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WHAT WOULD HUNTER THUNK? CYBERSAFARI

The National Football League (NFL) is the biggest sports monster in America. It is by far, the States' largest sport in terms of fans, revenue, ratings and sports betting. But it took a while for it to become the giant it is today.

Early NFL TV broadcasts were local games on local television stations. A network broadcast one game a week. Brent Musburger, a Chicago broadcast sports journalist, helped create the pregame show by setting up a camera in TV control booth to run last week's highlight packages. Later, CBS started a studio show. Musburger brought in an animated former bookie, Jimmy the Greek, to give some color to the broadcast. It was the first public link between football and sports gambling.

At the time, the NFL was paranoid by gamblers screwing up the integrity of the game. There had been major sports betting scandals in the past, in college basketball sports shaving to Pete Rose betting on baseball games. The NFL had one death penalty: if you gambled on football, you were banned from the sport.

Based on this background, it was not lost on most of old football fans the hypocrisy of the NFL to have their Super Bowl in the mecca of American gambling, Las Vegas. But the NFL embraced sports gambling advertising revenue after the Supreme Court legalized state specific casino gambling. Vegas lost its near legal monopoly with that court ruling. But it did allow the city to get an NFL franchise.

When one thinks of Vegas, gambling and pop culture, the one who embraced the old Strip madness was writer Hunter S. Thompson. He was a serious bettor and sports fanatic, especially professional football. His stories and eventual book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, is considered the gold standard for a written road trip penned in his signature drug induced, gonzo writing style.

A few columnists and newspaper editors came to the same conclusion that the Vegas Super Bowl would have been cynical Thompson high water mark of event coverage. (Thompson died in 2005.) The question was raised: what would have Thompson thought about a Vegas Super Bowl in 2024?

Thompson would have latched onto the greed and hypocrisy of America in 2024. As a curator of political insight and commentary, he would have skewered and roasted the current politicians with blistering insults from a keyboard flame-thrower.

You can still feel the echoes of Vegas and football in what he wrote in the past:

On Vegas itself, he said, "I tell you man, this is the American Dream in action! We'd be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end." But in 2002 he wrote that the old wild Vegas casinos had been replaced with corporate glass temples of greed. But some things will never change. "For a loser Vegas is the meanest town on Earth."

Thompson would have still found the debauchery in 2024 Vegas. High stakes gambling is now a respectable profession embraced by cable television. Some drugs are now legal; alcohol is still the pain medication for losers. Vegas would still serve up a buffet of carnal pleasures because the grift has been marketed into a product like soft and cushy toilet paper that wipes away your wins with shitty losses.

"There is always room for losers in the football business. They are the mother's milk of gambling, and why not? Somebody has to do it, and there won't be any winners," Thompson wrote. "Football fans share a universal language that cuts across many cultures and many personality types. A serious football fan is never alone. We are legion, and football is often the only thing we have in common."

He would have made analogies to politics. He would have been disgusted by the state of national politics. He turned sour when the Clintons corralled the Democratic party, not on principles but for personal gain. He would have eulogized the death of the rival Republican party by the fraud and huckster, the Don. "The main problem with any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can got out on a stage and whup up their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy - - then go back to the office and sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece." He would have called Joe Biden a political hack, a processional politician whose only purpose in life was to sell access and line the pockets of his family with the spoils of connections. He would have loathed Trump as a menace, a despot and narcissistic boar. "There is a terrible danger in voting for the lesser of two evils because the parties can set it up that way," he wrote.

My paperback edition of Fear and Loathing has a bookmark, a $5 Wrigley Field bleacher ticket stub for a Cubs-Cardinals game from June, 1989. Today, bleacher tickets start at $100; dynamic pricing for a rivalry game could double the cost. But football eclipsed baseball as the American Pastime long ago. The treasury printing money faster than a South American banana republic is the cause of inflation, corruption and slow choking to death of the American Dream.

Millions of people bet billions of dollars chasing the Quick Fix. "Victory is a fleeting thing in the gambling business. Today's winners are tomorrow's blinking toads, dumb beasts with no hope."

Thompson would have remarked that the corporate orgy of Super Bowl Week in Vegas was the poster child what is wrong with current culture, priorities and values. You could mortgage your house in bets on your smartphone on prop bets that are worse than a coin flip. The screen addicts are easy marks for The House since the dopamine rush is the common urge of any addict. Lonely, isolated, bitter, despondent and depressed masses find the forced cultural festival of the Game a necessity like oxygen and obesity food groups. Everyone is expected o Like It. The 32 NFL owners are the new golden mob bosses with billion dollar franchises and the inability to lose money because of the wealth generated by TV contracts and a weak players union.

He would have had a nostalgic loss of the old days when real gangsters ran the old hotels in the real wild west action. The days when you would wander into the seed bag hotels to find a bookie who would give better odds than the casino sports book. The days when alley drug purchases were 50-50 life and death beat down betrayals. But then again, daily news has senseless drive by gang shootings, legal pot shops in the suburbs, soccer moms taking more diet pills than pro sports players amping up for the game, and leeches on all limbs blood sucking one's savings into rich government official pensions and benefits.

