Life In The Twentyfirst Century: No Privacy, No Legroom, No Common Courtesy

I’ve been preaching “The Tiger Rule” ever since that epochal day in November 2009 when it was revealed that Tiger Woods had been dipping his nine iron in a Las Vegas party planner…and a cocktail waitress…and a porn star…and at least ten other curvaceous morally flexible nymphs who were all too eager to share their multiple text messages, voicemails, and even dick pics (which were reportedly a lot more impressive than his fairway drives) with The Enquirer and Us Magazine.  The take-home message of Tiger’s spiraling dive from glorious fame to legendary infamy was a reworking of the famous line from 1989’s “Field of Dreams”: “If you build it, he will come.”  The Tiger Rule, summarized, is: “If you make it, they will see.”

So, when Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton and Mary Elizabeth Winstead and several dozen other celebrities had their I-Cloud accounts hacked and their nude pictures released, they really had no right to be shocked or surprised.  Anyone in 2014 who seriously believes that they have an inherent right to privacy is somewhere between naive and delusional.  We already know that the NSA has access to our every email and text and cell phone conversation.  We know that we are tracked in realtime by GPS chips in our phones and automobiles.  We see cameras on every street corner, in every office lobby, and on the helmets and dashboards of every police car and officer.  We are aware that when we use Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and Twitter also uses us.

So anyone who doesn’t understand that if they create naked images of themselves on any digital device whatsoever, those images stand a very good chance (almost to a certainty) of entering the public domain.  Any computer or IT expert will happily explain that even hitting the “delete” key is no protection.  Any hacker with half an ounce of skill can easily recover deleted files from any hard drive, and the guys at places like the NSA aren’t hackers with half an ounce of skill…they’re the guys who lived on delivery pizza in their parent’s basements, entertaining themselves with online porn, masturbation, and breaking into the Pentagon’s nuclear launch computers before being busted by the FBI and offered the choice of forty years of forced sodomy at a nearby Federal pen or moving to the basement of the NSA, where they subsist on vending machine sandwiches, Japanese elder porn, and spying on YOU.  If you think your $99.99 downloaded encryption program or password protection is going to keep the close-ups of your glistening hoo-ha and manly meat-pole from the prying eyes of these cyber-geeks, I’ve got some swamp land just outside Ft. Lauderdale you’d be interested in.

There is one way and one way only to keep naked visages of yourself private: NEVER CREATE THEM.  And by the way, any of these celebrities who claims “youthful indiscretion” as the excuse for their sex tapes and bathroom selfies ought to check a calendar.  Most of them are still well south of 30, which makes every damned thing they do a “youthful indiscretion”.

Meanwhile, just yesterday a Delta flight from New York to West Palm Beach was forced to divert to Jacksonville because a passenger had a come-apart over the dickhead in front of her reclining his seat, requiring her to go from zero leg-room to “assume a position only easily attained by Chinese contortionists employed by Cirque du Soleil”.  It was the third such incident in just a week.  I’m in the minority on this, but I’ll go with Henrik Ibsen: “The majority is always wrong, the minority is rarely right.”  Polls on the subject of the etiquette of reclining your seat on an airliner show that about 55% of people think it’s acceptable.  Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but as best as I can tell, those 55% are the assholes who are always seated in front of me.  For my part, I’m hyperaware of how incredibly cramped the penurious airlines have made travel in the coach section, and I NEVER recline my seat because I know how uncomfortable it will make the person behind me…and roughly 10 degrees of recline barely makes a dent in my ability to sleep, but it causes 100% more discomfort to the poor son of a bitch to my rear.  Look, I don’t expect the general populace to suddenly get substantially concerned with the comfort and well-being of their fellow passengers.  If most people had their way, I think they’d be smoking a cigarette, chatting on a cell phone, and resting most of their three hundred pound shorts and tank-top clad bulk on the armrest of my middle seat, so I’m hardly expecting them to refrain from encroaching on the ten cubic inches allotted to me behind them.  But if the airlines had any sense, or any common decency, they’d alter the tiny seats so that NONE of them could recline.  Everyone would then be equally painfully cramped.  Problem solved.

No need to thank me.  I’m here to help.

BW

Sexting With Daddy And The Tiger Rule

For those of you (the few, the proud, the folks with too much time on their hands) who followed along on my previous blog, “Left, Right, and Centered”, you’ll undoubtedly recall my many references to “The Tiger Rule”, named for Tiger Woods and his penchant for texting, sexting, and running large expensive SUV’s into trees with angry blonde Swedish women in hot pursuit.  For those of you who missed my wise and prescient pronouncements on my long-lost prior publication, let me reiterate and summarize The Tiger Rule:

1) All digital information is ultimately in the public domain.

