Diamonds, Engagement Rings & Diamond Jewelry in popular culture

Soon enough, you can cyber-kiss any of the Papal rings, from the early renaissance ruby and diamond rings to the current solid gold ring worn by Pope Benedict XVI.  No longer do you have to wait in huge crowds to merely see His Holiness go by in his pimped-out Mercedes-Benz SUV Popemobile; or travel all the way to Vatican City to be a speck in a crowd in St. Peter’s square; or try to score tickets to any of the masses over which he presides and grants “audiences”.  Expecting to be given a direct blessing by the Pope is like expecting that Ed McMahon was going to show up at your door with a check for millions of dollars (y,know, before he died).  It could happen, but it wasn’t likely.  But now, all of that isn’t necessary.  All of the legwork is being taken out of chasing the Holy Father around the globe.  All you need now is an internet connection and a working knowledge of social media.

Who wouldn't want this guy as a Facebook friend?

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Papacy is getting its own Facebook page.  It already has an event page that was designed to promote Benedict XVI’s September trip to the UK.  Apparently, despite the six-month expiration of the event for which it was designed, more than 10,000 people regularly check in.  Those devout Catholics evidently need to get their mass on.  Seeing this, the Vatican’s social communications office found an untapped market: Facebook freaks.  The millions and millions of people across the globe who spend hours every day—hours when they should be focusing on spreadsheets for work or maintaining relationships with family—screwing around on Facebook.  And out of those millions and millions, there are scads of Catholics.  That’s just math.  The launch of the new Vatican website will, initially, be dedicated to upcoming beatification of Pope John Paul II on May 1.  It will link to video highlights of His (late) Holiness’s 27-year papacy.  The designers of the page are focusing entirely on the beatification for now.

But the Holy See is hoping for much more from this re-entry into social media.  The six-month old, never-updated page has become an online community in which Catholics, or any interested person, can interact.  At Easter, the Vatican is launching an information web portal, the contents of which are meant to be posted, tweeted, and even blogged.  It will contain information about the Vatican’s views on, for example, the Tsunami in Japan or the various uprisings in the Middle East.  With a multi-media format, “friends” of the Popedom can send out the Vatican’s innermost feelings about issues with the click of a mouse.  Pope Benedict XVI did the unthinkable when he allowed “the faithful” to ask questions online.  While an exhaustive search of the Vatican website, various websites for “the faithful”, and a Google search provided no “Contact the Pontiff” links, it is possible that they were already taken down.  When His Holiness responds to some of these questions on Good Friday, he will be the first Pope ever to answer to online posts.  His pre-recorded responses will be available on Italian state television, and, 10 seconds later, on YouTube.  No word yet on whether there are plans for a Pontifex Maximus YouTube channel.

The original Vatican website will remain as it is, posting the Pope’s schedule, Papal events, celebrations, and links to get tickets.  That will stay as it has always been.  But now you can “like” and “friend” the Vatican and Pope Benedict XVI, all without getting out of your PJs and slippers.  With friends like that…

Unless you’ve had your head in the sand, the word “WikiLeaks” and the oddly melodic name Julian Assange have been assaulting your brain from every possible source.  Until April, WikiLeaks managed to fly mostly under the radar of our collective consciousness.  And then something happened that affected Americans, and claws came out.  On April 5, the site released classified US military footage from a 2007 attack on Baghdad by a US helicopter that killed 12, including two Reuters news reporters.  The footage, known as “Collateral Murder”, caused “WikiLeaks” to be the most searched term on the internet worldwide.  The US went after a young man named Bradley Manning who was accused of leaking the video.  WikiLeaks has maintained that they do not collect personal information about their sources, but aha!  A new name came into the picture.  Spokesperson Julian Assange told The Guardian that, although he had no specific knowledge of Manning’s involvement in leaking any video, he hired three criminal attorneys to represent the 22 year-old.

Proof positive that pasty-faced nerds have the means and opportunity to take over the world.

