I Love Urban Legends

I love Urban Legends. The first time the stupid gringo couple bought that rat in Tijuana and tried to import it as a Chihuahua, I laughed myself stupid. I always look for the dead mouse in the soda pop. And even though I’ve never seen the Ghost Hitchhiker, I know a woman whose cousin worked with her neighbour. The neat thing about urban legends is, like Rembrandts, it’s so easy to spot a fake. Street gangs do not have the patience nor the elaborate forethought to drive around town with their headlights off, looking for victims. Petty little sneak thieves don’t take the time and trouble to do unmentionable things with your toothbrush. And regardless of how many people have declared they are Jedi on the census form, the federal government does not recognize it as an official religion. (I checked.) That’s why it’s so cool that the latest urban legend has surfaced as a legitimate news story.

If you missed it, too bad, but here’s the Peanut Gallery version. Apparently, this six-figure American computer programmer, who conveniently works out of his house, decided that rather than working for a living he would pull a General Motors and outsource his job to China. Basically, he hired a Chinese national to do his work for him — at a fifth the price. The Chinese technician is living large in some place called Shenyang, and our boy is fat, smart and happy, getting 80% of his salary for doing nothing. According to all reports, he spends his days watching cat videos on YouTube. Pretty sweet, huh?

Of course, when you think about it, a bunch of WTF questions come to mind. Like how did our American programmer find this Chinese guy in the first place? A want ad in Wired? Or how come the company didn’t notice when there was a daily log-on from China? These are little things, but they raise some serious red flags (no pun intended.) But the telling moment in the whole “news’ story is there’s no who, when or where! The programmer, the company, the timeframe and the city are not named. The only hard “fact,” in any of it, is Shenyang, China, and go ahead and try finding a particular programmer in that town. There’s absolutely no way, from the information given, to check just how true this “news” story really is.

That’s the thing about Urban Legends; they seem plausible. They could be true. A maniacal killer could, on occasion, lurk in the back seat of a car. Dead people could wander rainy midnight roads. And American workers could outsource their jobs. These things are all entirely possible; they’re just not probable.

Yet urban legends are more than simply the lies the Internet tells us. (BTW, Dream Whip™ and ping pong balls do not have the same molecular structure, and Coca-Cola™ was never laced with cocaine.) They are contemporary fables; teaching stories and cautionary tales. They remind us that, as Hamlet once said, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” and tell us to be wary of our world. For example, there’s an urban legend that Kentucky Fried Chicken changed their name to KFC because the USDA discovered that the company had genetically modified their product to such an extent that it could no longer legally be called chicken. Apparently, Kentucky Fried Mutant would have been a marketing disaster, so they went with KFC. This is 100% false (again, I checked.). However, it does demonstrate that there is widespread concern about GMOs and just exactly what is happening to the food we eat. Similarly, our enterprising computer programmer shows us that people are worried that North American jobs are, like the elves of Middle Earth, leaving these shores.

Urban legends are genuine folk tales. Like Aesop’s fables,they give us an allegorical insight into our world and reflect contemporary concerns and attitudes. As sophisticated as we may believe ourselves to be, we still fear the unknown. This is why so many urban legends have a supernatural or demonic element to them.

Unfortunately, as our society gets more complex, so do our urban legends. Real stories get mixed in with the fakes. We might laugh at our computer programmer outsourcing his own job, but what about my sister’s gardener’s brother, who had his identity stolen when terrorists used Face-recognition software on his Facebook profile picture? Then, when he went to collect his lottery jackpot, he was arrested for terrorism…. You can never be too careful in this world.

Children of the Net

There’s a funny little thing happening right now that is going to change our society forever. However, unlike most changes history has encountered, this one is not the deliberate result of layers and layers of knowledge. This new phenomenon is merely an unintended by-product of what was once called the Information Superhighway.

If you are of an age, you remember the family photo albums. These were where the hard copies of your family’s memories were warehoused. They had pictures of aunts and cousins you’d never heard of, a bunch of black and white faces with no names, Christmas trees, birthdays and even the vacation from hell. They were a permanent record of you standing there like a bow-tied midget at some wedding, or flashing your baby bum. All of the good shots and geek shots of the life that was yours. The photo albums were the repository of you and your family’s consciousness, collected and bound and hidden, as if they were precious, in a closet somewhere. And precious they were. There is more than one story of parents braving natural disasters to save the photographs or divorcing couples arguing over baby pictures. As sentiments go, pretty much everybody prizes photographs above all else. They were yours. They belonged to you. In essence, you owned your own memories and could distribute them (share, if you will) as you saw fit. But that was then, and this is now.

