The Citizen, 2015-09-03, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2015. PAGE 5.
The barista looks me up and
down, smiles and asks “So, where ya
from?”
This is more than annoying, it’s
crazy-making. This barista lives on an
island. I live on the same island. I’ve
been living here for 20 years. A couple
of times a month as I’m walking through
town or lined up to pay for something,
somebody will look me up and down,
smile, and ask some variation of “Where ya
from?”
It’s not their fault – it’s mine. I look like a
tourist.
Not that I try to. I don’t wear a Tilley fedora,
I avoid shirts with palm trees and surf boards
on them. I can’t remember the last time I slung
a camera around my neck. Still, strangers look
at me and something in their brains says
‘tourist’.
This goes ‘way back to my days as an
international movie star.
True story. I was a 25-year-old vagabond
sitting in a Madrid cafe, on a break from
hitchhiking my way through Europe. As I
nursed my cafe con leche I suddenly felt the
hairs on the back of my neck doing a little
impromptu tango.
Somebody was staring at me.
Unfortunately it wasn’t a smoldering
senorita, it was an oily little guy in a beret
sitting at a corner table. He sidled over and
when he realized I didn’t speak Spanish,
switched to broken English.
“You lahk to make mon-ee?” he asked.
I allowed as how my wallet could use a top-
up. What was he proposing – selling blood?
Becoming a drug mule? ‘Losing’ my passport?
I didn’t need money that badly.
But his answer stunned me. “I wan to put
you in a film.”
Well, FINALLY! I thought. I knew that
Lana Turner had been scouted for the
movies when an agent saw her sitting at the
counter of the Top Hat Malt Shop in
Hollywood. Pamela Anderson was discovered
in the stands at a BC Lions football game
filling out a Labatt Blue t-shirt. Harrison
Ford was working as a carpenter when
somebody thought he might look good playing
Han Solo in Star Wars. And now my turn had
come.
This, I smirked to myself, is how
stars are born.
We negotiated a bit. The money he
was offering was pathetic, frankly, but this
was Spain, not Hollywood. Not yet,
anyway.
Besides, he was promising a week’s work
minimum and all the food I could eat on set. I
signed the contract – which was even more
bewildering than most contracts as it was in
Spanish.
As I gave him back his pen I asked him what
it was about me that made him think I
belonged up there on the silver screen. Was it
my fine and manly baritone? My regal
bearing? My noble profile?
He shook his head. “No, man. You will play
‘extra’. You look like American tourist.”
Which is how I got to appear in a movie
called Oscuros Suenos en Agosto – Dark
Dreams in August. It was ‘oscuro’ all right. I
don’t think the movie even made it to the
Spanish rural circuit, never mind the
international film world.
Still, if by some miracle, you come
across a copy, pay special attention at the 35-
minute mark. It’s a crowd scene and you can
spot me in the bottom left hand corner of the
screen.
If you don’t blink. It’s been a lot of years,
but it’s unmistakably me. I look exactly like an
American tourist.
Arthur
Black
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
The Ashley Madison hack has caught a
lot of my attention over the past few
weeks because of people referring to
those who were outed as victims.
And no, I’m not a member of that site or any
other like it, in case you think my interest is
more of a personal one.
For those of you who aren’t familiar
with the site (and if you are among that
group reader, good on you for being moral
and upstanding), Ashley Madison is an
infamous site that married individuals can visit
to seek outside assistance in sating certain
appetites.
The hack involved 36 million individuals’
e-mail addresses and other identification
information being stolen from the site
which enables users to have extramarital
affairs.
I’ve read stories about users who were
seeking someone to comfort them because
their partner was paralyzed and unable to meet
certain needs, I’ve read other stories where a
partner had been in a coma for years. I’ve also
read stories where people, when outed by the
hackers, committed suicide.
The list of accounts is out there in some of
the darker corners of the shallow web to
download (read-as be careful what you
click on) and several sites have popped up
that will allow users to see if their e-mail
(or the e-mail of the partner) is part of the
leak.
Despite anyone’s reason for having an
account on the site, I just can’t see these
people as victims.
If this were a bank website, or a credit card
site (like the Home Depot hack of 2014 or
the Target breach of the same year) or
anything innocuous, yes, I would have no
trouble understanding how these people
had been victimized but, in this particular
case, I feel more for the hackers than for the
hacked.
Team Impact, the group that claimed
responsibility for the hack, said they did
so to force the site to shut down and, after
years of hearing and watching their brazen
advertisements encouraging people to step out
on their partners, I can’t help but feel that these
cheaters or would-be cheaters or could-be
cheaters brought this on themselves.
Even the people who made an account for
the sole purpose of checking to see if their
partner was on the site (which speaks volumes
to the level of trust in their relationships)
should know better.
I have no sympathy for the people who
were outed by this attack. They were
looking for a means of having their cake and
eating it too at the cost of the trust, love
and respect of their partner and if the
worst thing that happens to them is they
are outed by this, I think they’ve gotten off
lightly.
The lack of sympathy extends to most the
people on the list, however, when it comes to
those brazen (or stupid) enough to use a
known personal or work e-mail address to sign
up for a site like this, I find myself swinging to
downright outrage.
