As I sit here, just waiting to taste those delicious chocolate macadamia nuts that BS will mail me from Hawaii in one of those ‘one price all you can fit USPS mailing boxes’ you can get from any Hawaiian post office, I reflect with pride on the fact that the other day KLS, myself, J & J went bowling.
Now I haven’t bowled in years, and feared that perhaps I’d be a bit rusty. But my skills hadn’t waned at all, and with effortless ease I bowled a perfect 300 game of twelve strikes in a row. KLS and JBF were astounded to be bowling with such a paragon of the lanes as myself.
I quit for many reasons, primary amongst them that I played too much and the game is a distraction I don’t need going in to what promises to be my busiest teaching semester yet (I am teaching two different courses). Plus, I have to somehow write a PhD thesis during this semester as well.
Secondly, I’ve been playing for 4.5 years. The game is still good; is still fun – in fact WoW is perhaps better now than ever. But over the last couple of months and particularly weeks it was beginning to feel more an obligation than entertainment. Having played hundreds (thousands more likely) of games to completion it’s typically obvious when it is time to put a game down and start another. Warcraft has no end, and will continue to evolve until the servers shut down in 201x. So one has to make their own end to the game, and it’s possible that now I have done just that.
Of course an expansion will be announced mere days from now, which promises to reveal a wealth of new content to get excited about. My hope is to resist the allure. Time will tell.
Uncommonly, the broadcast signals of television or radio stations have been hijacked by people. When this happens, the hijackers are able to replace the signal (the picture and sound) with one of their own. It hasn’t happened frequently, especially in developed countries, and is a crime in most western nations. When it does happen, the substitute signal is usually some sort of protest (for instance a Christian group hijacker Playboy TV in 1987 and replaced the picture with a protest statement).
One of the most unusual cases of broadcast hijacking occured in Chicago America on November 22, 1987. During a three hour window, a hijacker was able to hijack the signal of two separate televison stations and broadcast his own signal. The first incident was early in the evening during a newscast, when the normal signal of WGN-TV was replaced by video of a man wearing a Max Headroom mask swaying in front of a moving sheet of corrugated iron (used to resemble the standard Max Headroom background). It lasted about 30 seconds and there was no sound.
Later that evening, at around 11:15pm, a screening of Doctor Who (specifically The Horror Of Fang Rock) on PBS was replaced by a similar picture, this time with audio. What follows was one of the most bizarre uses of signal hijacking ever recorded.
Rather than describe it, why not watch it in it’s entirety:
What followed were numerous (criminal) investigations, court filings and a plea for community assistance that never amounted to anything.
The perpetrator(s) were never caught or exposed, and to this day remain unknown.