The Political Football these days is a narrow shift of party control, split houses and annual impeachment hearings to avoid dealing with actual government issues and policy. You don't get reelected passing competent legislation. You get votes by yelling the loudest and blaming the opponent bogeyman. Politics have surged into nonpolitical areas like the court system. The NY Trump cases are clearly political retribution circus shows, Thompson would have concluded because of the disconnect between political fantasy world and real world business deals. He would have believed Trump is a contemptible idiot who does not know the law, does not care about the law, and does not follow the law because he has the mindset of a dictator-child. "In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity."

As for the game itself, he probably would have bet on the lead horse, Mahomes, because you ride your chips when the roulette wheel is spinning in your favor. But he would have found the pomp and crass commercialism surrounding the event boring, tedious and flaccid.

cyberbarf

SCAM PLAYBOOK NEWS

There are many scammers out in the digital weeds looking for a naive mark. Email phishing scams are on the rise with the malicious ransomware links. The phone grandmother scam about wiring money to get a grandchild out of jail still works. There was an article about a former Nigerian scammer who said their scam call center had a 40 page book on how to scam people, what to say, what to do, and how to take the money and vanish in thin air.

As sociologists lament that more and more people are turning into hermits because of lack of interpersonal social skills and addiction to their smartphone apps, friendship and romance scams have an ocean of lonely people to phish. Here is a real example:

A person who opens a new IG account to post artwork, cartoons and photographs in their daily life. The person's goal is to share in the community their interests with like-minded people. After several months, he begins to get some attention and likes from other IG accounts.

Then, out of the blue, he gets a DM from a stranger. Not a like a post, but a direct message after following the account.

A simple click on the account name opens her home page which says her name in Korean, but the profile is in English stating she is a doctor and surgeon. There is only one post on plastic surgery. She has no other posts, and only a few followers.

The next day, there is another DM. This one asks basic information to the person. Information that was already stated in the person's account profile. This is the first real red flag.

A quick comparison of the account screen name and her stated name did not match. A quick Google search of her names found no matches. Another, bigger red flag.

But she continued to DM to try to engage in a conversation. Then she suddenly wanted to move"off-line" to chat on a private app. She asked for the person's private application account number (which would be an actual phone number). Since this person had no such account, and did not want to have one, he searched this behavior and found that it is a classic scammer's playbook. Try to befriend a person into a private, off-line chat, so there is no public message trail.

Now that the scammer was caught, the person decided to let her hang with no response. After another couple of days, another DM which asks if she did something to upset him. Then she gave him her telephone number for the private chat app. A quick search of the given telephone number showed it was from China. So this person is using a suspect Korean name but is logged in China was the final confirmation that person was up to no good.

The person decided to stop the activity and any escalation by the scammer. In researching the best way to do it, he found that removing her as a follower did not stop her from contacting him. He went for the block account option. This stops further DM.

About a week later, the scammer unfollowed the person's account. It was clear by the silence that the scam would go nowhere. The game was over. Then the scammer's account disappeared.

It is a cautionary tale that can be easily navigated by common sense and a mission to not trust but verify what happens on the internet.

cyberbarf

ART APPRECIATION INTERNETTING

You can actually train the algorithmic goblins to better populate your social media feed with things you actually want to see. Granted, the targeted advertising will soon follow but at least it is on topic. But some friend posts or comments can lead the computer overlords into different directions but as long as you like certain posts or search bar the thing you want to see, over time your feed will become consistent.

I mostly use facebook and IG for art links and examples from other artists. This narrowly defined approach has yielded a vast, global array of talented people sharing their artwork. The diversity of style, subject matter, skill level (nonjudgmental) and abstractions to form social commentary is impressive.

But the downside is that the binary output spitter does not distinguish between real art and A.I. generated art. There are days that the same Asian anime 3D girl posing in various blurred backgrounds floods by feed by various aggregators or AI zealots. Even though AI is better at human anatomy, there is still the dead eye stare in portraits and the lack of true artist brush strokes.

As a result, I have come to appreciate real artists using real physical tools to make art. For example, this example from facebook:

Granted, someone putting in the artist's name and style could generate something similar, but it would not capture the simplicity of the fuzzy brushstrokes to create a unique image that allows our brains to fill-in-the-blanks of recognition and acknowledgment of the subject matter. Simple. Black and White. But with a master's touch of ink, contrast and paper.

iToons

cyberbarf

FOUND BUT NOT LOST ON THE INTERNET

TikTok influencers have starting dressing up in Catholic garb. Who would have thought Gen MZ had run out of ideas to find religious cosplay?

Source: Daily Mail (UK)

This world graphic is telling in that industrialized countries are now fused to their collective screens while there is a huge disconnect throughout much of Africa and western Asia. The information deserts may be a curse but also a blessing.

Source: neatorama

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THE WHETHER REPORT

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STATUS

Question: Whether AT&T national wireless blackout a symptom of the future breakdowns?

* Educated Guess

* Possible

* Probable

* Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

* Doubtful

* Vapor Dream

Question: Whether phishing scams are getting more pushy?

* Educated Guess

* Possible

* Probable

* Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

* Doubtful

* Vapor Dream

Question: Whether the voters are already bored before the election has even started?

* Educated Guess

* Possible

* Probable

* Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

* Doubtful

* Vapor Dream

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