Google Street Views: Big Brother is Watching You (Get Drunk and Pass out on Mom's Lawn)

We live in a confessional world, at least that is what some complete stranger whispered in our ear before the threat of a macing moved him to another seat on the bus.

And what good's a confession if there is nobody there to hear it? [Guest Editor Christopher Hitchen's aside: If God is omniscient, isn't confessing redundant?]

A confessional world could not have developed without its twin evil, the Mary-Kate Olsen to its Ashley--voyeurism.

It's one thing to read accounts of someone's seedy life on a blog, it's another thing entirely to watch it unfold, and it's probably best where the twain meet.

Google Aerial Maps, initially showed us the promise of being able to zoom in on your neighbor's hot polka dot bikini-clad wine-drunk mistress, before privacy advocates put the kibosh on it. Similar concerns however, have not been directed toward the increasingly popular Google Street Views.

We are guessing that a line is drawn, and one that is rendered quite blurry squinting at it through Aerial View, between the clearly private and the public sphere. However the following near-encroachment onto a person's private property has called this distinction into question, with some of those same privacy concerns raised.

Australia, much like it was in our book, The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery is again at the center of drunken shenanigans, with the resigning of two Qantas flight attendants (reporters were unclear if they were on board during the recent ill-fated hole in the fuselage flight) for drunkenly pulling the fire alarm at a 5-star hotel.

However, it is a drunken Aussie fisherman who passed out on his mother's lawn and was captured on Google Street Views who has raised the ire of their Privacy Foundation.

Some make the claim that if sans Google, someone had happened by, (and rather than asking the man if he needed help, though the Samaritan issue is a different one entirely), drew lines (or put something else) on his face and taken an embarrassing photo, this would be no different, however others question how every public action, no matter how 'public', is scrutinized either by some indifferent corporation, or in the case of many downtown intersections, by more snapping pictures than backstage at the AVN Awards.

Whatever happened to the good old days of balconies and telescopes?

At the risk of betraying an editorial bias in our headline, we do side with the privacy advocates in this case but only marginally so, as without public shaming our tome of drunken exploits could not have come about (and we are equally aware of the irony of holding this position when we've decided to disseminate the poor bastard's photo all over the blogosphere). Hey, it's a gray issue.

George Clooney Versus Absolutely Fabio-lous

We Shark Guys generally steer clear of tabloids, unless of course, it’s to get the latest GPS coordinates for Angelina’s lost baby or to find out when the biblical rapture is coming to a town near you (get that bulk shopping done now, Kearney, Nebraska).

Yes, there are tens of thousands of blogs out there that already go into the extreme minutiae of celebrity exploits, from the rum-laced oatmeal that starts their mornings to the evening’s highway hot toddies that result in more DUIs per capita for the high-rolling set than anyone else.

That said, as with our respective addictions to restoring functionality to Civil-War-era cannons and firing them off, and needlessly polluting public parks (we won’t say which of us suffers from which addiction), we do occasionally feel the need to indulge in a bit of trashy, celebrity gossip, especially when the stars of the tale are as unlikely a pair as this one. We could no longer resist the temptation to cover male-model extraordinaire Fabio's recent dust up with George Clooney at an Italian restaurant again after the Fab-ster rehashed the entire incident in an interview with Ok Magazine earlier this week.

The incident started when George Clooney suspected that one of Fabio’s dinner companions (a group who had won a “Dinner with Fabio” prize in some sort of housewife fantasy contest—we were unable to determine who sprung for the tab) was taking photographs of Clooney gorging himself on the expensive Italian fare without his permission. Clooney was photographed with middle-finger poised Fabio-ward (see above), so we can assume that Clooney was right in thinking this, though we typically reserve the middle-digit for more worthy recipients like the guy at the highway toll booth, who can’t do crap about it anyway.

Fabio, who has graced hundreds of covers of romance novels and once was so absolutely incredulous at the thought that a margarine spread was not butter that he starred in a nationwide advertising campaign to that effect, came to the table, told Clooney no photos were being taken of him and to take it easy. Clooney paid up and then, according to Fabio, dealt out a parting-shot to his table referring to one of his lady friends as “a fat cow”.

Chivalry is not dead, as long as Fabio is in the house while George Clooney is drinking wine. He came to their defense, later telling OK! “You have to be a low-class, scumbag to start calling a woman a name. If you're a man, you should never. You should be a gentleman. These women were with me and as a man I defend them.” If Fabio’s version of this is correct, he then chased Clooney out of the place, later saying “He was lucky he ran out of the restaurant. He's not even half a man."

We consulted some street fight analysts (read: rummies who say they could and would have kicked your ass seven ways from Sunday when they were your age) and, on providing them with the tale of the tape -- with Fabio at 6'3 and in good shape and Clooney at 5'11 and presumably too preoccupied with his career as an A-list Hollywood actor to waste his time on martial arts -- the majority opinion was not in Clooney's favor. As one wag surmised: “That big bastid Fabio would tear his freakin’ head off!”