Category Archives: Digital

New Form of Kidnapping (Ladies – be aware – worth a read)

Nationality: Ecuador
Age: 70
Occupation: real estate agent
Residence: Park Ridge, Il
Performance Date: 07/18/2010
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English

“NEW FORM OF KIDNAPPING

Please take a minute to read this. This is very scary and could happen to
any of us.. Seems like every nice thing people do for one another can be
perverted.
A new twist on kidnapping from a very smart survivor:
About a month ago there was a woman standing by the mall entrance passing
out flyers to all the women going in. The woman had written the flyer
herself to tell about an experience she had, so that she might warn other
women.
The previous day, this woman had finished shopping, went out to her car and
discovered that she had a flat.
She got the jack out of the trunk and began to change the flat. A nice man
dressed in a business suit and carrying a briefcase walked up to her and
said, ‘I noticed you’re changing a flat tire. Would you like me to take care
of it for you?’
The woman was grateful for his offer and accepted his help. They chatted
amiably while the man changed the flat, and then put the flat tire and the
jack in the trunk, shut it and dusted his hands off.
The woman thanked him profusely, and as she was about to get in her car, the
man told her that he left his car around on the other side of the mall, and
asked if she would mind giving him a lift to his car.
< BR>She was a little surprised and she asked him why his car was on other
side.
He explained that he had seen an old friend in the mall that he hadn’t seen
for some time and they had a bite to eat, visited for a while, and he got
turned around in the mall and left through the wrong exit, and now he was
running late.

The woman hated to tell him ‘no’ because he had just rescued her from having
to change her flat tire all by herself, but she! felt un easy . (Trust that
gut feeling!)

Then she remembered seeing the man put his briefcase in her trunk before
shutting it and before he asked her for a ride to his car.

She told him that she’d be happy to drive him around to his car, But she
just remembered one last thing she needed to buy (Smart woman!!)

She said she would only be a few minutes; he could sit down in her car and
wait for her; she would be as quick as she could be

She hurried into the mall, and told a security guard what had happened, the
guard came out to her car with her, but the man had left. They opened the
trunk, took out his locked briefcase and took it down to the police station.

The police opened it (ostensibly to look for ID so they could return it to
the man). What they found was rope, duct tape, and knives. When the police
checked her ‘flat’ tire, there was nothing wrong with it; the air had simply
been let out.  It was obvious what the man’s intention was, and obvious that
he had carefully thought it out in advance. The woman was blessed to have
escaped harm.

How much worse it would have been if she had children with her and had them
wait in the car while the man fixed the tire, or if she had a baby strapped
into a car seat? Or if she’d gone against her judgment and given him a lift?

I’d like you to forward this to all the women you know. It may save a life.

A candle is not dimmed by lighting another candle. I was going to send this
to the ladies only; but guys, if you love your mothers, wives, sisters,
daughters, etc.., you may want to pass it on to them, as well.

Send this to any woman you know that may need to be reminded that The world
we live in has a lot of crazies in it. Better to be safe than sorry.

PLEASE BE SAFE AND NOT
SORRY”

 

This email was originally received by my real estate agent, she resent it to me with the message that I should be, “extra careful!” especially since I am a single woman living away from home.

What first threw me off about this narrative was that the woman remembers the man put his briefcase in the trunk of her car; however, when she is narrating what he put in the trunk, she doesn’t mention the briefcase. It was inattention to detail like this that made me look it up and as it turns out, it’s an urban legend that’s been around since at least 1998.

My real estate lady is older, and she sent it to me because as a single young woman living in a big city like Los Angeles by myself, she thought I was more at risk. I guess this goes along with the stories and legends you hear about how dangerous and gang-infested big cities are.

Auntie Cockroach (kids)

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 30, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Farsi

When he was four or five, his grandmother and mother told him a story about “Auntie Cockroach”. This folktale is a very popular Persian fairy tale for kids and it was a popular bedtime story for Arya. Her mother and grandmother would always end their retelling by asking him to answer what the moral of the story was (being generous, helping people and welcoming guests into your home).
He told me the following rendition from what he remembers:
On a very rainy night, auntie Cockroach received many visitors from animals who needed shelter. There was the zebra, the horse, the cat ad the mouse. The zebra asked to come in because his roof was leaking; the horse came next and asked for some food since he had been traveling all night and hadn’t been able to stop anywhere. Then came the cat seeking the warmth of a fireplace and finally, the mouse whose mousehole had flooded with the rains. Auntie cockroach let all the animals in and tended to their needs; the next morning, all the animals left and were eternally thankful for Auntie Cockroach’s generosity.

What’s interesting about this story, is that Arya revealed that there is another version that goes by the same name: “Auntie Cockroach and Mr. Mouse” and is the adult (more elaborate) version of the kids’ one he’d heard growing up. This version can be found online as a PDF and is titled “Auntie Cockroach (Khale Suske) and Mr. Mouse”

What Game Will Helen Keller Always Win?

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Torrance, California
Performance Date: 4/26/2013
Primary Language: English

Q: “What game will Helen Keller always win?”

A: “Marco Polo.”

