************************************************************** * * * CYBERSPACE * * A biweekly column on net culture appearing * * in the Toronto Sunday Sun * * * * Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer * * Free for online distribution * * All Rights Reserved * * Direct comments and questions to: * * * * * ************************************************************** The last couple weeks, with the Leafs making the move from Maple Leaf Gardens to the Air Canada Centre, we've seen an extreme or two in the mysterious phenomenon of fan behaviour. Paying $4000 for a pair of tickets to see men on ice when you could spend it on a week in Fiji or strolling down Tokyo's Ginza seems odd to this admitted non-fan of pro-sports. A friend who went to the second last game at Maple Leaf Gardens observed that one highly devoted fan was stripping paint off the walls with a razor blade and pressing it between wax paper. It's an odd souvenir considering the building itself isn't actually going to be torn down. You'll still be able to see heavy metal bands play there for the next twenty years. The net has changed the way fans of sports, movies, and celebrities express their devotion. The moral equivalent of the drunken idiot who takes off his shirt and runs onto the ball diamond in the middle of play can probably be found in the thousands of really crappy Geocities pages featuring a single picture of Leo DiCaprio and, set in H1, B, and BLINK tags, "I LOVE YOU LEO!" repeated four hundred times. Some fans are so devoted that they don't really have time to read a book on how to write decent HTML. Some fans, however, out do themselves. There are pages that so obviously speak of a web master's mentally and physically unsound devotion of time to a particular celebrity that Wired magazine coined the term "Stalker Site" to describe them. Probably the most "stalked" celebrities on the net is The X- Files' Gillian "Scully" Anderson. A smart, skeptical woman of science seems to appeal to netizens who are still largely males in their mid-twenties involved in high tech. One of the more venerable Gillian Anderson pages is the Gillian Anderson Testosterone Brigade (GATB) at www.bchs.uh.edu/~ecantu/GATB. The GATB site came on-line in 1995 (yeah, the dark ages) in response to the even older David Duchovny Estrogen Brigade (DDEB). The DDEBbers started a email list back in 1994 and now have a domain at www.ddeb.com. One wonders if celebrities ever visit their fan pages. Given a recent spate of lawsuits launched against fan page operators, we know lawyers frequently do. If I was Ms Anderson's legal counsel, I would advise the actress to exhibit cautious charm over the Smilin' Scully Page (www.geocities.com/Area51/Vault/1411/smiles.html). A user has made a careful study of every episode of The X-Files and comes to three conclusions: 1) Scully doesn't smile a lot 2) she used to smile more in earlier episodes 3) she should smile more often. The Smilin' Scully creator documents 14 episodes where the FBI agent shows her pearly whites, including one rare instance where Scully actually laughs. Of course, the other Fox network show that engenders a high percentage of net traffic is The Simpsons. If you're a list maker, The Simpsons Archive at www.snpp.com features more than a dozen fan-compiled lists of the show's many reoccurring references. For example, The Simpsons makes numerous allusions to movies and TV shows like Star Trek and Dr. Who. What you may not have noticed, and as this page reveals, there are also mysterious references to the number 17 and monkeys. Strangely enough, there are no discussion on the numerous barbs the show's writers hurl at Canada. There's always a debate amongst Star Trek and Star Wars fans as to which group is truly more insanely devoted. I think the upcoming release of Star Wars Episode I decides the issue. There are plans for line ups in front of theatres one month before Episode I's May 21, 1999 premiere. We worry about the Y2K bug but society may well come to a halt and economies will be thrown into recession when computer-related services become unavailable because every techies has booked off May 21. Information on these line marathons, a possible a Toronto line and other first day events can be found at countingdown.com/starwars/events. Some friends and I were thinking about taking the day off but when we heard about people lining up for a whole month, we back peddled. I'm not sure if I want to sit next to a guy who's spent 30 days in moist spring air wearing the same Boba Fett armour.