6 I The Behrend Beacon Universities watch out for torrent of users By Erika D. Smith Knight Ridder Newspapers (KRT) Who says students don't learn anything over the summer? Chances are quite a few of them at tended the new school of file sharing. They learned all about Bit Torrent, and how it's easy to download full movies, CDs, video games and software. But the University of Akron and Kent State University are prepared. "We monitor network usage and bandwidth and we respond to com plaints," said spokesman Paul Herald, summing up UA's strategy. Kent State isn't much different.. "We know we have a lot of people out there using it," said Greg Seibert, Kent State's director of security and compli The university doesn't root out and punish students for using Bit Torrent or any other file-sharing network. It does, however, limit how much bandwidth a single student can use. That way the university's high-speed network won’t get bogged down by a few users swap ping the new Eminem CD. The only time that changes is when the Recording Industry Association of America slaps Kent State with a cease and-desist notice. Then, the university will block a user's access to the network until he removes all the offending files from his PC. Last year. Kent State received 45 of those notices; small potatoes compared to the hundreds and thousands sent to other colleges. No numbers were avail able Thursday for the University of Ak Tear carnival sideshow still hanging on By Miriam Hill Knight Ridder Newspapers (KRT) (NEW YORK) It is hard to say which of Insectavora's meals is the least appetiz- The pus-colored maggots she dumps on her tongue, then illuminates with a flashlight so the audience can see them wriggle? The glistening earthworm she slurps with a gustatory glee more often associ ated with children eating spaghetti? The crunchy crickets? Jolting people out of their seats is one of the points of the Coney Island Circus Sideshow. Before Insectavora, the audi ence has already watched the Amazing Blazing Tyler Fyre pound nails into his nose and Ravi the Scorpion Swami con tort and stretch his body as if it were Silly Putty. Almost 100 years after its heyday, the freak show is hanging on. This may seem surprising when eating bugs and other gross stunts are standard fare on such TV shows as "Fear Factor," but real-live per forming "freaks" seem to have an oddly enduring appeal. "Geek Love," a novel about carnival freaks by Katherine Dunn, has a waiting list at many libraries. At the Bros. Grim Sideshow in Seaside Heights, N.J., Katzen the Tiger Lady has Teflon whis kers implanted in her cheeks and per forms with a live boa constrictor. Her hus- At Kent, more and more of those no tices list Bit Torrent as the partner in crime, Seibert said. "They don't understand how it works," he said of students. "They just go to a Web site, and they see movies and they see songs, and they’re happy." This year, Seibert expects even more students to switch from peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing programs like KaZaA. They are regular targets for lawsuits. In a way, that's good because Bit Torrent tends to manage bandwidth better than its file-sharing cousins, he said. It's incredibly efficient and stable, even though people tend to swap huge files of full-length movies. That could be behind Bit Torrent's growing popularity. By some measurements, the use of Bit Torrent has eclipsed that of KaZaA, the most popular file-sharing program for music. A six-month analysis showed Bit Torrent accounts for 53 percent of all file-sharing traffic in Europe. In June, Cache Logic also reported that about 8 million users were online at any given time sharing a petabyte, or 10 million gigabytes, of data. "It's much stealthier," said Eric Gar land, chief executive of the P2P track ing firm Big Champagne LLC. But buzz aside, Bit Torrent is still largely the domain of early adopters in the United States - typically teen-agers and college students. Much of main stream America is still taking its legal chances with P2P. "They feel there really is safety in num bers," he said. "They think, 'Yeah, I could get hit by a bus, but I'm not going Factor’: band, Enigma, has puzzle pieces tattooed over most of his body and silicone "horns" implanted in his head. But New York _ a city some have called its own freak show _ has always been the center of this kind of entertain- "In New York, there's just such an in credible culture of circus and freak shows. This is where the freak show started in its sensational and institution alized form," said Rachel Adams, a pro fessor of English at Columbia University and the author of "Sideshow U.S.A: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagi- nation." In downtown Manhattan's Soho, Todd Robbins, a former performer in Coney Island's sideshow, had a hit with his own show, "Carnival Knowledge," in which he eats light bulbs and sticks his hand into an animal trap. Robbins teaches fire-eat ing, sword-swallowing and other skills at twice-yearly Sideshow Schools, where participants pay $6OO for six four-hour classes. The progenitor of this comeback is Dick Zigun, 51, the goateed, tattooed, self-proclaimed mayor of Coney Island. He was raised in Bridgeport, Conn., P.T. Bamum's hometown. "I grew up thinking elephants