Hasta La Gadget!

Germany is irked that the NSA spied on its officials (including its Chancellor), and today it responded by hitting the US where it really hurts: the pocketbook. The German Ministry of the Interior has decided against renewing a Verizon internet…

The Internet’s most popular music stars are about to get an expanded audience, with YouTube revealing today that Sirius XM will be featuring its most popular artists on a new show called “The YouTube 15”. This marks a first for the video service. YouTube is home to many musicians, some who have gone on to achieve record deals and fame, … Continue reading

When we take photos, we’re only preserving one aspect from an experience. You can’t get the full scope of what a day at the beach was like if you’re only seeing a picture of the sunset and some waves. The same goes for taking video, as you only have a set amount of space you can capture on a screen.

If you want to get more than a picture frame’s worth of information in one shot, then you’re going to love the 360cam. This is a super high definition camera that will capture 360 degrees through 3, 185 degree fish-eye lenses. These are synced up to capture and stitch images in real time, so you won’t need to do any post work. You can use a MicroSD up to 64GB, and move files around through the Micro USB port.

Alone this costs around $349, and would be perfect for recording your memories on vacation, at festivals, and more. This is waterproof and comes with an underwater lens cup (goggles for your lenses) so your video or photos will be crystal clear without distortion from the water. This is very small, and can fit in the palm of your hand. Seeing that it has universal mounting capabilities, this could be used in a variety of hands-free ways. It has GPS to let you geotag your images, a gyroscope for image stabilization, 3 microphones, and a rechargeable lithium-ion battery. There are add-ons you can buy which will also allow you to live stream or monitor your home.

Available for crowdfunding on Kickstarter
[ The 360cam will let you capture everything there is to see copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

Ward Hall – King of the Sideshow! is the first-ever biography of the man who has helped shape the American Circus Sideshow into what it has become today. Among other oddities, he has worked with monkey girls, half-people, fat men, sword swallowers, fire eaters, giants, colossal snakes, huge rats and diminutive horses. In addition to owning dozens of sideshow and circuses during his long career, Ward has written four books, four musical stage productions, has appeared in seven movies, and more than 100 videos and TV specials, performed at Madison Square Garden and Lincoln Center in New York City and has sung at Carnegie Hall.

Ward has the memory of an elephant, the exaggerative dialogue of a Ginsu Knife salesman and a sequined wardrobe that would have made Liberace turn his head.

Excerpts from Ward Hall — King of the Sideshow!

Ward Hall joined his first circus in 1944 when he was a 14-year-old kid living in Colorado. A year later, as a 15 year old 10th grade dropout, he ran away for good, joining the Dailey Bros. Circus. He never looked back. By 16 he was performing in a sideshow and by age 21, he owned a sideshow!

***
It was spring 1946, Ward was 15, and he was prepared, or at least he thought he was, when a Billboard ad caught his attention. Dailey Bros. Circus was looking for a magician and fire eater. He didn’t know how to do either very well. He didn’t tell them he was only 15, and he didn’t have a plan. He just knew he had to join the show at that time. Ward responded to Milt Robbins asking for the job, and soon a telegram arrived that read:

Salary OK.
Show opens April 1. Join anytime.
Winter Quarters, Gonzales, Texas.
– Milt Robbins, Show Manager

Ward daringly told his father that he was going to leave and take the job with the circus. His father didn’t argue, telling Ward that he would get the circus out of his system and be “back in two weeks.” Ward laughs. “They are still waiting for me.”

Using what he had left of his last paycheck from the part-time job he had on the railroad to buy a $51.50 bus ticket, he caught up with Dailey Bros., still at its winter quarters in Central Texas. He borrowed his uncle’s steamer trunk, packed it with his one suit, a few other pieces of clothing and a small collection of homemade magic tricks. The day he climbed off the bus in Gonzales, Ward recalls thinking that at that point, he “was beginning the second part of my life. On that momentous day, my childhood ended.” It was March 27, 1946 – 116 days before his 16th birthday.

Anxious to get on with his life, he arrived in Gonzales more than two weeks early. Instead of the circus bosses sending him home, he was put to task on several small projects. He slept in a small shed along with sideshow equipment that would be traveling with the show that year. Ward’s pay was $30 a week with cookhouse privileges, which meant he could eat at the official circus cookhouse and share a berth on Car 79 of the circus train when the show hit the road.

While new to the circus itself, he had a pretty good idea of what to expect before he stepped off that bus, having been reading news and stories about the big top in Billboard for years.

It didn’t take Ward long to be noticed on the lot, but not necessarily in an endearing way. On his second day, he decided to further educate himself on fire eating, having never truly learned the skill. In his letter to Robbins, Ward claimed he could eat fire, so he thought he had better learn as soon as possible. On his first attempt he badly scorched his lips, turned around in pain, kicked over the fuel can and caught the shed on fire. Needless to say, a good eye was kept on this aggressive but polite newcomer to the business from that point on. Ward moved into the men’s dormitory where he spent only a few nights. “Having been a loner all my life, I was not knowledgeable on how men act after drinking large quantities of alcohol, so I discovered an abandoned circus wagon which became my living quarters until we moved onto the train.”

