Friends fall for Jayden K. Smith hoax
We took the kids for a quick vacation to Santa Barbara over the weekend, and when we got back, I saw I had been deluged with Facebook messages. I wondered if my birthday had arrived a few months early or maybe people were concerned about the Whittier fire, which was blazing not far from where we were staying.
Nope. They were all warnings to avoid friending someone called Jayden K. Smith, who my well-meaning but gullible friends believed to be a hacker of mass proportions who would take over the systems of anyone who friended him and anyone in their contact lists. Now, that’s certainly no way to treat a friend, but it appears to be just another Internet hoax.
Snopes.com, a reliable source for ferreting out the veracity of such claims, has added Jayden K. Smith to its roster of social media hacker hoaxes. Who knows what the aim of such a scam is, but the hoaxer got a lot of people to do his or her dirty work by forwarding mass messages to their friends with the warning. So while it pays to be careful about hacked accounts, feel free to ignore this one without creating a flood of spam for your real Facebook friends.
Let’s leave the hacking to the professionals in Russia.
‘BOOKMOBILE’ REPORT >>
San Jose artist Tony May will be at the San Jose Museum of Art today for a casual talk about his installation, “Variable Book Construction: Bookmobile,” which is back on display at the downtown museum.
May was commissioned to create the piece — a large mobile of books hanging on wire tubes suspended from the ceiling — for the 1991 opening exhibition of the museum’s then-new wing. The books used in the piece are encyclopedia yearbooks from 1961 to 1969, which was a nod to the old wing of the museum’s previous life as the main San Jose library.
For those who’ve never seen the piece before, there’s a fun, interactive aspect that May will be demonstrating at the talk, which begins at noon. It’s free with museum admission.
ON STAGE SURPRISE >>
The audience got more drama than it bargained for at opening night WVLO Musical Theatre Company’s production of “Catch Me If You Can” on June 24. After the final curtain, one of the performers, David Lamcke, got down on a knee to propose to one of his co-stars, Amanda Vogel, who said, “yes.”
“In our 52 years of producing Broadway musicals in Saratoga, this is the first time that has ever happened,” said Marge Hand, WVLO’s box office manager.
The show, the musical version of the Steven Spielberg movie about slick con man Frank Abagnale Jr. continues its run on weekends through July 22 at the Saratoga Civic Theater. Get tickets at www. wvlo.org.
BACK IN THE POOL >>
One guy who’s swimming along nicely these days is Jim Zuur, the former coowner of Camera Cinemas who moved to Morro Bay area a few years back. Zuur, 76, was part of a mixed relay team that had two first-place finishes in April at the U.S. Masters National Swimming Championships in Riverside.
In August, he’ll be off to the World Swimming Championships in Budapest, along with teammate Richard Alejandro, who is the executive director of the American Diabetes Association in San Jose. “We are both hoping to bring back some gold, silver or bronze medals in our relays,” Zuur says.