Canthook

Did you see that clip on YouTube? It doesn't matter what "that clip" is. There's always a "great clip" on YouTube that's making the rounds, embarassing someone or another.

They warn us all that in anything you say online is probably archived someplace or another, and may come back to bite you thirty years from now. They also tell us that it's possible to walk from Boston to Washington DC without ever being out of sight of a security camera. Everybody, everywhere, over the age of 4 seems to have a cell phone and most cell phones have cameras.

Given that one of our fundamental rights, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, is based on "a reasonable expectation of privacy", one has to ask, is there anyplace where one may reasonably expect privacy these days?

One thing bringing this to mind is the presidential campaign, of course.

I really don't think Senator Clinton is praying for someone to assassinate Senator Obama. It's pretty obvious that she really wants the presidency, though. Her team's explanations of how that happens were strained a month ago, and now they're pretty much banking on invasion by little green men. Boy, wouldn't you love to play poker against her? You could get really rich, really quick, playing against such a fool an optimist.

But Senator McCain and Senator Obama have had their YouTube moments, too. Nobody has escaped scrutiny.

Blondie and I were listening tonight to Elton John "Blue Moves" album. She really likes his current stuff, but she doesn't care much for his recordings from the early 1970s.

After "Blue Moves" came "Abandoned Luncheonette". I only ever had listened much to one side of that LP, but there aren't any "sides" to digital music. I got a lot of songs I'm not familiar with, and frankly, I'm not too fond of. There's a reason why certain songs went on the "B" side. They had to put something there, but they put all the best material on the "A" side, since that was what would be played the most.

"I told you," Blondie said, "that they went to my high school, didn't I?" I had, but I didn't interrupt her. It's a bad idea, in general, for a guy to keep a woman from talking. Even when it's a rerun, though, I like hearing Blondie talk. I didn't marry her for the sex; a single guy can get that anywhere. You marry the woman you want to listen to, all night long, and for the rest of your life.

She said she'd heard them on the radio, but Dana told her who they were. You mean Five-Dollar Dana? She nodded. I should explain here that the first time I met Dana, we had lunch at a restaurant. She ordered a $7 meal, a $3 side, and a $2 beverage, excused herself after eating, because she had lost track of time and had an appointment, tossed a $5 bill at us, telling us to apply her change to the tip.

We had a disagreement, Blondie and I, because Blondie said Dana didn't realize that it was too little for her share of the check. I said she pulled the stunt deliberately, because she was cheap. It wasn't much of a disagreement. Blondie thought about it for two minutes, and remembered other stunts Dana had pulled, and decided my assessment might be right.

In any case, Five-Dollar Dana told Blondie that she used to go over to the garage and listen to Hall & Oates practice, back before they had released any records. I don't know if that statement was full of euphemism or not. Five-Dollar Dana had gotten a new job every 3-4 years in her adult life, and always fell in love with - and started sleeping with - her boss. She seemed to have a number of other boyfriends as well.

She went to see the dean at the parochial school where her daughter was attending classes, over some behavior problems, and ended up seeing him four or five times. It being a Roman Catholic school, the dean was a priest. As is Five-Dollar Dana's style, she fell in love with the priest, or at least fell in lust. She ended up leaving a note on the priest's windshield.

Sadly for Five-Dollar Dana, it turned out to be the janitor's windshield. The janitor read the letter, realized that it wasn't for him, and passed it on to the intended recipient. At the next meeting, the priest gave her the letter back, saying how he had come into possession of it. Oops!

Although it seems that Five-Dollar Dana tried to sleep with anything with pants on, that really isn't fair. She wasn't slutty. She simply fell in love easily, and never, ever, found the love she was searching for. Blondie's Law says that "nobody has ever been loved the way they wanted to be loved." Although that sounds brutally pessimistic, I've never found an exception to her law, and she says she hasn't either.

So I don't know if she was going over to the garage to listen to music, or to get laid. Maybe she didn't know, either.

In any case, we're getting off-track here. When Five-Dollar Dana told her who Hall and Oates were, Blondie went through her old yearbooks. Oh, THAT is who they were.

They were thugs.

Not the crowd your mother would want you to associate with. For that matter, not the crowd you would want to associate with. Blondie said that girls would make efforts to avoid the sections of the hall where the thuggish element congregated.

