The Tourist Guy - NOT!
Posted on 11/08/2001 9:58:15 PM PST by Timesink
And an anonymus brazilian turned into a celebrity, overnight, after the attacks at the World Trade Center. The face of a trader from Campinas, in the interior of Sao Paulo, turned up in dozens of images, that are circulating through the internet -- the global computer network. In the most famous, he appers on top of the World Trade Center with a plane ready to crash into the tower. Check out in the report by Cristina Maia what the electronic collage has done in the life of this brazilian.
The picture looked like another angle of the attack at the World Trade Center. In truth, a collage made in a computer. The image circulated throughout the internet and the tourist turned into a witness of other tragedies, showing up in pictures of the John Kennedy assassination, of the Titanic, in the movie "Velocidade Maxima"(Portuguese translation), in the movie E.T. etc.
The tourist was found by our report in Campinas, and is the trader Jose Roberto Penteado, 41 years old, a common person who became famous after having his face travel through the world via the web. He never got the top of the twin towers, although he did visit New York.
Due to fear, it took him more than a month to show his whole body. Now he has even given interviews to international publications. "How am I dealing with this? I can't say. It's something new and I wasn't ready for it. I know it made a big mess with my daughter, for example. She started going into sites and seeing me with models and famous celebrities", says Penteado.
All of it due to a prank by friends. "When I opened the picture and saw myself in it, everybody, and there were seven on the room, laughed at the same time", he says. "They made a (deal?) in one of the sites, with me being the Anti-Christ".
Today, he receives 60 e-mails a day, has even given autographs and is ready to debut on the net, for real, in a commercial for an automobile factory.
Now nobody can stop him...
"I dunno, maybe I'll stop myself. That's whats bothering me: until when am I going to put up with this story?", sighs the trader.
All your Face are belong to us.
I just mixed up two letters, is all.
Some of those photos in his album look fake though...
The Tourist Guy - NOT!
And probably a fraud. Not like the real Tourist Guy who has been all over the world. :-)
By Frank Barnako, CBS.MarketWatch.com
Last Update: 10:00 AM ET Nov. 9, 2001
CBS MARKETWATCH
Jose Roberto Penteado, a businessman from Campinas, Brazil, says he is the man pictured in photos showing a tourist at the World Trade Center just before the crash of a hijacked jet. "I believe that some friends planted my face in that body," he wrote in an e-mail to Wired News. Penteado has been interviewed on Brazilian television and interview by a Sao Paolo newspaper. He has also been asked by Volkswagen to appear in a TV commercial.
Is Penteado the real thing? Rick Montoya, whose TouristGuy.com aggregates the original graphic and subsequent knock-offs and parodies, does not think so. "It is in my opinion that the person from Brazil claiming to be the 'Tourist Guy' is not him," he wrote on the site. "No further proof has been provided. Considering the popularity of the Tourist Guy ... I would think it is a very lucrative deal and he is going to make lots of money on it. Good for him," Bruno said.
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