I admit to slacking on the job lately when it comes to celebrity-watching (though it’s great sport). It did filter through the din that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie had their baby last weekend, in Africa. I didn’t realize, however, that they occupied Namibia:

Over the past six weeks a Western security force has effectively taken over the small African nation of Namibia. A beach resort in Langstrand in Western Namibia has been sealed off with security cordons, and armed security personnel have been keeping both local residents and visiting foreigners at bay. A no-fly zone has been enforced over part of the country. The Westerners have also demanded that the Namibian government severely restrict the movement of journalists into and out of Namibia. The government agreed and, in a move described by one human rights organisation as ‘heavy-handed and brutal’, banned certain reporters from crossing its borders.

However, this Western security force is not a US or European army plundering Namibia’s natural resources or threatening to topple its government. It is the security entourage of one Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the celebrity couple better known for living it up in LA than slumming it in Namibia. They reportedly wanted their first child to be born in Namibia because the country is ‘the cradle of human kind’ and it would be a ‘special’ experience (1). And it seems that no security measure is too stringent in the name of making Ms Jolie feel special. Welcome to the new celebrity colonialism.

The author of this piece, Brendan O’Neill, is a little harsh on celebrities who go to Africa or some other poor place to make themselves feel “special” and do some gratuitous moral posturing in the process. And he paints my boy Bono with the same broad brush as Brangelina.

Come now! I can’t get too upset about this. It’s just too funny. This is the same couple that spread themselves over 60 pages of W magazine last summer, posing as a 1960s married couple, when they weren’t yet officially out as a romantic couple in real life—in other words, they went totally tabloid on themselves—

(Steven Klein Studio, Inc.)

and now they shut down an African country to get some privacy for the birth of their baby.

It’s too delicious!

Sacha Baron Cohen portrays Kazakhstan’s sixth most famous man and a leading journalist from the State run TV network in the comedy Borat (due sometime this year).

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Borat, here’s a little background from the New Yorker:

[T]he press secretary for the Embassy of Kazakhstan, wants to clear up a few misconceptions about his country. Women are not kept in cages. The national sport is not shooting a dog and then having a party. You cannot earn a living being a Gypsy catcher. Wine is not made from fermented horse urine. It is not customary for a man to grab another man’s khrum. “Khrum” is not the word for testicles.

These falsehoods, and many others, have been spread by Borat, a character on “Da Ali G Show,” which recently finished its second season on HBO. Like Ali G, Borat is played by Sacha Baron Cohen, a British comedian who specializes in prank interviews. As Borat, Cohen has told a dating service that he is looking for a girl with “plow experience,” persuaded a meeting of Oklahoma City officials to observe a ten-minute silence in memory of the (fictitious) Tishnik Massacre, and, most notably, led a country-and-Western bar in a sing-along of “In My Country There Is Problem,” whose chorus goes: “Throw the Jew down the well / So my country can be free / You must grab him by his horns / Then we have a big party.”

I gotta say, I find it fascinating that Sacha Baron Cohen is a cousin of Simon Baron Cohen

Professor of Developmental Psychopathology and Director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University.

Interesting discussion of the professor’s controversial theory of autism as a manifestation of the “extreme male brain” here.

I’m not telling my own archetype, but I invite you to have a laugh figuring out where you belong.

(via Hit and Run)