Slate is running a piece by Paul Sabin on the Death Stuff. There’s not much new there, but it links to us, so I’m linkin’ back.
Much juicier is their hilarious article up about the celeb/green/media stuff we covered here, particularly Cameron Diaz’s Trippin’. I must say, mocking celebrities is cheap and easy and kind of pointless.
But it’s still pretty fun:
Trippin’ is about ecology in the same way that Charlie’s Angels is about feminism — it obliquely reminds you how kick-ass it would be if the problem didn’t exist in the first place, while simultaneously allowing you to watch blond girls take their clothes off. The Charlie’s Angels connection makes it all the more fitting that last week’s episode featured Diaz’s fellow angel, Drew Barrymore. Together, the two marveled at the radical simplicity of the indigenous Chilean people (this show’s condescension toward the “exotic” communities it visits could be the subject of an entire doctoral dissertation) while discoursing on the importance of buying recycled toilet paper.
Barrymore is a 30-year-old woman, and Diaz is 32 — a fact I mention only to contextualize such dialogue as:
(During a canoe trip after a campout):
Barrymore: I took a poo in the woods hunched over like an animal … awesome.
Diaz: (laughing) I’m so jealous right now. I’m going to the woods tomorrow.
Barrymore: It was awesome.
After the two return from separate guided hikes:
Diaz: Did you learn so much?
Barrymore: Oh my God yeah. So intense … with the loving and feeling and tree-touching and the learning.
At one point, an unnamed tour guide (all the unfamous people on Trippin’ are unnamed, except for the Exotic Brown Person of the week) tells the girls that every second, the Chilean rain forest loses an area equal to two football fields. A similar process seems to be at work in Drew Barrymore’s brain, as she visibly decompensates during the course of her journey. Reaching the top of the hill after one ecotourist trek, Drew’s only response to the gorgeous vista before her is to burst into uncontrollable laughter — not a “witnessing the simple joy of God’s creation” laughter, more like a “peaking on Ecstasy” kind of laughter. Watching her dissolve over and over again, able to repeat only, “I’ve got the giggles. I’ve got the giggles,” I felt a special new brand of embarrassment I’ve never experienced before — one obviously shared by her baffled guides, one of whom asked, “I don’t see what’s so funny out there. Could you show me?”
