I stopped next to one of those Smart cars at some traffic lights on Tuesday, and couldn't help noticing that the young woman behind the wheel was the spitting image of Paris Hilton.
Then it hit me. Somewhere inside my skull, a remarkably complex network of neurons is being used to store an image of Paris Hilton, along with assorted trivia about her that I won't go into here—this is a family website. Now, there is another set of neurons storing the memory of some poor, unsuspecting girl in a black Smart car. I would surely have forgotten all about her by now, were it not for Paris Hilton.
Paris Hilton is using up space in my brain, and I want it back.
I have far more important uses for my grey matter than storing crap about talentless, American no-marks. Last weekend, for instance, I went upstairs, then realised I had no idea why I had gone up there. Yesterday, I referred to a colleague using the name of a different colleague—I do that all the time. And I still don't have the vaguest recollection of what happened on that pub-crawl with Carolyn all those years ago that she keeps winding me up about.
My brain has limited capacity. It has important jobs to do. Knowing who the shit Paris Hilton is isn't one of them.
Postscript: Less than 24 hours after I wrote the above, I was doing a calculation at work and suddenly realised that I couldn't remember what four times nine is. I knew it would start with a three and the digits would add up to nine, but I couldn't remember what the answer was off the top of my head. I had to work it out by adding 18 to 18 instead.
Paris Hilton has robbed me of 36. Which, by an amazing co-incidence is her IQ.
But you can't control things like that! If you take this reasoning to it's (il)logical conclusion then you would deny vacuous "celebrities" other finite resources. What about oxygen, for example? Come to think of it, maybe you do have a point.