2) If you create any sort of digital information, be it text, email, video, audio, or photographic, it will inevitably be discovered and made public.

3) If your spouse, parents, employer, children, neighbors, or drinking buddies don’t see whatever it is you’ve sent on your Iphone, stored on your PC, or produced on your DSLR, you can bet that the NSA has the file somewhere.  (And some bored desk-jockey in the third subbasement at Fort Meade can’t believe you’re actually into that.)

4) Even if you’re living in distant era, and have enshrined you and the little woman doing the nasty on VHS tape, at some point your daughter or your grandmother or the cleaning lady will put what they think is a copy of “The Sound of Music” on the antique tape deck, only to be greeted by the frightening vista of your hairy balls.

5) There are many corollaries, but the bottom line is that your expectation of privacy ends the moment you touch the “send”, “post”, or “connect” icons.

There are examples of the validity of The Tiger Rule on a daily basis, but yesterday’s was a doozy.  College coed Nyja (last name redacted) was completely unsurprisingly sending a naked selfie to her sweetie on Instagram, only to discover that she’d mistakenly connected to her father’s account before tapping the send button.  In a complete panic, Nyja desperately tried to find a way to unsend her message, which is, of course, impossible.  Before you can say, “Hey baby, want some of this?” her father replied with a hilarious series of furious replies, capped with: “Is THIS what you do while you’re at school??”  iPhone 5: $599, Data Plan: $49.99/month, Dad seeing your naked hoo-ha: Priceless.

BW

A Glass Half-Full To Last A Long Weekend

I worry about stuff.  I worry about details.  I stress about problems, and when there are no problems, I worry that I’m overdue.  I worry that I’m writing crap and I worry that not enough people are reading the crap I write.  I worry about the things I’ve done, the things I haven’t done, and the things I don’t know that I’ve done or not done.  Take yesterday, for example.  I worried that my site statistics were on the decline and I stressed over having nothing particularly cogent or pertinent to share.  I did my usual article by article search of Huffington Post and CNN.com, and even noted the headline about the Supreme Court overturning another state’s ban on same-sex marriage, thinking to myself, “Great!  One more state down, thirty or forty to go,” and completely missed the story of the day by failing to click and find out that the state in question was my very own bright RED uber-conservative god-fearing Mike Pence-led Indiana.  My bad.  But here’s where the glass starts being half-full.  In the midst of my whining and failure to report a local scoop, I had more site hits yesterday than in the past two weeks.  Begging apparently has an effect.

Let me be the first (or more like the ten thousand and first) to congratulate Federal Judge Richard Young for ruling that Indiana’s ban on gay marriage was unconstitutional.  It was the right thing to do and it was about time.  It came right on the heels of a similar ruling by the federal courts in Utah on Wednesday.  Clearly the tide of progress, tolerance, and human dignity is building momentum, and that’s where that glass remains optimistically filling.  But there’s always someone eager to rain on even the happiest parade, and they are not far behind.  My gay friends in the Hoosier state would be smart to get to the altar sooner rather than later, because suits will be filed, stays will be contemplated and almost certainly issued, constitutional amendments will be pushed, and even marriages signed sealed and consummated today may be reversed and denied tomorrow.  But for today love and sanity are triumphing over hate and fear.  Glass half-full.

The federal courts were full of surprises yesterday.  The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the police need a warrant to search the contents of your cell phone, which is about the biggest concession SCOTUS has made to civil liberties since the Miranda decision.  So that’s good news.  The glass is half-full.  Still, it makes you wonder how the court can rule the contents of your iPhone to be sacrosanct, but the contents of your bladder to be in the public domain.  It’s the sort of dichotomy I’ll never understand.  At the same time, while it’s very nice that State Trooper Jackboot can’t see who you’ve been sending pictures of your tattooed and pierced junk to, the NSA not only has their names and numbers, but they know about that little rash you’ve been concerned over…it’s probably just from the heat.  Nothing to worry about.  The glass is half-full.

Which brings me back to me (it’s Kibbitz Corner, where it’s all about me all the time).  I may worry that I don’t have as many readers as George Will, but no one is accusing me of being a paternalistic insensitive mysogynist either.  In fact, I figure I have about two dozen people whose days aren’t complete without a dose of Wendellisms, and another two dozen who check in when the moon is in the correct phase.  I appreciate all of you.  When I finally write the book, I promise to autograph your copies.  The other sixty or so will be in my attic, just in case my fame multiplies posthumously.  In the meantime, I’ll be off the grid until next Tuesday, visiting my son in the Mile High City (make of that what you will).  But I should have some great stories and stunning pics when I return, so all in all, the glass is half-full.

BW