How horrible does a person need to be to use
their work e-mail to set up an extra-marital
rendezvous? Well, fortunately for me, the list
can answer that question.
Early analysis reports that upwards of 400 e-
mail accounts used by people who are paid by
our federal taxes happen to be in that group
that would draw my ire. There are 228
government of Ontario e-mail addressess, 170
Department of National Defense e-mail
addresses, 40 parliamentary e-mail addresses
and 10 accounts made using sentate e-mail
addresses in the leak.
The City of Toronto may also want to look at
a changing of the guard as more than 70
addresses at toronto.ca accounts were
registered.
(To be fair, the list has both verified and
unverified e-mail addresses, meaning both
active users and e-mails that may not have
actually been submitted by the owner of the e-
mail, so some of those numbers may need
adjusting down the road.)
It’s a lot of information to parse so local
addresses are something that I haven’t seen as
of yet, but rest assured, if someone around here
is on the site, eventually, someone will find
out.
So whether those people thought they
wouldn’t get caught or didn’t know how to
set up a secondary, private e-mail address, I
can’t help but feel anything but contempt for
them.
Yes, in the truest sense of the word, they are
a victim of this hack because their personal
information and (possibly) credit card
information was released on the internet.
However the term victim denotes a sense of
undeservingness, and anyone who is willing to
be a part of a service that helps them cheat on
their spouse is deserving of, at the very least,
being outed to the public regardless of the
circumstances.
A friend of mine, when discussing the
issue, had this to say: “You can’t be in love
with two people at once. If you fell in love
with a second person, then you didn’t really
love the first.”
Regardless of why people had information
on the site (even a fellow journalist who
claimed she was using the site for research),
they got involved with something detestable
and, as far as I’m concerned got what they
deserved.
To those considering using a site like Ashley
Madison to find something “on the side” as it
were, I’ve got only one thing to say: grow up.
If you need more, tell your partner that. If you
can’t get more, end it and move on and take the
lumps that will come from it.
Otherwise your actions will catch up with
you. Maybe it’s in the form of this hack,
maybe it’s in the form of slashed tires and a
scratched truck like a Carrie Underwood song
or maybe it’s something worse, however, I’m a
strong believer that, in the end, what you sow
is what you reap.
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den
Ground floor, please!
Since the Toronto Blue Jays have really
turned it on and began winning, there has
been a lot of talk about people jumping
on the bandwagon. Let me be the first to say
that the bandwagon shouldn’t exist. Its mere
concept goes against everything sports is
about.
The idea behind the bandwagon is that once
a team starts winning, a fan (whose actual
favourite team is presumably out of the
playoffs) will begin cheering for that team,
because, really, who doesn’t like a winner?
Sport is, by definition, a competition. It’s
one team standing on a field with another team
in a contest in which there can only be one
winner. Similarly, when it comes to all of this
bandwagon talk, there is a similar competition
that happens in the stands/bars/living rooms,
etc. It revolves around who has been a fan the
longest and honestly, it makes no sense.
This idiotic discussion is not just reserved
for sports, however. You can find it with just
about anything that has a “coolness” level to it.
If it’s cool to like something, you can
guarantee that people will be arguing over who
liked it longer – presumably making them
more cool.
It is a concept that has even been mocked in
the world of music, where hipsters are often
rewarded by their peers for being the first on
their theoretical block to listen to a band who
then hits it big (at which time, it’s no longer
cool to listen to them, so people complain
about how the band sold out, but that’s a
discussion for another day). I have seen, on
more than one occasion, someone wearing a t-
shirt that states “I listen to bands that don’t
even exist yet.” A quick Google search brings
you plenty of results for this shirt. It can be
yours for just $19.95 U.S.
Back to sports, the whole idea of the
bandwagon employs this idea – that whoever
has been cheering for the team that has
recently started playing well is more of a fan
than the guy who started following the team
five years ago.
So now, with the Toronto Blue Jays virtually
tearing the cover off of the baseball since the
All-Star break, the competition amongst fans
has begun. Well, I have been going to Jays
games since they started! I was at the very first
game! I watched every game of the 1992 and
1993 seasons!
Who, then, is the biggest fan? And does it
matter? No, it matters not.
Baseball teams spend millions and millions
of dollars to attract new fans, whether they be
young, old, from the area or not. And this, on
occasion, works. It could also be – as is the
case with a few friends of mine – that they had
no interest in sports until recently, but have
since discovered how great baseball can be and
can relate to several Blue Jays.
So are my friends, fans for a few years, now
less important than those fans who have been
going to games since the 1990s? No.
At a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous or
Narcotics Anonymous, they hand out chips to
folks who have been sober for certain
milestone durations – a month, a year, five
years, 10 years. But the most important chip,
as they always say, is the first chip: one day
sober, or declaring a sincere intention to quit.
In many ways, the most important fans are
the ones watching their first games, learning
about baseball and growing to love it.
Growing the game is what every sport strives
to do. When fans reward a sport by becoming
a fan, they shouldn’t be punished for doing so
by the “veteran” fans. You all cheer for the
same team, now go watch your team together.
Other Views
It’s tourist season: can we shoot them?
Asking sympathy is just too much