and midgets were patriotic and American," Zigun said. Armed with a master's degree in fine arts from Yale, Zigun thought Coney Is land offered the perfect staging ground BTUDKNT Lin Laughing till it hurts Thank goodness for bad news. Oth erwise, Bill Maher wouldn't have an act. "We do live in trying times, but that is good for stand-up," Maher says. "It gives you a lot of material." Did somebody say George W. Bush? "Sometimes I'll do a Bush joke or some thing, and people will be laughing," Maher notes. "And I'll say,'Well, look, I'm not going to stand up here and rag on George Bush all night,' and they go, 'Yes, you'd better. ... We paid good money to hear that!"' But Maher is an equal-opportunity comic: He attacks Democrats as well. "There are places where I take the Democrats apart because they infuriate me sometimes," Maher says. "But you know, as with any comedian in any era, you're always going to attack more the people who are in power.” "That is, to me, the job of the come dian: Attack the powerful and the people who are running things. Some times some people will say, 'Hey, you know, the white men, they're like the last group of people you can attack in America.' Well, yeah, because they run everything!" Maher is taking on both parties and other topics in a new act that runs the gamut from the debate over gay mar riage to the war in Iraq. The number of those comics doing what Maher calls "hardcore" political jokes can probably be counted on at least all of one hand and part of the other is fairly small. They include George Carlin, Chris Rock, Lewis Black, Jimmy Tingle, Will Durst and Jackie Mason. The six of them join Maher, who dis plays a deft knowledge of the issues (and how to rib them) on his weekly roundtable discussion "Real Time" (11 p.m. EDT Fridays, HBO). Maher says he enjoys "Real Time" more than his previous series, political/social talk show "Politically Incorrect," partly be cause "I don't have to deal with people who were not that bright." "It's a lot better than pretending Pauly Shore has something to say about gun control," he says. Why aren't there more of those who make light of the issues? Maher jokes that some acts are just selfish. "The George Carlins and those kinds Coney Island's for a new version of his old love, the side show. The sideshow grew out of European fairs that occasionally featured "freaks" such as dwarfs. In the late 1700 s, Philadelphia's Peale Museum featured not only portraits of American heroes, but mastodon bones as well as albinos and other "human curiosities," according to "Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddi ties for Amusement and Profit," by Syra cuse University sociology professor Rob ert Bogdan. The short-lived Peale museum aimed to educate people about science and the arts. But Bamum turned that idea upside down when, in 1841, he opened his American Museum in the heart of New York. He filled it with giants, fat people, dwarfs, a family of albinos, and "the Liv ing Aztecs," a brother and sister with a medical condition known as microceph aly that gave them unusually small heads. Performers such as Tom Thumb became household names. By 1850, the museum was a top attrac tion and spawned many imitators, which made "freak-hunting," or finding per formers, a full-time job. A half-century later, the steady stream of tourist dollars at Coney Island made it a popular spot for freak shows, and Co ney Island's Dreamland amusement park featured "Lilliputia," where every build ing and piece of furniture was scaled to the 300 dwarfs who lived there. As medicine led to an understanding of By Allan Johnson Chicago Tribune (KRT) of people who really bring it, that is harder to come by because everybody wants to be popular," mocks Maher, 48. Comedian and frequent "Real Time" guest D.L. Hughley says Maher's con viction for political commentary and humor might run deeper than some other comedians are willing, or able, to go- "Most people start to enjoy success, and they want to duplicate it," Hughley says. "They say, 'You know what, I'm going to keep doing this very type of thing because that's what works for me and that's obviously what people want to see.' (Maher) rewrites the blueprint every other week." It also helps that you have an appre ciative audience for that kind of humor that requires the crowd to have some information about the players and is sues. And he requires his audience to remain up-to-speed on current events. "You have to be knowledgeable," says Peter Kimball, executive in charge of programming and development for Stand-Up Comedy Television, an up coming comedy cable network based in Chicago and set to launch in January 2005. "I mean, if you don't know what's go ing on, you don't get (Maher). So he ex pects a lot. I think, as an audience mem ber, you've got to work. You just can't lay there and expect to hear knock knock jokes." Maher, bom in New York and raised in New Jersey, has been performing stand-up for 25 years, but he made his mark discussing social and political is sues on "P. 1.," which premiered on Comedy Central in 1993 and moved to ABC in 1997, where it ran until Sept. 11,2001. Actually, the show was canceled the next year. But the Sept. 11 attacks marked the beginning of the end. A few days after the destruction of the