Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Paid to Party?

Paid to Party

Well this is interesting (and yes, by interesting I mean absofuckinglutely refuckingtarded):

“According to documents from the "Pledge This!" lawsuit against her obtained by The Smoking Gun, between 2006 and 2007, Paris Hilton banked more than $22 million pushing perfume, Prosecco, clothing and other products. She also made $150,000 for appearing at a Las Vegas nightclub's '07 Halloween party.”

As is this:


“Kevin Federline's fame has since dwindled down to starring in a commercial for Nationwide's "Life Comes at You Fast" ad campaign and appearing on professional wrestling shows. Still, he reportedly banked $175,000 from the Las Vegas nightclub Pure for throwing his 30th birthday bash there.”

Ditto this:

"Take Paris and Nicky Hilton. One well-placed insider says the heiress sisters will haul in $500,000 for ushering in the New Year at trendy Las Vegas nightclub LAX. "

Source:
http://www.forbes.com/2007/12/10/celebrity-hollywood-entertainment-biz-media-cx_kb_1210celebparties.html

Hold on a minute here. I don't follow this celebrity bullshit, so I may be way behind the times on this one, but.....celebrities get paid to fucking party? And not only that, but they get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do it?

WOW. Let's think about this shit for a second:

Neurosurgeon A spends 8 hours in surgery, saving someone's life through meticulous, incredibly complicated, difficult work requiring amazing knowledge, experience, and fine motor skill. We're talking operating on a brain here, people. Neurosurgeon A makes $5000 for this 8 hour, life saving brain surgery.

IT technician A spends 8 hours helping a business recover their important system files, and shoring up their IT infrastructure, thereby saving the company from possible disaster. IT technician A is paid $200 for 8 hours of saving a company by fixing their infrastructure and recovering important files.

Social Worker A spends 8 hours saving kids from abusive families. Social Worker A is paid $175 for 8 hours spent saving kids from abusive families and quite likely saving some of their lives.

Teacher A spends 8 hours doing one of, if not the most, important jobs in existence (seriously, without education we have nothing). Teacher A is paid $250 to spend 8 hours educating the future of humanity.

Celebrity A spends 8 hours drinking and snorting coke at a club while looking sexy. Celebrity A makes $150,000 to sit in a club with their friends (or their 'entourage'), drink alcohol, snort some blow, and look sexy for 8 hours.

Now, I know that the celebrities are paid to go to these places because their presence at these clubs attracts other people (thereby making lots of money for the club), given the way our society works (celebrity worship and all that). However, that's a different indictment of society. Let's stick to the current one, shall we?

So, despite the fact that I completely understand why clubs do this, and ignoring how stupid I think the fact that this shit actually works is, I still feel 100% justified in saying that this is complete, total, utter bullshit and a terrible indictment of the society we have built for ourselves.

Think about it: We have created for ourselves a society in which a person can be paid more in a single night than 80%(+) of people make in a year working hard at their jobs, for the arduous (ha!) task of......partying. People are paid to party in this wonderful society we live in. Not only that, they are paid HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of dollars (a night!) to party.

What kind of monster have we created here? What's the lesson in all of this? I'll tell you what it is (besides being the proverbial pink elephant in the room, only this elephant is 'blinged out'). We have a system where people are now getting famous for doing nothing at all. They are heiresses to a fortune, or they have a sex tape, or were on a 'reality' show, which followed them as they primped and preened and.....partied. They get rich and famous for doing nothing of value in the first place, and then more money and fame are just thrown at them to the point where they get paid to fucking party!

Someone on a forum mentioned that some reality star (with a sex tape!) gets paid $10,000 every time she twitters (tweets?) about some product she hawks for a company. Once again, I understand the concept. The company sees probably 10 times that in revenue, based on the irrationality of humans (again, a separate indictment; perhaps for another blog), so it's worth it to them to pay the ten thousand dollars. However, that still means some airhead bimbo is getting ten thousand dollars for typing a sentence.

So, what is the lesson that I alluded to earlier? Simple: Hey kids, don't bother with that school shit. Education and hard work doesn't pay. Partying pays! Sex tapes pay! Just be a vacuous, vapid, clueless simpleton with collagen and botox injections, fake tits and make a sex tape. Release it online, or have someone else do it (and then pretend to be angry at them!), and then profit. Be on TV, where you will get paid to do nothing at all. Then get paid to hawk products for companies ($10,000 per tweet!), because amazingly, celebrity endorsements somehow still mean something to people. Then, get paid over a hundred thousand dollars to host your birthday party at some club.

Intellect, hard work, meaningful contributions to society, education, furthering the progress of humanity via innovations in science and technology, teaching, saving lives, all of that is shit. Screw it! Why bother? Prostitute yourself and some products and the world will be thrown at your feet. 7th graders don't want to be astronauts anymore. They don't look up to scientists. They don't want to be teachers. They want to be Kim Kardashian (did I spell that right? Ah, who gives a fuck! Can she even spell it? Doubtful.....).

