Often it turns up in the hands of hawkers at the Mitinsky market in Moscow, where a vast array of recorded music, movies, computer software and other goods of dubious provenance can be bought for pennies.
Outside, two groups of hawkers began a shouting match over "the rules of the pavement".
As they left they were met by a mass of hawkers.
That younger demographic also forms the basis of Hawkers itself.
THE news-stands that share the pavements with betel-nut hawkers and tea stalls in central Yangon display an impressive array of publications feeding a market starved for decades of independent news.
The shops are largely chains and souvenir hawkers, but it's worth a stroll to see the array of buskers displaying their talents at bagpipes, fiddles and U2 covers — and for a stop at McCambridge's (38-39 Streettreet; 353-91-562-259; mccambridges.com), a family-owned deli that has been around since 1925 but features an inventory fit for modern foodies.
VISITORS to Times Square are inundated with marketing pitches, like an array of oversize electric billboards stretched across office buildings and the crowded streets jammed with comedy-show hawkers, tour-bus operators, 6-foot-tall Cookie Monsters and the occasional Naked Cowboy.
"The postapocalyptic array of war-damaged buildings looked reassuringly familiar," he writes, arriving in one forlorn town, "as did the potholed roads, hawkers selling sachets of alcohol and the roadside health notice in English urging people to 'bury all poo poo.' " Ultimately, however, Butcher's account of ruin and desolation grows dispiritingly monotonous.
He owns an array of wigs, prosthetic masks and tiny cameras; once he feigned madness to infiltrate Ghana's largest psychiatric hospital; and he has posed as characters ranging from street hawkers to an albino body parts trafficker.