It's been a couple of hours since Blondie went downstairs, and I've been thinking about this.

Mel Gibson is an anti-semite. They asked him to change the script of The Passion of the Christ because it cast jews in a bad light, and he refused. I'm going to tell the truth, no more, no less, he said, and one has to respect a producer for that. But when he was stopped for drunk driving, he made some unquestionably anti-semitic statements.

It was "Mel Gibson Syndrome". Being drunk doesn't turn you against the jews. What it does is loosen your tongue, and what's inside your brain spills out.

Being tired at the end of a long day of campaigning, during a long season of campaigning, no days off, tends to loosen your tongue, too. McCain repeatedly makes "mistakes" about Sunni and Shiite and Al Queda. Bill Clinton repeatedly tries to pigeonhole Obama as a token black who needs to move to the back of the bus, since it's obvious that he couldn't possibly win the election. Hillary Clinton repeatedly makes "mistakes" in describing in great detail a foreign trip that never happened.

I told Blondie tonight that I feel sorry for Hillary. At some point or another, everyone has been caught saying something they shouldn't. Perhaps it was a white lie that blossomed as one attempted to cover it up. Perhaps it was a secret that they hadn't intended to blurt out. I'd like to think that as I get older, I do less of that. I try to tell the truth, partly because I'm trying to be virtuous, but mostly because I've learned that lies are too damned much work. I am lazy, of course. Lazy is one of the cardinal virtues of a programmer, the other two being impatience and hubris.

The thing is, our "Mel Gibson Syndrome" moments are going to come closer and closer together as time goes on, as more and more information on us is archived in digital form, where it's easily searched and retrieved 30 years later.

Some years ago, I read a short story, perhaps it was in Analog, about a scientist who produced an inexpensive electronic telescope that could see not only anywhere, but into the past as well. The further you got away, in either time or distance, the fuzzier the image would get, but you could look into the past and watch Custer's Last Stand, or watch Jack The Ripper. It was a great tool for historians, and with further development, it would be possible to pick up sound waves as well, by seeing objects vibrating from them.

But when does the past start? Well, a fraction of a second ago. Not only could you want yourself being conceived, you could watch your wife, effectively in real time, making out with the milkman. And you could watch the famous movie star undress and take a shower.

The characters asked each other, so how do we get our privacy back? It was a cheap device to build, and the plans had been made public. The answer, obviously, was that you couldn't.

I had an earwig the other day, of "Spanky & Our Gang" singing "It Ain't Necessarily Bird Avenue". I tried to tell Blondie about it, and she didn't remember the song, so I went looking on YouTube. Nope. I went looking for lyrics to the song. Nope. I went look for a torrent. Nothing from S&OG.

That's pretty rare. I had been looking, several months ago, for a digital version of Sammy Davis, Junior's album, "The Shelter of Your Arms", and couldn't find it, not on YouTube, not the lyrics, not a torrent. It's a pain to rip an album from vinyl, so I ended up buying a CD in order to have it in convenient digital form.

But there were other Sammy Davis recordings. There's nothing at all from S&OG. Wanna bet that this will be true in another year? I own a 78, original recording, of Gene Autry singing "Rudolph, The Red Nosed Reindeer" and some 78s of Spike Jones recordings. I wouldn't give any bets that they aren't freely available as digital downloads. YouTube is already using more bandwidth by itself, than the entire internet consumed five years ago.

And in the end, the legend goes, after everything else escaped from Pandora's box, the one thing remaining was hope. The reason it's called a legend is because it's fiction, a bleeping lie. There's no hope. It didn't take the internet for me to discover that Hall & Oates were jerks when they were in high school. All it took was a high school annual.

The internet is nothing to fear. I'm not sure we can say the same about the attacks on our individual liberties. It's time for the courts to officially recognize what everybody already knows: people lie, and if they aren't under oath when they say something, it ought not be introduced as evidence.

But until we get to that point, I want to point out that Anna Nicole Smith said I was a wonderful lover, and that her multi-millionaire baby is mine.

Other Bloggers On These Subjects:
Anna Nicole Smith - assassin - Gene Autry - Sammy Davis, Jr - Elton John - Mel Gibson - Hillary Clinton - hubris, impatience, & laziness - Abandoned+Luncheonette - Pandora's Box - Rudolph,the Red Nosed Reindeer - Spanky & Our Gang