I don't care how much sense it makes for the club owners; it's still fucked up that someone can make $150,00-250,000 in a night. It's even more egregious when you discover that all that person did that evening to 'earn' this money was party. There are people on earth who subsist on dollars a day. On the other hand, our best minds, who spent decades in school in order to enhance this mind, will make that much money.....in a year! If that! We're talking about doctors, scientists, professors, etc. People who are contributing in a real, positive, and meaningful way. It's absolutely CRAZY that they have to work for a whole year to make what Paris Hilton makes in one night of partying.

And then you have the people in the middle. They aren't doctors, or engineers, or social workers. They also aren't the destitute people to whom I alluded earlier. They are office administrators. Salespersons. Technologists. Janitors. Supervisors. Security guards. Police officers. Fire fighters. Nurses. Schoolteachers. Counselors. Social Workers. Servers. Garbage Collectors. Bartenders. Small business owners. Grocers. Etc. c Average, everyday working people who work hard for a living. These people aren't poor, for the most part, and they certainly aren't rich. They cover the expanse of the so called middle class. Some in the upper echelons of such; others in the lower and middle. All getting by, many comfortable, but none free from the constraints of middle class life.

Bills, children, mortgages, retirement funds, and the constant threat of their little slice of the pie crumbling down around them with a few bad moves on Wall Street. These people earn anywhere from $20-90,00 a year, roughly. D These people, it could be argued, don't do anything extraordinary. They are, for the most part, replaceable. In terms of their vocation, of course. And so, the argument goes, that's why they make what they do. If you put them in place of Paris Hilton, that club doesn't make a dime. Put them on screen in place of Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt, and the result is the same. No money made for anyone. The people who are paid these exorbitant amounts of money are paid such because they draw (wrestling vernacular for bring in money/crowds.....what? I recently read Mick Foley's autobiography, leave me alone!).

And boy, do they draw. A Hollywood blockbusters can bring in a hundred million dollars in a single weekend. More, even (of course, COD: BO made, what, a billion in one day?). So it makes sense that the people who are a big part of the reason this happens are paid their cut. You make a club $1000,000, you get paid $100,000. You make a movie studio $200,0000,000, you make $20,000,000. f So, I understand why they make so much money. At the end of the day, it's our fault. We, the consumer, created this monster. We fed this beast night after night, week after week, year after year, deca- well, you get the point. It grew and grew and grew and we kept feeding it and now it's so fat it can't leave the house and will likely continue to grow until we have to build an entirely new house around it.

All of this is true, and yet, it changes nothing, because at the end of the day, an uneducated, spoiled, shallow as can be fucking simpleton heiress is pulling in $150,000 for a night's.....well, partying. And we haven't even gotten to Paris Hilton yet! (In the words of Dr. Sheldon Cooper, PhD, Bazinga!). This is still a fucking problem. It's insane! It's absolutely, stark raving mad, fuck your children and eat them alive with some fava beans and a nice Chianti infuckingSANE! D I don't know what else I can add to this. I've already rambled on for some time. I mean, really, people are being paid over a hundred motherfucking thousand goddamn fucking dollars a fuckin NIGHT, A NIGHT! To PARTY! That shit sort of speaks for itself, does it not?

What do you guys think? Let me know in the comment section, and if you're as annoyed by this as I am, grab your torches and meet at my place at 7pm! (Note: This blog does not advocate violence. Usually.)

2 comments:

  1. Totally missed your torch mob. How did that go?

    Anyways... I agree with you. I understand how this works.. but that doesn't make it any better. In fact, it makes it worse. That masses of people actually look up to these celebrities so much that are easily swayed; they will go to these clubs, buy the products, etc.

    I honestly don't see the appeal. I am not someone who is easily swayed by advertisement. In fact, I can't think of one piece of advertisement that has made me think "ok, I'll get that." I never looked up to celebrities when I was growing up. Hell, I didn't even know most of their names.

    But this makes me different than the usual crowd I suppose.

    It is a good thing that there are people who want to be doctors, teachers, scientists, etc, despite the terrible pay comparison.

    Also, I want to add that those of us in the middle class, who work at grocery stores, janitors, etc, this is still important work. How else would products get out? Things be cleaned? Food be produced and sold to the masses? The list goes on. Some leisure and luxury is good too, so selling products for these purposes (and all that entails) is still important to society (and also helps the economy in complicated ways).

    Yeah, I'm not feeling very articulate at this moment. So I hope my point got across. Basically I agree with you. Bullshit.

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  2. Hm...I can't decide what's worse: Paris Hilton getting paid $150,000 to party, or Sarah Palin getting paid $100,000 to speak... Seriously, they pay that empty-headed cunt that much money to show up and verbally defecate all over crowds of people.

    Perhaps after August 2nd comes and goes, and our two dumbass political parties still can't come to an agreement on what to do about the national debt, and we default on our loans and China repossesses the country...maybe our new Chinese overlords can whip this country back into shape, because we're sure as shit not going to figure out how to do it ourselves...

    And if we're really lucky, there's still the 2012 apocalypse to look forward to! :D

    ReplyDelete

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