But now, we’ve all but forgotten about that kid because now there’s a sex scandal.  Sort of.  Evidently, Julian Assange was in Sweden and met two women, known initially as Woman A and Woman B, both of whom were taken in—on different days—by his flaxen hair and cadaverous complexion (we blame you, O makers of the Twilight Saga).  After spending romantic, rolling-in-the-hay kind of evenings with him, they each went to the Swedish authorities and reported a crime that exists only in Sweden.  It’s something that happens to regular people all the time, and all they generally get out of it is a great deal of anxiety and possibly an unplanned child.  Conspiracy theorists are running amok with ideas that the women were sent by governments that had been exposed by WikiLeaks for various bad things.  Julian Assange has made a lot of enemies along the way.  As of December 9, one of the women chose to leave the horror of the situation she was in for a relaxing trip as part of Christian Outreach program to the West Bank in the Palestinian Territories.  It is not out of the question that someone in a position of power might take steps to discredit Assange, since WikiLeaks has exposed classified documents ranging from Scientology to a nuclear spill in Iran.

Under pressure from the government and unnamed sources, PayPay, Visa, and Mastercard all suspended their services for cardholders to make donations to WikiLeaks.  As a response, angry cardholders and people who know stuff about computer hacking caused the sites to crash.  Not good news when all of those companies rely 100% on businesses being able to slide cards through a machine that dials up through the—can you guess it?—internet to get transactions approved.  Basically, while Interpol was ready to go looking for the WikiLeaks spokesperson, fans of his site made commerce extraordinarily difficult on an international level.  The lesson is that you cannot mess with The People.  WikiLeaks supporters are the high-tech version of the Colombian coke dealers in Scarface.  They used a cyber-chainsaw and the shower was the credit card business, which previously felt itself invulnerable.  Oops.  After proving that hackers can, indeed, achieve more-or-less what Tyler Durden was going for in Fight Club—and on some of the busiest shopping days of the year—they backed off, having proven their point.

Assange now sits in a London jail and has only one request: a computer.  While the charges against him in Sweden seem to be fading away, the US is mulling over espionage charges, which would be unwise.  Why?  Again, we turn to the wisdom of Tyler Durden: “…the people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep.”

Julian Assange is not a violent man, and the people who support WikiLeaks are not violent.  They are dedicated to the exposure of the truth at all costs.  Is that always right?  Maybe, maybe not.

But I don’t want to be the one on a bathroom floor with a rubber band determining my fate.

After seeing the photo that launched a thousand blog postings—the one of a man getting searched to the point of knowing his religion—the TSA went from a minor security inconvenience to one worthy of starring in its own de-motivational poster.  The TSA is supposed to be here to protect us, and instead it causes us to become angry and restless from waiting in lines and making sure we have only the appropriate amount of fluids in out carry-on luggage.  Now they’ve upped the ante from the full-body screenings that would have made Superman blush (he, after all, could only see to Lois Lane’s modest underthings) and can see whether or not you’ve shaved your legs recently.  No word on whether or not hairy legs are a sign of a threat or not.  Because of the backlash of the scans that were designed to “keep us safe”, which we later found out were, in some cases, printed and brought home by security staff for their, ahem, personal use, TSA decided to rock it old school.  They’ve gone back to the LAPD pat-down.

Currently, this is a joke. Emphasis on "currently".

In general, pat-downs are used on the street because street cops don’t have a lot of handy-dandy technology (unless you’re watching CSI for your information, in which case, you have other issues to discuss with your therapist).  But the TSA, in their efforts to thwart terrorism and avoid another attack like the one in 2001, have had a lot of government money and research at their disposal to make flying safer for all of us.  And I, for one, don’t mind getting my bags searched and taking off my shoes.  The waiting makes me cranky, but that also gives me ample people-watching time.  However, I must add that I have never been put through the indignity of a full-body scan, and I can say unequivocally that I would lose it if some woman wanted to touch me all over because my toothpaste exceeded the 3.4-ounce limit.  While TSA Chief John Pistole waffles over policy changes, Hillary Clinton has already stated that, although she is exempt from such searches, would not submit to such an invasion of privacy.

