye.
I see what you mean. I’m starting to look at jaundiced elephants with a drunken eye, too. From what I have read for years, most drunken elephants aren’t getting into ready-made booze. They simply have lunch in a spot where the berries are all ripe. The berries ferment in the bathtub-sized belly of the beast. Then the elephants start picking fights and singing “You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille.” It’s not a pretty sight. :eek:
What’s fascinating is that English has hundreds of millions of speakers and has existed in some form for more than 1,000 years, and yet that’s probably the first time that sentence, constructed of familiar words, has ever been written.
I opened this thread with trepidation, praying to a God I don’t even believe in that Paris did not choose to support any cause I support. I think it is wonderful she has apparently found her own *cause célèbre * to support and I am thankful it was not Clean Water, Clean Air or AGW.
She has the potential to bring publicity that is far more negative to any cause she supports than positive. I think she chose wisely in this non-American issue. I doubt she can hurt the cause that sounds worthy. I say “good for her” and “very good for the causes the rest of us do support”.
Jim
As with any thread of this nature, I will respond with what I think is very appropriate.
Who the HELL is Paris Hilton? 
Well, maybe Ms Anderson feels she can relate to the birds.
Leave BRITNEY ALONE!