Service Disruptions

In which the weather system over Dallas, Texas throw me for a loop

I’m stuck in the Dallas airport, 10 hours into a disrupted air travel day that promises at least 6 to 8 more hours. Truth be told, I was going to write about travel this week. Particularly traveling alone. Even more particularly about traveling alone when you have a wife and kids back home, and the specific increase in dislocation that comes with that. But I’m tired, I’m frustrated, I’m still recovering from a sinus infection I got during my last flight, and so I feel like doing neither that nor finishing/polishing any of my drafted posts. I’ve changed time zones so many times and gotten so little sleep that my body has no sense of internal timing at all right now and I’m not even sure where or when I am at the moment.

So I’m honor of disruptions, here’s a clip of one that has always fascinated and unsettled me. One a winter’s night in 1987, a pair of local Chicago broadcasts (one the nightly news, one an episode of Dr. Who) were interrupted and taken over by a pirate signal in which someone wearing a Max Headroom mask made a series of strange, vaguely upsetting remarks and then got spanked by a woman with a fly swatter. It’s something that could never happen in today’s media world, relying as it did on the physical nature of analog broadcast signals, which probably explains in large part my fascination with it. That and the fact that the perpetrators were never caught.

Below is a clip of the Dr. Who intrusion, which is the lengthier and more upsetting. Like WGN, I hope to be able to resume regular transmissions soon.