Tiger Better Fess Up

By now, everyone within range of a TV or radio knows that Tiger Woods had some kind of "incident" over the holiday weekend. The official story is that at 2:30am, Woods was backing out of his driveway and ran into a tree and a fire hydrant, injuring himself. His wife supposedly had to break his rear windshield with a golf club to pull him out of the vehicle, and when the police arrived, they found Woods lying in the street, bloody and incoherent. with his wife "standing over him."

Riiiight.

Before any of the inevitable rumors began to swirl, I had my doubts. First I thought, "Tiger Woods had an accident at 2:30 in the morning? Backing up? What was he trying to get away from?" Then I heard more details. Facial injuries, wife with golf club. Immediately, I figured, he wasn't injured from the accident, his wife went upside his head with that golf club. After all, if he injured himself that badly backing up, he would have had to stomp on the gas pedal, meaning at least he would have pulled the hydrant out of the ground (I've seen it happen) and/or possibly backed into -- or through! -- whatever was across from his driveway.

Then it came out that Mrs. Tiger had read a National Inquirer report of her husband having an affair with a woman in New York. That would definitely be a rationale for her working him over with a golf club or whatever. These days the Inquirer has to be taken more seriously than in years past; after all, they stuck to their guns with the John Edwards paternity story, and turned out to be correct.

Eldrick Woods is, and has always been, a private person. I can respect that; I treasure my privacy as well. But Tiger better put aside the worries about his image and just fess up to whatever it is he's so afraid of the police finding out, and just answer their questions. The best way to make the story go away is to tell it. But continuing to stick to an obvious fable, and continuing to hold off the police, will just prolong the publicity until the truth comes out anyway, maybe bringing along with it something else the Woodses would like to keep private.

EDIT: Of course, now more women are stepping up and saying that they've had affairs with Tiger Woods, one even supplying a voicemail recording of Woods asking her to remove her name from her phone so it won't show up in his cell phne's call logs  when she calls, because his wife had checked his phone and seen the name. And, typically, Woods is throwing money around to all involved, including his wife, in the hopes that it will keep everyone in their respective lanes.

I will never understand the mindset of someone who apparently values image above reality. Woods is apparently rewriting his prenuptial agreement with his wife to give her more money if (well, basically "when") she leaves but giving her more to stick around for a couple more years. Reminds me of a movie I saw parts of a few years ago, "Love Don't Cost a Thing," starring Nick Cannon and Christina Milian. Tiger comes off as a lot nerdier (and maybe needier?) than Nick here, because Nick's character didn't pay millions to Christina's cool-girl character to pretend to be his girlfriend, the way Tiger's paying Elin millions to stick around and pretend to be his loving wife. (Take note of the title, Tiger; whatever you're paying for ain't love.)

Interesting note from UrbanDictionary.com, in its definition of Kobe Special, named after the ring NBA player (ha!) Kobe Bryant bought his wife after being caught cheating:

Jewelry bought by husbands to appease their angry wives. Usually, the anger concerns extramarital skank diddling on the side. In normal households, a gift of jewelry like this would solve nothing; it would be seen as the empty and loveless gesture that it is. However, in the lives of the rich and famous, empty materialism covers all sins and fixes all problems because they have no souls.

You gotta be spoofin' me (as my father might say)

There is now a service called SpoofTel, that actually allows you to spoof the number that shows up on caller ID when you call others' cell phone numbers. What's more, the link is actually in rotation in Google Mail's new Web Clips service (one line ads and news links XML'd to the top of the mail listings). The blurb on the site's front page claims that this allows users to protect their privacy while making cell phone calls. Um, excuse me, but how is this any different from spoofing email headers? What's to stop unscrupulous telemarketers (imagine that!) from getting hold of this, if they haven't already, and going to town with it? As it is, they already send little or no info with their calls. All they need now is some kind of way to send spyware into your cell phone so they'll know what trusted numbers to spoof? With all the info they buy already about each and every one of us, what's one more bunch of bytes? (And I hope there aren't any conspiracy theorists reading this -- be assured that if I've thought of it, someone with the money and means to see it through has already done so a thousand times over.)

And with all the fuss over perceived loss of privacy through GMail's targeted ads in user's browser windows alongside their mail, why would Google even want to be involved in this mess? How can this not make people less secure with Google's promises that they value their users' privacy?

Somebody didn't do a very good job of thinking things through here.

PS -- Not only did someone drop the ball when deciding to let SpoofTel's ads through, but when I used Blogger's spell-check on this post, the spell-checker didn't recognize Google, GMail, or XML. I had to tell the checker to "learn" those terms. When a company that lives and dies by the Internet makes a tool available to the public, a tool with an included spell-checker, I would think that said company would make sure that the checker recognizes the company's name and the names of its main services without having to be "told."