San Diego traveler John Tyner became a national hero when he told a TSA screener bearing gloves and a giant sense of entitlement, “If you touch my junk, I’m gonna have you arrested.”  And why the search?  Dude is so All-American that apple pie and baseball are shamed in his presence.  Hours later, he was released.  And so, as the Thanksgiving and the busiest traveling time of the year approaches, all of our collective junk still hangs in the balance (so to speak) while the TSA and Congress try to come up with something better.  President Barack Obama has stated that he wants to ensure our security, but to review methods to find ways that are “less intrusive.”  Left to their own devices, the TSA would have colonoscopy and “turn your head and cough” rooms for “suspicious types” like John Tyner.  Of course we need airport security, but there are airports that are doing it right, and those are the places that we need to be looking at modeling ourselves after.  Instead, we have meetings.

I wonder how long it takes to walk 300 miles to see my parents.

It’s all about social media these days.  What began as a way to connect to people has turned into big business.  Now companies have pages on Facebook, MySpace, and a few other sites like Friendster that may or may not exist anymore.  Bands create pages to make their music even more accessible to the masses.  A person can get discounts on items if they become fans of particular Facebook pages.  We text instead of talking, we find mates on websites, and we buy things without leaving the house.  Because of “social media”, everything is popularized and made available online.  We can get updates from our favorite authors, musicians, and celebrities daily.  Do I expect to get a personal message from Chuck Liddell by becoming his Facebook friend?  Well, no.  But a person can buy everything from books to computers to diamonds and engagement rings—often at dramatically reduced prices—by becoming “friends” with companies.  Where MySpace has been eclipsed by Facebook, so is Facebook quickly playing second fiddle to Twitter.  But suddenly we find ourselves being virtually assaulted and given viruses via the internet.

Big Brother in 140 characters or less.

And it makes headlines, especially when a gaping hole in security is found by a 17 year-old Australian kid who just wanted to see if he could do it.  The precocious Pearce Delphin decided to send out a bit of JavaScript code that would cause a pop-up ad to appear when someone moused over it.  “I did it merely to see if it could be done,” he told AFP via email (of course), “that JavaScript really could be executed within a tweet”.  Well, not only did it work, but hackers found it brilliant and used it to send millions of people to various websites, including Japanese porn sites.  It also was used to create something called “worm tweets” that replicated every time they were read.  Twitter was suddenly overwhelmed with random redirection and endless tweets from other accounts.  The glitch wasn’t only used for pranks and porn.  More malicious hackers were able to create code that allowed them access to Twitter users’ personal information.

And suddenly we all feel a little more vulnerable, afraid that everything from our real birth years to credit card and banking information is being accessed by cyber-creeps.  And those of us who still rock it old-school and prefer talking on the phone to texting are still left exposed to attack because we wanted to be among the first to know when Soundgarden released their tour dates.

The one thing that kept us mildly protected was Twitter’s allowed tweet length.  According to the mischievous teenager, “The problem was being able to write the code that can steal usernames and passwords while still remaining under Twitter’s 140-character tweet limit”.  Given enough time, hackers could certainly figure it out.  Twitter, however, jumped on the problem and had the bug fixed within five hours, but not before even White House press secretary Robert Gibbs found his account bombarded with unwanted code.  While Delphin didn’t do anything that is technically (pun intended) illegal, he did prove that no system is foolproof.

It certainly isn’t causing very many people to panic and close their accounts to Twitter, Facebook, or any other of our favorite social media, but it does kinda make you think, no?

I’m going to call my mom.  On the phone.  Using a landline.  But while we’re talking, I’ll be checking to see what my friends overseas are up to without leaving the comfort of my own home.  I, like everyone else, can’t go back to what life was like before AOL got me hooked.