Since the time of the photo album, our society has gone through some radical changes: the Internet, digital cameras, email, texting, smartphones, Facebook and Twitter. As the children of the Internet were exploring these new Apps and devices they were recreating themselves as public personae – picking and choosing the best and the brightest for their public faces. Straddled across generational lines (their earliest pictures might still be in the photo albums) they could maintain a semblance of privacy in a tsunami of social networking. Bad hair days were deleted, not uploaded; shoes were shined and despite the ubiquitous “duck face,” everyone put their best foot forward. However, even as they were shaping their newfound publicity they were also growing up and starting to have children of their own.

The children of the children of the Internet are being documented as no other generation. Even before they were born, they swarmed through cyberspace as baby bumps. (God, I hate that term!) Now, as they teeth, talk and waddle around the coffee table, smartphones are snapping every move they make, and with a few finger stokes, uploading their antics across the planet.

This is the Facebook Generation. They are the first generation to be born in the Internet fishbowl and raised in the public domain. Nothing is sacred. They can neither run nor hide. Every developmental step and stutter is being recorded, and the results are available to anyone with a Web connection. As of right now, their individual collective memories, so guarded and cherished by past generations, are no longer their own. For the first time in history, an entire generation will not have the option of deciding for themselves how they want the world to see them. They’re already on permanent display. This will have a profound effect on their future. To them, privacy will no longer be a question open to debate; it simply will not exist.

Without thinking, we have sacrificed our children’s privacy on the altar of Social Networking. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The situation is what it is, and there’s no turning back the clock. However, by denying our kids the right to stumble and make mistakes in private, we have condemned them to live their lives in the public eye. At this point, there’s no way of knowing how well they’re going to handle this relentless public scrutiny. However, I, for one, am glad my teenage friends couldn’t download the details of my potty training and Elizabeth McTavish never saw me looking like a toad in that stupid sailor suit.

Golf is Not a Metaphor for Anything!

I don’t play golf. I don’t know anything about the game. If asked, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a birdie, an eagle, two penguins and a duck, or whatever other fowl they use to keep score. (Personally, I think most games where the lowest score wins are suspect, anyway.) However, that’s not to say I am philosophically opposed to golf. I’m not one of those people who wants to dig up all the golf courses and plant potatoes for the poor or anything. I just don’t see the obsessive enjoyment golfers get from the game. At the risk of pissing off many of my relatives and most of my friends, I have no idea why anyone would want to spend a Sunday morning stumbling around a pasture in the first place. Nor do I see the intrinsic excitement involving in whacking a little white ball with what appears to be a medieval weapon best suited for hand-to-hand combat — especially since the purpose is to somehow drive the ball into a tiny hole that’s normally 200, 300 or an inconceivable 400 yards away. Quite frankly, at that distance, I couldn’t clearly identify a Baltimore Ravens linebacker let alone a hole in the ground that’s the size of a teacup. In fact, I think getting your little white ball even close to the hole it’s supposed to go into is a matter of out and out luck. And actually putting it in with any regularity has got to be wizardry at its most occult – Annika Sorenstam notwithstanding.

However, as much as I could badmouth golf all day, the only reason I’m even writing about it is it has one amazing feature which simply doesn’t exist in any other sport – the Mulligan. For the uninitiated, the Mulligan is basically a do-over. It works like this. You’re standing over your ball, rear back and give it a mighty wallop and it goes someplace unfortunate, like into your opponent’s ear or miraculously through the window of a passing car. Rather than just swear for an hour and get three Budgies (or whatever) on your score card, you can simply declare a Mulligan and do it all again. Obviously, when the big boys are playing the Interplanetary Championship, it’s not allowed (otherwise Tiger Woods would still be hauling in the hardware) but in most friendly games it’s perfectly legal. Weird, huh?

Nobody seems to know where this strange scenario came from (It certainly wasn’t invented by the Scots — who are Presbyterian to the bone) but it’s been around since the first part of the last century. It’s always attributed to some guy named Mulligan. However, after that, the only thing we can say with any certainty is he must have been bigger and meaner than the fellows he was playing with; otherwise they wouldn’t have let him cheat like that. It’s no wonder that this kind of chicanery caught on, though; golfers are notorious for bending the rules. Even before Mary, Queen of Scots, took to the links, golfers were kicking sand on each other’s balls and lying about their handicaps (challenges?) The Mulligan is right up their fairway. Fortunately, this Mulligan nonsense never migrated into more important sports. Third and ten, bottom of the ninth, three seconds left on the Shot Clock: none of that would work at all, if every coach could just holler “Mulligan!” and get to do it over again. (It’s a good thing they can’t, either, or there wouldn’t be a respectable bookie left anywhere from here to Vegas.)

They say sports, like art, imitates life. We have highs and lows, triumphs and defeats, and all the other clichés in between. I imagine there are whole battalions of philosophers out there explaining how the game of golf is a metaphor for life and wouldn’t it be nice if we could all just take a Mulligan when we screw up. Who cares? For my money, reading about golf is probably just as boring as the game itself. Besides, does anybody really want a world with every idiot and his half-witted cousin running around going Groundhog Day on life’s well-manicured pasture, forever trying to get it right?

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