What's with elephants these days?

Why is http://elefanten.blogspot.com called elefanten? What's with the White Stripes album "Elephant"? And why did Gus Van Sant call his latest film "Elephant"?

An answer to the last question at least can be found here:

1. Van Sant based his title on another film: a much-admired 1989 BBC work by the late British filmmaker Alan Clarke. Clarke’s Elephant strips away narrative to depict Northern Ireland’s sectarian violence as a relentless, anonymous march of murders. Clarke titled his film after the mordant saying about a problem that is as easy to ignore as an elephant in the living room.

2. Initially, Van Sant thought Clarke’s title referred to the ancient parable of the blind men and the elephant.

In the story, a version of which appears in Buddhist canons dated 2 B.C., several blind men examine different parts of an elephant – ear, leg, tail, trunk, tusk, etc. Each blind man is firmly convinced that he understands the true nature of the animal, based on that one part he felt – that the elephant is like a fan, or a tree, or a rope, or a snake or a spear. But none sees the whole.

For Van Sant the parable’s theme seemed apt in the context of school shootings. "I assumed Alan Clarke called his film Elephant because it was about a problem that was hard to identify, because of different ways of looking at it," he says. "That was what I thought for a long time, until I read a quote where Clarke said that it was the elephant in the living room. But for us, when were making our film, it was more about the blind men."

So far Van Sant's explanation. However there are other stories people came up with. Here are two great ones:

3. I like to think that the title is a reference to Hemingway's short story, "Hills Like White Elephants." In that story, Hemingway describes the actions of characters as they sit waiting for a train, and we hear their dialogue. But the narrator offers no analysis or insight into these lives--we are left to figure them out for ourselves. "Elephant" the film uses the exact same strategy--it shows us these lives, but it does so unobtrusively, and we must draw our own conclusions.

4. Because Elephants never forget.

PLUS: If you look real closely to the film: there is a slow pan around Alex his room during the scene where he's playing the piano. One of the last things you can see before the camera returns to him is a drawing of an elephant on his wall.