World Trade Center, Maher took is sue with Bush's assertions that those crashing planes into buildings were cowardly. "We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away," Maher said in part, which got him pub lic floggings from government officials, and rejection of his show by some spon sors and stations. But even while all that was happen ing, Maher's stand-up career never took a serious hit. "I was even more of a hero with the many "freak" characteristics, the side show began to fade. "People were no longer giants: They had hyperthyroid ism," Bogdan said. "It kind of took away the mystery." Todd Robbins, however, thinks the amusement-ride technology that emerged after World War II killed sideshows. "They could make more money with these rides," Robbins said. Attitudes toward disabled people changed, too, and society began to be lieve that freak shows exploited people with medical problems. In 1984, a protester demanded that "Otis the Frog Boy" be banned from per forming at the New York State Fair. Otis Jordan was black and had underformed limbs; he rolled cigarettes with his lips. Jordan complained to Bogdan that he loved performing and wished the pro tester had talked to him first. Zigun took Jordan into his show, but instead of calling him "The Frog Boy," he called Jordan "The Human Cigarette Machine" to avoid the demeaning "boy." Soon after, Zigun formed Coney Island USA, which aimed to revive the amuse ment park by harking back to the old days. The organization now oversees the freak show, the popular annual Mermaid Parade, the Coney Island Museum, and Burlesque at the Beach, a revival of the old Coney Island girlie shows. Insectavora has a burlesque act in which she shoots flames from an unexpected body part. Friday, September 10, 2004 people who were there for me to begin with," explains Maher, who began his career in the New York club scene after graduating from Cornell University as an English major. "The people who made the Politi cally Incorrect' show go away were the people who never watched it to begin with. They just heard about it and then made a big stink about it and then made advertisers pull out." If you look at Maher's career today, back on television in February 2003 with a show that is a leaner, sharper version of "P. 1.," and plenty of road dates when he isn’t working on "Real Time",” it's as if his comments from 2001 never existed. It's those with the same political mindset as Maher that kept him afloat, says Dr. Todd Boyd, a professor of criti cal studies in the University of South ern California School of Cinema-Tele- vision "(Even though) there probably are a large number of people who still find Bill Maher and his comedy and his poli tics to be problematic,” Boyd says, "clearly there's a large segment of soci ety who agrees with him. And so I think for people like that, and even if people don't agree with him totally, they're sort of leaning in that direction." Hughley, a comedian for 16 years, says Maher succeeds because of some thing a lot of other comics lack: cour age. "I think he's probably braver and has had a truer sense of what he wants to accomplish than anybody else," says Hughley, 40. "Maher (does) something that I heard George Carlin talk about that he likes doing when he performs. He finds out where the line is that you shouldn't cross, drags the audience across it, and then makes them glad they came." Maher can be brave due to the cour age of convictions strengthened by his love of stand-up. And he loves the trip. "It's a great pleasure for me," he says. "Stand-up always clarifies my thinking. It tells me what's really, really funny. Because I don't want to do anything that's not really funny. It's not like ("Real Time"), where you can have moments where it's serious or some thing. With stand-up, people want to just laugh until they hurt. "That's what I give them: pain." Performers find their way to the side- show in various ways. "I dropped out of college and ran off with the whole hard-core punk scene," said Eduardo Arrocha, 42, who performs as Eak the Geek. Years of slam-dancing provided natural training for his act, which includes lying between beds of nails while people stand on him. "I have a high tolerance for pain," he said, "but I'm not like a masochist." Tattoos cover most of his hulking body. He's met people, he said, but relationships didn't last. "I figured the steadiest thing in the world would be tattoos," he ex plained. Looking different has taught him the importance of tolerance. At the end of his performance, he urges the audience to remember that "in the real world, there are no freaks or geeks, only human be ings, so treat each other with respect." Insectavora, 34, turned a childhood dare (eating a worm) into a career when she met Coney Island Circus Sideshow performers at a tattoo convention. She buys the bugs and worms at pet stores and bait shops and has learned to grow maggots in her Brooklyn apartment. She advises people not to eat bugs themselves It's not easy, she said, "to make your own maggots that aren't going to make you sick, because what they live on is death." She herself has had her fill, she admitted, and is hoping to move on to a proven sideshow tradition: eating fire.
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