Magic Jewball

I’m a bit of an Internet vigilante. When someone hotlinks to a picture from my site, I go have a look at who it is and why they stole my picture and what it’s being used for. Mostly, I don’t really care about the theft itself (half these pictures aren’t even mine, especially all the Simpsons ones) but I do care that you’re stealing my bandwidth. For you non-bloggers, I should explain that every picture you look at travels over the Internets to your computer and costs me a little bit of money. Usually, it falls within the package I pay for and we’re all OK. But on principle, it annoys me when you stick a picture (statistically, it’s probably Paul Banks or A-Rod) on your MySpace page or whatever and every time someone loads that page, guess who pays for the bandwidth? Me, yay! Usually, once I’m alerted, I change the name of the picture so the connection is no longer made and instead, one of those useless little boxes with an X in it appears on your page (I tried changing the hotlinking settings but it led to some headaches I don’t want to revisit). Sorry, but as I say in my FAQ, just copy it and drop it into Photobucket or some other hosting service and it’s all yours. I won’t mind, even if I took it with my own camera.

Except for one picture.

That’d be the one in the sidebar, which is me at some age (I don’t know, it’s not dated, although the outfit sure is). My parents worked at a summer camp and I spent every summer of my childhood there. One year, a professional photographer came up to take some candids (I think it was for a booklet advertising the camp) and captured me, dirty-handed, fresh from playing in a mud puddle. I love the unrepentant smirk on my face. There are a whole series of them in the camp archives (half have me and another kid actually in the puddle) and I guess they sent us one to keep. I suppose if it really meant all that much to me I wouldn’t display it here and so I’m resigned to other people stealing it. Still, when I saw that someone was linking to it, I had to go look. It turned out to be a French cycling forum and my picture was being used for what seemed to be a sort of game (it was the “other sports” section) of “what tennis player is this as a child?” I’m the second one. The answers haven’t been revealed but the first one looks a lot like Amelie Mauresmo.

As is my M.O., I immediately changed the name of the picture so the forum page would show the silly red X box but people who had seen it originally kept guessing anyway. One thought it was Monica Seles. Hm. Either way, it was kind of funny and since I’m learning French at the moment (maybe I’ll explain more about this later in the week) I registered and responded that it was in fact me, I don’t play tennis or really speak French, and come and have a look. At least, I think that’s what I said. Who the fuck knows.

So, welcome French pre-teen sports-enthusiasts! Please note that the little girl in the picture, sadly, did not grow up to be Monica Seles.

Depeche Mode – Photographic