Hacking toward Bethlehem

Wed, 21 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Abe Ingersoll is not the type to hit a lady -- even if she is kicking his
ass on national television. So when a tiny woman
named Gladys smacked him with a roundhouse left hook, Abe reacted stoically.
The punch landed squarely on his jaw, sending him sprawling. Gladys then
pounced, raining blow after blow on his back and shoulders. The entire
beating unfolded before rolling MTV video cameras, for later viewing by an
audience of millions. But Abe did nothing to defend himself other than ball
up and yell at her to knock it off.

Abe, a compact, spiffy-looking 18-year-old, was a cast member of "Road
Rules: Latin America" -- a 15-week-long installment of MTV's peripatetic
spinoff from the rusty but reliable documentary show, "The Real World."
(Abe's "Road Rules" episodes, which first aired earlier this year, will
likely be rerun in the fall.) When the self-professed "punk hacker kid" decided
to audition for the show, it occurred to him that he might upgrade his odds of making the cast by hacking
into the network of the show's production company, Bunim/Murray. He was right. Included in his haul
were transcripts of previous interviews with prospective cast members,
which gave him an inside track on what the producers were looking for.

The great Princess Diana Conspiracy

Thu, 25 Sep 1997 19:00:00 +0000

the massive public mourning over the death of Princess Diana seems to have abated a little, but conspiracy theories of her "murder" are still racing along like a drunk driver on antidepressants.

We ought to know. Our Web site, Conspire.Com, received its first e-mail on the subject -- asserting that Di was killed by "MI-5" (sic) -- within minutes of the initial news bulletins of the car crash on Aug. 31. Dozens more have flooded into our mailbox since. Elsewhere on the Internet, at least a half-dozen Di-conspiracy Web sites sprung spontaneously to life. An entire newsgroup (alt.conspiracy.princess-diana) popped up out of nowhere and was promptly glutted with thousands of postings.

Sometimes (well, most of the time, actually) a car crash is just a car crash. But try telling that to the hey, paranoia-rocks! brigade who have deluged the Net with brainless ramblings about "Princess Die" that are not only crazy, but worse, boring. In fact, they're giving the whole notion of conspiracy theories a bad name.

Salon.com > Jonathan Vankin

Hacking toward Bethlehem

The great Princess Diana Conspiracy