More than fifteen minutes...

Remember The Star Wars Kid? Young Ghyslain Raza from Quebec was fooling around with the video camera in his school's makeshift video studio. He recorded himself using a golf ball retriever like a lightsaber from Star Wars. Unfortunately, when he was done, he forgot to retrieve the tape, or at least erase it. Some other kids found it, uploaded it to one of those controversial file sharing services, and Ghyslain's 15 minutes of fame commenced. Star Wars fans downloaded the video en masse, and several "re-mixes" appeared in short order. Apparently, there are now over one hundred and six Star Wars Kid re-mix videos available, including an ascii animation.

That all started almost two years ago, and Ghyslain's 15 minutes has yet to come to an end. A recently released X-Box game, Tony Hawk's Underground 2, features an animated Star Wars Kid vignette as a bonus for reaching a secret room. At first, you might think, "poor kid, his ordeal just keeps getting worse." It seems to me, however, that Activision probably had to get young Mr. Raza's permission to use his likeness, and that certainly would have involved some kind of remuneration. Maybe they just set him up with a console, and a copy of the game, or maybe Ghyslain had a semi-fat cheque to deposit in his bank account. Either way, the moral of the story seems to be: nothing is really as bad as it seems to be.