Paris Hilton Goes To Shanghai And Nothing Else

Paris Hilton, as we've all been forced to hear for months now, is a changed woman, and now that she's out of prison once and for all, everything she'll ever do for the rest of her life will be for the greater good of mankind.

And yesterday Paris Hilton flew to Shanghai to prove this by, um, mooching around The Bund and doing some shopping and stuff. OK, while that might not seem like an especially mankindy sort of act, but bear with us - while in Shanghai, Paris Hilton is going to attend the Asian MTV Style awards. Again, a wonky-eyed internet pornstar tip-tapping around Shanghai just so that she can listlessly clap her hands at some people who've been deemed to wear clothes fairly well might not seem like the sort of thing that'd make a wider difference to humanity, but really it is - now that it has to suffer seeing Paris Hilton everywhere, maybe the people of Shanghai will learn why everyone in the west is so uptight all the time.

Bloody Thanksgiving. While it might be alright for the people who actually celebrate it, the rest of us are just left with a sneaking suspicion that the whole thing was invented by the pilgrims to leave hecklerspray with nothing to write about for a couple of days each November. Because nothing has happened today. Literally nothing. And there are only so many pictures of Ally McBeal feeding soup to homeless people that one can take without feeling the need to do a dirty protest at the explosive dullness of it all.

But, hey, Paris Hilton has gone to Shanghai. So that'll do.

This is the same Paris Hilton, you'll remember, who recently decided not to go to Rwanda and announced how much she didn't care about drunk elephants. So from that we can determine that while Paris Hilton can't be doing with starving children or elephants slurring their words and falling over, she's a sucker for being trailed for miles by men trying to sell her cheap fake Rolex watches in broken English and almost being decapitated by omnipresent near-invisible kite-strings.

In actual fact, Paris Hilton hasn't gone to Shanghai for any desperately important reason - she's just gone to attend the MTV Style Awards that are being held in the city, which admittedly sounds like an even-more vacuous version of every other MTV awards show, only with the added bonus of not having to watch Britney Spears clomp around the stage like a lead-booted Moomin lip-syncing to a song that it's never heard before.

But the awards aren't held until tonight, which is why Paris Hilton spent yesterday swanning around the - admittedly beautiful - city like some sort of slow-witted tourist. Strolling along The Bund clasping a stuffed toy panda and meandering through the crowds in the gorgeous Yu Yuan Gardens drinking flower tea were literally both of the things that Paris Hilton did yesterday before giving a press conference about it, where about the most note-worthy - not to mention suspiciously PR-drilled sounding - quote was:

"Shanghai looks like the future!"

Let's not be too hard on Paris Hilton for essentially broadening her global horizons, though - all she's really doing by going to Shanghai is furthering the centuries-old tradition of cultural exchange between east and west. For instance, China has given us tea, glazed proto-porcelain and silk, and we've returned the favour by giving them a clueless-looking drink-driving failed popstar with a crappy reality TV show and a handy sideline in getting boned by blokes on the internet. Seems fair to us.