08 October 2010
 
Going Viral

(Nobel Laureate for Literature Gabriel García Márquez with shiner provided by Nobel Laureate for Literature Mario Vargas Llosa. Photo Copyright 1976 Rodrigo Moya)

You need to watch out for what you wish for. It can come true.
 
I was buying Power-ball tickets with a co-worker the other day, trying to figure out whether it would be better to win the jackpot this year at only $141 million, or wait till next year, with the new tax laws, even if the payout was more.
 
We decided in the end that having to give more than seventy million to the Feds, more if we took the total in lump-sum, was probably worth it.
 
Anyway, my arm is still itching from the tattoo this morning, and of course I had to bore you with that whole thing, since it seemed interesting at the time, and Kevin warned me not to scratch it, so darn it, here we are. He says a firm pat can drive back the spiders, and that is what I have been doing while desperately trying to figure out some intensely fascinating thing to anesthetize you with this morning.
 
The Daily Socotra has ranged far and wide in the course of following the human parad. You have been dragged on the search for executed Nazis in the wilds of the Southeast Distrcit of Columbia; the search for the Boundary Stones of the same jurisdiction, placed as the First Monuments of the Capital of the New Republic. Or the travails of a thoroughly dysfunctional family like all the others.
 
It is weird. I sometimes stumble across myself searching for things on the internet; MSNBC is carrying a segment from the Today show that is an account of a visit to my home island yesterday, 250 miles south of Yemen, which is a very dangerous place these days, but the island is not. It is gratifying to see the hometown get some positive ink, and you can see our Dragon’s Blood trees and all sorts of things at: today.msnbc.msn.com.
 
I know the folks back home are going to be pleased. We are a small clan, and we can use all he positive publicity we can get.
 
That is why I felt bad for Karen Owen. She made The Times along with Mario Vargas Llosa, who nailed the Nobel Prize for Literature. Like many world authors of renown, I didn’t know much about him. He apparently has a body of deeply political work spanning decades of an evolving sensibility. Apparently he is a fierce conservative these days, starting out from a place long ago a little left of Lenin.
 
I trust the Swedes, and went to Amazon to purchase three of his works and qualify for free shipping: Feast of the Goat, Aunt Julia and the Screenwriter, and The Bad Girl.
 
Apparently Mario practices a certain muscular brand of literature, which is different from the current diffident tradition. The last Nobel for Literature awarded to a Latin American went to the legendary Gabriel García Márquez, who is best known here for his hallucinogenic masterpiece “100 Years of Solitude.”
 
The two Laureates were once close pals, but have been on the outs for several decades. Apparently Mario and his second wife Patricia went through a rough spot back in the mid-1970s, which a lot of us did, and Márquez did his best to console her.
 
At least that is the delicate way the paper handled the matter this morning, since Mario decked Márquez at the Palace of the Arts in Mexico City in 1976 at a movie premier and left him with an impressive Nobel-class shiner. The photo did not show up until 2007, though I am sure it would have gone viral back then, if the internet had existed. People love scandal.
 
Scandal faded over time, and in the end the two now share the highest recognition for their writings. But looking at the review of the “The Bad Girl,” I had to cluck in sympathy for Karen Owen.
 
She got far more than she bargained for on the net. She just graduated from Duke, the prestigious university where my pal Rufus matriculated about the time the Nobel Laureates from Latin America were duking it out. She did a marvelous and quite amusing PowerPoint presentation of her amorous affairs with a dozen young men, rating them all in a pseudo thesis format.
 
She sent it to three friends, and it is wicked and devastatingly funny.
 
 I imagine you can find the original on the web someplace; the Jezebel site has a somewhat bowdlerized account that tactfully deleted the true names and faces of the unfortunate young men with whom she dallied. You can find it at this link, though if you wish to do so you would have to fill in the two asterisks in the address. You know that the people here at the Daily Socotra have strict standards and they won’t allow me to get away with gratuitous profanity.
 
http://jezebel.com/5652114/college-girls-powerpoint-f**k-list-goes-viral <http://jezebel.com/5652114/college-girls-powerpoint-fuck-list-goes-viral>

Anyway, the predictable happened. After floating around for a couple weeks in a relatively narrow circle, Karen’s PowerPoint went viral, and showed up just about everywhere that there is broadband connectivity.
 
She has deleted her presence on all the social media sites, and apparently is devastated by the scandal. Several sites managed to grab her picture off Facebook before she did, and I could post it here but I won’t, poor kid. Karen has lost her anonymity and her privacy, though of course that is true of all of us.
 
It just wasn’t our day today.
 
There is also apparently a book deal in the works, and if other fame is any indication, she should manage to get this behind her in only a couple decades. I doubt if anything I am up too would ever merit going viral, like that cat that plays the piano. But it does make you a little apprehensive.
 
I may have to re-think this whole thing, you know?

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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