***
In August 1973, while playing in Indianapolis, Ward appeared in a television special called On Location: Alan King at the Indiana State Fair. Alan King kept asking very basic and non-informed questions and it was obvious to Ward that King didn’t quite understand, or like, the sideshow business. “I can’t imagine why anyone would pay 50-cents to see this stuff,” the comedian told Ward, referring to the sideshow acts. Taken aback, Ward retorted, “I can’t imagine someone paying $5 to go to a nightclub to see your act.” King bragged, “They pay $15.” To which Ward responded: “That’s actually worse!” The network edited out that exchange, but the edited segment effectively showed that freak shows “provide honorable livelihoods for handicapped men and women who otherwise might be unemployable.”

***
With the life that Ward Hall has led, it seems impossible that one single event would stand out to him as the best. What’s even more improbable is that event had nothing to do with a sideshow.

On April 22, 1994, Ward was the singing master of ceremonies at Carnegie Hall for Circus Blues, a show that was part of The Carnegie Hall Folk Festival. Stephen Holden, a reviewer with the New York Times, attended the show and wrote of Ward. “Wearing a sequined top hat and tails, Ward Hall, a former lion tamer and pitchman, presided over the program of old-time circus musicians, like Ralph Edwards leading a big top version of This is Your Life. Ward sang three numbers with the orchestra to get the show under way. “Hi, Neighbor!,” “There’ll Be Some Changes Made,” and “When You’re Smiling.” Among the musical guests on the same bill were Blind Willy, Guitar Gabriel (Robert Lewis Jones), Diamond Tooth Mary and Willa Mae Buckner.

“I have said it many, many times that singing at Carnegie Hall in New York City was the highlight of my life,” said Ward. “It’s the one singular thing that I have enjoyed most, and being a part of that program is one of my proudest moments.” Surprisingly, not too many people who know of Ward and his sideshow prowess know that the Carnegie Hall event took place, said Ward. “I don’t usually tell people that I sang at Carnegie Hall. It is so unbelievable that this sideshow bum would have been top billed in a program at Carnegie – with great reviews the
following day.”

***
Ward celebrates 70 years of working in the weird, wacky and wild world of the sideshow in 2014. Now 84 years old, he doesn’t travel often with his show and he has passed the baton on to a younger generation who are now his partners. But he checks in daily and occasionally surprises them all by showing up in his red, sequined jacket, taking the microphone as he immediately starts attracting the curious to the front of the tent. There is only one person silver throated kind of the carnival talkers who could do that, Ward Hall.

__________
Tim R. O’Brien is the author of Ward Hall — King of the Sideshow!, available wherever books are sold and online at Amazon.com and Casaflamingo.com.

In January 2012, they were everywhere. The morning shows, CNN, Fox News. A group of teenage girls from the small town of Le Roy, New York, all exhibiting startling tics, their necks twisting, jaws thrusting, strange barks emanating from their mouths. And the “mystery illness” was spreading — 10, 12, eventually 18 stricken girls. For several weeks, I found myself following the case compulsively. It wasn’t just the disturbing tics that mesmerized me. It was the look of panic in the girls’s eyes, and the eyes of their parents. Watching them on my laptop, I felt my own neck start aching, my jaw throbbed. I remember chiding myself: You can’t catch it through a computer screen.

Within days, I began writing my novel The Fever, which imagines a similar, fictionalized outbreak in a small town. My version unfolds over less than a week, but for the young women in Le Roy and their families, the crisis continued for a year or more — compounded, many argue, by the exhaustive news coverage. By the very footage that riveted me: those clips of the girls that spread through social media like a super-virus.

The official diagnosis, accepted by most after a fraught period of speculation and finger-pointing, was that the Le Roy girls were suffering from conversion disorder — a condition in which we “convert” stress or emotional trauma into physical symptoms. And, despite charges that the girls were “faking it,” their symptoms were real and involuntary. While conversion disorder is relatively common, what happened next was not. When conversion disorder affects a group of people, as it did in Le Roy, it is called mass psychogenic illness (MPI), or “mass hysteria.”

Traditionally, MPI is spread through sight and sound and depends on proximity, which is why so many previous cases were contained to schools, factories, rural areas. But Le Roy was the first case to unfurl, on a large-scale, in the age of social media. Dr. Laszlo Mechtler, medical director at New York State’s Dent Neurological Institute where several of the girls were treated, told the local newspaper that social networking among them was “far more intensive and far more complex than the media [was] aware of.” Dr. Jennifer McVige, the neurologist who treated ten of the girls, says that restricting access to each other, including through social media, was critical to their treatment. “A lot of them got off Facebook,” she says. “Parents shut it down.” But it was an ongoing challenge to prevent the girls from communicating with one another other through digital means. “The texting was forever a problem,” she says. “Spreading all this negativism. One of them would say if you don’t get this antibiotic, you’re going to stay sick forever. It actually hindered our treatment. The texting was brutal.”

