Need another reason to cut back on meat besides personal health and environmentalism [1]? We'll give you two: Pamela Anderson. The buxom model is fed up with the cruelty to animals and she plans to do something about it! Anderson, a strict vegetarian [1], is confronting the problem the way she's learned to confront most problems: by taking her clothes off [2]. She intends to stand naked in Stella McCartney's shop window to raise awareness for PETA. Pam also recently wrote a letter to Kentucky governor Ernie Fletcher demanding that a statue of KFC's Colonel Sanders be taken down on the grounds that the Colonel is an emblem of cruelty to chickens. Anderson recieved a response declining [3] the request. "Colonel Sanders remains a Kentucky icon," Governor Fletcher wrote, adding that Sanders is, in fact, Kentucky's only icon.
When Al Gore told Jay Leno that he was in a big feud with Lindsay Lohan [4], most of us assumed he was joking, especially when Leno asked him what the feud was about and he responded that Lohan "knows what she did." A new preview of a movie called An Inconvenient Proposal [5], though, suggest otherwise. The phony film asserts that we're facing a previously unimagined crisis. Lohan, it seems, has teamed up with global warming [5]. Who knew? On the other hand, we did always wonder if fossil fuel emissions had anything to do with the freakiness of that Friday [6].
It's not incredibly surprising that bling-obsessed Paris Hilton drives an SUV. But we didn't expect a video of Paris [7] tooling around a parking lot to be interesting enough to grace a gossip site. In other news, Charlton Heston owns a rifle, Sam Elliot enjoys steak, and the Marlboro Man is known to smoke the occasional cigarette.
In San Francisco last night, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. appeared as the keynote speaker at the annual Baykeeper [8] Gala. This year's celebration honored Erin Brokovich for her commitment to fighting for the environmental health of those in California's rural areas. Brokovich was made famous in the popular film [9] based on her 1996 battle to protect small town Californians from the Pacific Gas & Electric Company. Rumors abound that a sequel is being discussed with the working title "Erin Brokovich: Still Getting Awards, Ten Years Later."
The stereotype of movie stars as pioneers of yoga [9], Pilates [9], and healthy foods may be fading. The New York Observer reports [10] that Hollywood's leading men are getting fatter and fatter by the minute in order to look like mainstream America. Among the actors named in the story are Vince Vaughn, Will Ferrell, Jack Black, and Brad Pitt. Apparently the film industry hasn't heard that we're living a healthier, greener, more balanced lifestyle. When casting director Lisa Beach was asked why the idealized male image is getting tubbier, she said, "If you are trying to reach the biggest audience, then you're looking for the everyman." No wonder Iggy Pop [11] has only ever been able to land bit parts [12].