They swore after the second incident that the signal was boobie-free when they sent it out. This wasn't a simple matter of wires getting crossed at the Comcast switchboard. Viewers were treated to something startlingly more heterosexual than football (yes, we said it) as the picture cut to a woman unzipping a man's pants for the two-point conversion. This time it happened in Tuscon, Arizona during the goddamn Super Bowl. Comcast vowed to get to the bottom of it and make sure it never happened again.Īnd it didn't. Yes, Handy Manny had been interrupted by hardcore pornography for the Comcast viewers in Lincroft, New Jersey. Kids plopped in front of the TV were suddenly treated to a human anatomy lesson, probably causing mild confusion as to why Manny was wrestling with that woman, as well as arguments over who was winning. One day in 2007, in one cozy New Jersey town, Handy Manny suddenly looked rather real, and Handy Manny got a bit too handy with a lady. It's a Dora the Explorer rip-off, sure, but that's OK because kids are stupid. In a heavily cliched attempt at multicultural acceptance, Manny Garcia is a Hispanic handyman with talking, googly-eyed tools. Handy Manny is an animated show on Disney's Playhouse programming block. It's a message sent in the native language of a certain group of embedded Russian agents. But honestly, who are you going to trust: A Web admin who didn't have the foresight to pay for a domain name, or the Illuminati-run Wikimedia foundation? Wikipedia argues that this makes no sense, since it's mostly just that simple buzztone. That listener, who helpfully kept his crucial analysis at the mercy of Geocities and Yahoo!, claimed the operator is the "1st Communications Hub of the General Staff of Army," and its purpose was to "transmit orders to the military units and recruitment centers of the Moscow military district." Military base? Home of Russia's shittiest FM radio station? From this, we know it originates from Russia, specifically here: Information on the mysterious station had been compiled here on Geocities, the best place for code cracking and speculation on the Web. That is, someone is actively broadcasting and maintaining the signal. The case gets curiouser when you realize that the noise is apparently something held up to a live microphone rather than a recording or just some random feedback (distant conversations can be sometimes heard behind the sound, though they're difficult to decipher). It is clearly becoming more active after remaining quiet during the Cold War. The most recent occurrence was 2006, a mere three years before the time of this writing. Each time a voice comes on and lists several Russian names and numbers before returning to the foghorn. In its 20-something year run, the sound has been interrupted only three times, the earliest known time being Christmas Eve in 1997. But the weird part isn't the tone, but what happens when it stops. It is broadcast over a certain frequency, constantly, and has been since at least 1982. But the WTTW takeover lasted a full 90 seconds, and the pirate TV broadcast's audio, while distorted, was audible to anyone who happened to be tuned in.It is an irritating, electronic noise, not unlike the sound of a truck horn played through a cheese grater. In the case of the WGN news broadcast, engineers were able to change the frequency used in the uplink to the John Hancock tower after a brief interruption, and the audio from the pirate transmission was drowned in static. The hack was made possible by the analog television broadcast technology of the day-the attacker was able to overpower the signals sent by the television studios to a broadcast antenna atop the John Hancock building in Chicago with his or her own signals. To this day, the perpetrators of the television hack remain unknown. Who on the Chicago public television station WTTW. The "broadcast intrusion" interrupted a primetime news broadcast from Chicago's WGN, and then (more successfully) the 11:00pm broadcast of Dr. Thirty years ago today, a person or persons unknown briefly hijacked the signal of two Chicago television stations, broadcasting a bizarre taped message from a man wearing a Max Headroom mask.
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