People Only Steal the Airwaves.

WTTV Chicago - Max Headroom Pirating Incident - November 22, 1987

NSFW : brief male nudity, butt smacking, Doctor Who footage.

I'm not exactly sure how the word piracy came to mean anything other than robbery committed at sea. That being said, in the modern world, there are two definitions of the word that are heard far more often. These days, I'm sure the most common use is to denote copyright infringement, but only just behind that, and only because it has become both harder and less rewarding to do, is the act of broadcasting without a license. There are plenty of resources on the net relating to pirate radio broadcasts, but actual acts of video piracy, particularly those overriding mainstream broadcasters' signals have only happened on a handful of occasions.

On November 22nd, 1987, during WGN TV's 9:00 news broadcast, one such event happened, the sportscast was interrupted for 20 seconds with the image of a man in a Max Headroom mask in front of a moving piece of corrugated metal. There was no sound. The station hurriedly switched transmitters, and sportscaster Dan Roan appeared flustered. If that was all that happened, this wouldn't have been such a big deal.

From Wikipedia:

Later that night around 11:15pm during a broadcast of the Doctor Who episode Horror of Fang Rock on WTTW, the signal was hijacked by the same person. It was the same video that was broadcast during the WGN hijack, but this time there was audio. The person in the Max Headroom mask interrupted the broadcast, saying "He's a frickin' nerd" before laughing and stating "Yeah, I think I'm better than Chuck Swirsky!". The person continued to utter strange phrases including a Coke advertising slogan (Max Headroom was a Coke spokesperson at the time), humming the theme song to Clutch Cargo (pausing midway to say "I stole CBS"), before finally undressing below the waist and was spanked by an unknown woman with a flyswatter before the masked person cut off his transmission. It was over in about 90 seconds. The pirate was never caught. WTTW, which maintains its transmitter atop the Sears Tower, found that its engineers were unable to stop the hijacker because at the time there were no engineers on duty at the Sears Tower. Also, the station's master control center was unable to contact its transmitting equipment remotely to switch the STL (Studio To Transmitter Link), unlike their counterparts at WGN-TV, who were able to thwart the intruder by switching their John Hancock Center transmitter STL remotely within seconds.

Who was this guy? No one knows. Why did he do it? No one know that either. Why did he want to be smacked on the heiny? It's all a mystery. He joins Captain Midnight (the man who hacked the HBO Sat uplink in '82) and Thomas M. Haynie (who jammed the Playboy channel just a few months prior to this incident) in a select group of people who've pulled this off. He's also the only major perpetrator who was never caught. There has not been a major pirate TV disruption recorded since.

Whoever you are, Max Headroom Guy, I salute you, for Sticking It To the Man. Maybe your actions did not destroy the broadcast TV paradigm. Maybe all you wanted was to dress funny and have your butt smacked on the air. Whatever the reason, your actions inspire others to dare to talk back to the Terrible Machines of Media Compliance. That and you gave me something to write about on a Friday.

Nerdcore II

Nerdcore Rising f. MC Frontalot

What better way to follow a trailer for a documentary on Nerdcore Hiphop, than with another trailer for a documentary on Nerdcore Hiphop.

MC Frontalot is arguably the founder of the Nerdcore genre. As such he is also one of it's best known proponents. From his Wikipedia entry:

Early days

Damian Hess began releasing music as "MC Frontalot" in 1999. His first successes came through Song Fight! where he was known to roll over the competition almost at will. Throughout his history at Song Fight! MC Frontalot has never lost a single competition, though he has entered only seven entries in the traditional fight style. He went on to make a song specifically about his winning ways in a competition titled "Romantic Cheapskate"; that song went on to get four times the votes of the rest of the competitors combined.

Nerdcore

In 2000 he released the song "Nerdcore Hiphop". From the first words spoken ("Initiating startup sequence") to the countless references to a proud geekish lifestyle and nerdly leanings ("Pish posh, man, I come as whack as I like!"), the song became an immediate hit in the geek and nerd communities. The rap subgenre of nerdcore hip hop, which had been around though unnamed beforehand, embraced the name and since has been expanding rapidly.

Many consider Frontalot, if not the founder of nerdcore, certainly the man who shone the torch on it. Front himself though is quick to point out the many artists who came before him and those which he considers his peers on his info page.

So there ya go. He is relevant to this whole Nerdcore thing I'm obsessing about. So relevant, in fact, that someone's doing a Nerdcore doc just on him, called Nerdcore Rising - The Movie. Well, OK, mostly on him. The site, which also features another trailer on the start page, mentions other artists and notables in the film, such as Al Yankovic, MC Chris, MC Lars, Jello Biafra. The synopsis ends thusly:

Nerdcore Rising will unlock the secret world of nerdcore - a first glimpse into a growing phenomenon where computers are the ultimate instrument, where the smart guys are cool, and where the geeks finally get the girls!

Geeks get the girls! Bring it on! Finally a film about what music is all about!

Nerdcore I

Nerdcore for Life Trailer

NSFW : Language

I'm not actually sure what order I should have done today's and tomorrow's posts in, so I asked both of my roommates whether they thought I should go general to specific or specific to general. One said the first choice, and one wouldn't say.

Okay, now that I've got the meta-blogging out of the way, today and tomorrow I'm going to talk about Nerdcore Hiphop, or Geeksta Rap. I have found trailers for not one, but two trailers for completely different, yet oddly similar, documentaries on the subject due out this summer.