We all throw around the word “viral” when it comes to social media, but is it possible that some of the Le Roy patients “caught” their illness by watching one another online? And what might that mean for future outbreaks? Might it be true, as Laura Dimon suggested in The Atlantic, that a “major lesson” in Le Roy may have been missed: “the power of social media to spread and exacerbate” an outbreak?

Studying videos of the Le Roy girls for MSNBC, Dr. David Lichter, professor of neurology at the University of Buffalo, observed how one girl would post their unusual movement disorder on Facebook or YouTube, and then the next would post the identical, bizarre movement, noting, “This is the modern way that symptomatology could be spread.” Indeed, sociologist Robert Bartholomew, an expert on mass hysteria, suggests we may be entering an era where the primary agent of contagion will be the Internet and social media. Which means MPI may no longer be confined to a school, small town. But could grow as wide as the internet itself.

While more research is needed, Bartholomew says, social media “appears to be a major factor in a recent upsurge in the most serious types of outbreaks involving motor dysfunction” — as in the Le Roy case. And the risks are greatest for teens — both because they are the heaviest users of social media and because, historically, MPI is more common among adolescents. It’s even more common among female adolescents. “There are some theories about that,” says Dr. McVige. “A woman’s ability to empathize and the need to fix or the need to care for, or nurture. There’s a feeling of sameness, of ‘I’m like you.'”

But there are no predictors for MPI. It’s a diagnosis made after the fact. So what, if anything, can parents do to “inoculate” their child against such an intangible risk?

As with all social media concerns, foremost is to try to ensure their child’s relationship to the online world is thoughtful, monitored and contained, and that communication between parent and child about what they see there is as open as possible.

Easier said than done, perhaps. Parents today face a uniquely challenging generation gap. Whereas they came of age as these new technologies were being introduced, bit by byte, their children have grown up “plugged in.” “The use of the new information technology has transformed us into a nation of intimate strangers,” Bartholomew says. “Relationships are initiated and carried out online. It’s a different world that our children are growing up in.”

And while parents are warned regularly of certain online risks — sexual predators, extreme harassment and bullying. But it may be much harder to see the more common, less conspicuous dangers. Delinah Hurwitz, a California State University at Northridge professor of psychology who has researched the impact of social media, notes the vulnerable space teens are in when they are online: “Social media will pull all on our weaknesses. The need for attention, for reassurance. As adolescents, we’re already addicted to feedback and social media facilitates it. Every time we tweet, post a picture, we’re waiting for people to like it, to comment on it. But it’s an empty feeling. It doesn’t last. Then we need more.”

In her own household, Hurwitz insists on “detox” periods for her teen daughter, which means time, after school, with no social media at all. “No laptop or no TV in her room,” she says. “She can’t go to bed with her phone. And we have whole-family disconnects at least one day a week.”

But it’s not just about what’s “out there” — at the potential triggers crackling in the ether — but inward. “Adolescence is about secrecy,” says Hurwitz. “Parents are far more separated from their kids than they know. They think, my daughter’s on a sports team, her grades are good, she’s a cheerleader. What they don’t know is they have this other secret world and without fully developed faculties to deal with being in there alone.”

Indeed, unexpressed and untreated stress is one common thread among the major of cases of MPI and is at the root of conversion disorder. A recent American Psychological Association survey found stress levels among teens exceeding those of adults, though teens were more hesitant to believe it had any impact on their physical or mental health. Which can make it doubly hard for parents to determine something is wrong.

“If you see your child hiding things, and your child is distressed, that’s a red flag,” Dr. McVige says. “With the girls I treated, the pervasive thing was a level of anxiety. Although they would say everything was fine at school, you really felt like something was wrong.” It turned out, all the girls in LeRoy had experienced recent stress — a sick parent, abuse, emotional turmoil. Yet Dr. McVige would see those same girls on national television, seated next time to their prompting parents, insisting they were fine. “And that’s not what was happening,” she says. “Because I knew what was going on with them at home. They needed help.”

One of the greatest challenges is helping your teens gain, and maintain, perspective. We all remember the intensity of feeling as a teen, and social media means it doesn’t go away with the school day ends. It’s constant. It can feel like a constant assault to the senses, to feeling. I think back to myself when I first watched those videos of the Le Roy girls. “I was always so active and everybody was always happy to be around me,” one of them told the Today Show, stuttering and shaking. “I don’t feel like myself anymore.” The panic, so real and vivid on her face, I could see how hard it was for her, for all of them. Hard being sick, being a mystery to everyone, most of all to herself. And also, maybe most of all, how hard it now is, harder than ever before, to be a teenager.

Megan Abbott is the author of seven novels, including Dare Me and her latest, The Fever (Little, Brown, June 2014).