Lead Story
* Ric Hoogestraat is married to Sue and works at a call center in
the Phoenix, Ariz., area but spends 30-plus hours a week inside the
online Second Life video game, pretending that he is the digitally-
drawn Dutch Hoorenbeek, a 6-foot-9, muscular babe magnet who
lives on his own island. That unnerves Sue, according to an
August Wall Street Journal profile, especially since Dutch recently
"married" a digital woman and set up housekeeping with their two
digital dogs. (The real-life creator of the new Mrs. Hoorenbeek has
never met Ric and says she never will.) Dutch and his wife spend
hours shopping and motorcycling together, leaving Ric little time
for Sue. "Is this man cheating on his wife [meaning Sue]?" the
Journal asked. Lamented Sue, "You try to talk to [Ric] or bring
[him] a drink, and [he]'ll be having sex with a cartoon." [Wall
Street Journal, 8-10-07]
The Entrepreneurial Spirit!
* World of Warcraft, too, is an online game as popular as Second
Life, with warrior-players amassing digital gold coins from every
opponent they vanquish, and the greater the lucre, the higher they
advance in the WOW ranks. Some players take the easy route,
though, and buy their WOW gold coins from dealers, who mostly
get them from "Chinese gold farmers" in Nanjing and other cities--
men and woman hired to play the game 80 hours a week, not for
advancement but to score coins that they can sell to other players,
at the equivalent of about $1.25 per 100 coins (marked up to $20
per 100, retail), according to a June New York Times Magazine
article. [New York Times Magazine, 6-17-07]
* In August, the Discovery Channel reported on the equipping of
Bushmen (indigenous to Africa's Kalahari Desert) with handheld
PalmPilot Personal Digital Assistants to track animals and locate
plants via special software. The illiterate hunters can tap screen
icons representing various animals, the activities they're engaging
in, and how many they see, with a global positioning satellite
automatically recording the location. [Discovery.com, 8-1-07]
from WEIRDNUZ.M021 (News of the Weird, September 2, 2007)
by Chuck Shepherd