Oddball Update

It was another decent day of work — I’m on track to meet my self-appointed goals for the week. I’m also currently caught up on all of my side projects, and waiting to hear back about various things before I can continue, so for the time being I’m spending my spare time writing a story, surfing the web, and doing various other leisure activities. And yeah, I guess posting on this site qualifies.

Apple and I are poised for our 10-day trip to Michigan, which will be a fun time — albeit a hot time, from the sound of the temperatures up there (it’s actually cooler here at home!). Looks like in the days before that happens, however, we’ll get to enjoy Hurricane Chris, which is currently churning in the tropics near Hispaniola. Well, to be fair, it’s still a tropical storm, but it’s expected to intensify into a hurricane eventually. It’s too early to predict where it’s going to go with any certainty, so we get to be strung along for a couple more days yet. That’s always fun.

Ah well, you take life as it comes at you! I’m lucky to have a job that lets me be as flexible as is necessary during turbulent times — not having to worry about reporting to work or driving in inclement weather is a major reduction in stress factor. The good news is that it looks like this thing will likely be gone by the time we head up to Michigan.

So lately I’ve been assuaging my Fox Mulder curiosity genes by researching a little-known phenomenon in the shortwave radio arena: numbers stations. Ever come across a weird radio station on shortwave (or even AM) bands where it sounded like some computerized voice was reading off random numbers, characters from the phonetic alphabet or some other odd crap? Apparently these clandestine, yet powerful stations are used to deliver secret messages to spies and other covert agents, although that’s still mostly unverified speculation. A lot of times the messages are assembled piecemeal from recordings of individual words, numbers or letters made by a person of ethnic origin, usually a female, and are in a variety of languages including English, German, Spanish, Russian and even Mandarin Chinese. Some of this stuff has been allegedly linked to CIA, post-KGB and Israeli intelligence agencies. Listen to some samples here — the polytones of #14 are particularly spooky.

I started reading about this stuff because I myself came across (and recorded) about eight minutes of a numbers station that was broadcasing on an obscure AM frequency in 1992. It’s a completely computer-generated voice — sounds a lot like Joshua from Wargames, actually — that’s simply reading a descending series of consecutive numbers in the 54,000 range. The voice even seems to have reverb processing on it. The purpose of this broadcast completely eludes me, as this it’s doubtful such a regular series of numbers could be any kind of code. It’s just counting down, endlessly, for reasons unknown. I stopped recording after it dipped into the 53,000s so I don’t know what happened when it finally got to zero, if it ever did. Weird stuff.

On a lighter subject, my extra spare time lately has led me to all kinds of goofy things on the net, including amusing videos. One of the funniest videos I’ve come across is the “Farting Preacher” series. Apparently these have been going around for a very long time, but I’ve never seen them before. It all started when some of the production crew from shamed televangelist Robert Tilton’s TV show edited together a series of clips of Mr. Tilton making his infamous constipated faces, dubbed with fart sound effects. So, if you find yourself amused by this kind of admittedly low-brow humor, even ashamedly so, check these out — I found videos four and five to be the most hilarious.

Okay, I suppose I’ve done enough dumbing down of the Oddball Update for one night — and hell, it’s already August 2nd, so I suppose I’d better update the title of this post. Ciao, now.

Categorized as Life, Randomness