I have always self-identified as a nerd, or geek, primarily based on my roots. Sometime not long after it was determined that there might actually be money in this Internet Thingie, it actually became socially acceptable to do so. But perhaps the truest expression of the arrival of the Chic Geek was the rising popularity of our own genres of music.

Nerdcore Hiphop is rap music for nerds. It's just like regular hiphop, but instead of rapping about pimps, ho's and glocks, you rap about otaku, j-girls, and 9-sided dice. As a genre of music it's a relatively recent phenomonon (the term was coined in 2000). Nerdcore for Life is a documentary about the culture growing up around this undrground genre (almost all Nerdcore music is 'Net only - very few CD's have been released) and the artists that perform it. According to a recent article on Canada.com:

Dan Lamoureux, an audio-visual technician in Chicago, was inspired to make the 90-minute film Nerdcore for Life after he and a friend ended up in a nerdcore audience last year "almost as a joke."

"It was the most insane thing you could imagine, it was so bizarre," he says. "We were at a pretty hip Chicago club and the place was filled with nerds! All the fans were nerds, they were doing nerdy dances. It was not a group I've ever seen at a club before."

So far all we have to go on for this film is the trailer (the site does not even mention a release date, unfortunately), but as a Nerdcore fanboy I'll have to see it when it's out (assuming it does - there's a donation page on the site, but see yesterday's post for why I have no money to donate).

Tomorrow I'll be posting about the other Nerdcore doc, and the artist who got me hooked. Stay tuned.

Even Skeletor Gets the Blues

Unemployed Skeletor's Blog of Evil #1

Hands up anyone who's been unemployed. All of you? Most I'm sure. If you have (and probably if you haven't) I'm sure you can empathise with an Evil Genius who's down on his luck.

I'm unemployed right now. There's very little work for actors in January, and my day job has laid me off until next month. So like Skeletor, I too know what it's like to sit around at home, at loose ends, too broke to go and do anything interesting, with nothing but a computer to keep me company. I too have whiled away my days puttering around online and trying to think of a new way to destroy He-Man...

But enough about me. Kevin Conn, a stand-up comic from Mahwah, New Jersey, has been doing this Skeletor thing for 8 months now, and is up to 40 episodes. So like everything else I've been doing since New Year's, I'm a little behind.

I'm also posting this fairly late in the day. My New New Year's Resolution is to get at least one day ahead in posting. I'll let you know how that goes.

Terry Jones, The Mathematical Python?

The Story of 1

Okay, so, what am I doing mentioning math, of all things, in a week I've devoted to slack?

My father was an uncelebrated mathematical genius who worked in computer graphics before computer graphics was cool (we're talking the 60's and 70's here). I discovered sometime in High School that, although I was suitably bright, I had not inherited the math genes. Dad was very, very good at doing math (there are, apparently, bits of his old , 70's FORTRAN and COBOL code that are still in use in hydrographic mapping systems for Fisheries and Oceans Canada, all of which work beautifully) but not so good at explaining it (one piece of the aforementioned code, for calculating True North from Magnetic North, is completely incomprehensible to those without an extensive background in this particular kind of advanced and esoteric math, and as the government has very few such people now, if any, there is, at present no one who can understand his code well enough to write a more modern replacement). After a few head scratching sessions trying to follow his notes on the back of a used punchcard, I stopped asking for his help with my homework. To this day I still don't understand what a cosine is.

So why math now? Because it's Terry Jones, dumbass. The Monty Python Terry Jones. And he's explaining math from it's very beginnings, by following the story of the numeral 1. You see, the BBC has a history of finding very bright people who are good at explaining things in an entertaining way, and having them do documentaries that actually do just that. About all kinds of subjects. Just because it's interesting. From a Canadian perspective that's a surprising thing for a public broadcaster to do (with apologies to the CBC).

What this means is you can sit back for an hour on a Sunday afternoon (or whenever you read this) and watch a very funny man talk about math throughout history. And if anyone gives you grief, you can tell them you're learning something. And who knows, it might actually be true.

Now if only he'd do a doc on cosines.

The Uncensored Reply

My Box

(NSFW: language, references to Canada's National Symbol)

The Internets work at lightning speed.

How else to explain this reply to the Justin Timberlake / Adam Samberg video I posted just before Christmas. Well, OK - It had been on the air a few days before that, and I'm actually posting this a week after it first hit the net, but I'm saying that the Internets work at lightning speed, not me personally.

So anyways. She calls herself Bunny. Her voice sounds pretty good. She's been blogging about it. She has a box. For You.

I usually post only one thing a weekend, but since I was lazy on Tuesday, here ya go. There'll be something else tomorrow.

Spiders on Drugs

(video from Collegehumor.com)

Spiders on Drugs

Late in the day, but I'm still trying to post every weekday. Keeping with my slacker theme this week, this is what happens when you put spiders on drugs.

This is a parody (created by First Church of Christ, Filmmaker), but experiments like this really happened. Someone actually got sizable grants to get arachnids all doped up and shi^H^H^H stuff.

As for the source of the parody, for any non-Canadians in the audience (at this point probably nobody, but I dare to dream) or anyone young enough to have missed them, this is based on Hinterland Who's Who, a series of wildlife related PSA's for the Canadian Wildlife Service that were produced by the NFB and which aired on the CBC and most other Canadian networks at one time or another starting in the 1960's. What is interestng about this stuff from a web perspective is that when the CWS set out to update these spots for a new audience, they released the orginal footage to the web for non-comercial remixing. This spawned a number of parodies, some of which are posted on their site, and is a fine and remarkably early (2003, I think) example of a content producer actually 'getting' the web.

Thanks to Myya for the link.