The joke that my informant tells me pokes fun at Helen Keller—obviously known for being both blinds and deaf.  My informant is the kind of person prone to enjoy a good laugh at an inappropriate joke, so it is not at all surprising that after telling me this joke, he got a good laugh.  The joke focuses on what American society finds socially unacceptable to laugh at: handicaps.  This joke that is presented is only one of the great many Helen Keller jokes that exist, so American culture clearly finds something humorous about making fun of the most prominent woman in history known for her handicaps.

I actually found a similar joke brought up in an episode of Family Guy titled Peter’s Got Woods.  The episode contained a scene in which Stewie Griffin, in an effort to poke fun at Brian, states: “That’ll be more pathetic than that game of Marco Polo I played with Helen Keller.”  And then the scene cuts to Stewie aimlessly kicking around a pool with his eyes closed calling “Marco….  Marco….  Marco…” over and over and over again while Helen Keller—unblinking and unmoving—stands as if lifeless at one end of the pool.  Stewie, after about twenty seconds of kicking around, does not find her, so it is safe to presume that Helen has won the game.

The popularity of a show like Family Guy is known for its crude humor that often goes “too far” into the realm of inappropriateness that the American public finds exceedingly funny.  So it follows that jokes such as the much popularized Helen Keller jokes have been found in Seth MacFarlane’s best work.

Annotation: Smith, Danny. “Peter’s Got Woods.” Family Guy. Dir. Peter Shin, Chuck Klein, and Zac Moncrief. FOX. CA, 11 Sept. 2005.

Pokemon Capture Button Press Ritual

Nationality: Chinese American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/11/2013
Primary Language: English

Click here for video.

“So as a kid, I was a huge fan of the Pokemon games. Best game ever, just putting that out there. So there’s quite a few times during the game where you have to catch these Legendary Pokemon. Like you know, in like Pokemon Yellow you go into the cave and you’re like ‘Oh my god its a Mewtwo, I need that Mewtwo’, right? So I have like 20 Ultra Balls and I’ll be like ‘Oh crap. I need to catch this thing before I’m out of Pokeballs’, so I go in and like every single time I throw a Pokeball I have to do the traditional moves. Once you throw that Pokeball you have to press left, right, left, right, and then while you’re doing that you have to vigorously press the A and B buttons. That increases your chances of catching that Mewtwo. Trust me it works. Try it next time.”

This practice of mashing buttons while trying to catch a Pokemon is incredibly widespread. Everyone that I’ve seen play Pokemon has done something similar. It is almost like a nervous fidget while waiting for a successful capture or a failure. Everyone I’ve watched does it differently based on where they grew up. In my hometown, the common practice was to hold the A button and tap B in rhythm with the twitching of the Pokeball. As children, we had no understanding of programming or how games were designed. We didn’t know that the designers of our Pokemon games never programmed in any functionality for button pressing to affect Pokemon capture rates. To us, Gameboys were these magical boxes that did things when we pressed buttons. I think we just assumed that pressing buttons while a Pokemon was being captured would affect the probability of catching the Pokemon because why would it not? This ritual speaks volumes about how we see new technologies. When we don’t understand things we tend to come up with rituals to deal with them. When we catch a Pokemon due to random chance, but happened to be pressing a certain button combination, we’re often lead to believe that pressing buttons works. For many people, these button patterns became consolidated because every once in a while, they appear to work.

There is an incredible amount of folklore and rumor surrounding the Pokemon franchise thanks to the internet and poor translation. In 1998, When Pokemon first achieved mass appeal in the United States, the internet was just burgeoning. I remember going on “gaming tips” sites that often featured wild rumors and had little-to-no fact-checking. What complicated things was that a lot of literature about Pokemon was in Japanese, the game’s original language. Many of gaming tip sites were run by people with no knowledge of Japanese, so often they just took pictures that were available in Japanese gaming guides and made an educated guess as to what the pictures were trying to illustrate. As a result, there were many theories and rumors, mostly incorrect, about the game.

In Pokemon, the main goal of the game is to catch a multitude of colorful monsters and battle them. Perhaps this explains why the game is so incredibly popular. The core concept of the game plays into our drive to collect, dominate, and compete. A friend of mine once compared it to a more interactive form of stamp collecting.

Lavender Town Syndrome

Nationality: United States
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 2/17/13
Primary Language: English
Language: French

The informant is a college student from Reno, Nevada.

This supposed “syndrome” is a piece of online lore which comes from the Pokemon video games for Gameboy. The informant first stumbled upon a website about it while he was in high school. However, he played the games when he was seven or eight years old. In the game, the player travels from town to town, advancing towards the end. One of the towns is called Lavender Town. In it, there is a tower full of ghosts of wandering souls of Pokemon who have been murdered. When the player enters a new area, the music changes. Each town has its own song, and the informant recalls Lavender Town’s being particularly creepy.

This song is central to the lore which has become an online legend. According to the legend, when the first prototypes of the game came out in Japan in February of 1996, there was a spike in illness of children who bought and played the game. These “illnesses” supposedly made them mentally unstably, resulting in a spike in suicides and violent behavior. According to the legend, the high frequencies used in the song resulted in these physiological changes. The informant does not actually believe the legend is actually true, mostly because it is posted on a page called “creepypasta Wiki”, a page for stories that are generally made-up internet hoaxes. Still, there are entire forums filled with lengthy theories about missing frequencies and ghosts in the machine. The following is a link to the song, as heard in the final, U.S. version: