Yesterday, I stumbled across an article in one of B1's kiddy mags about "numbers stations," something I hadn't known about before. Apparently, they are shortwave radio stations countries covertly use to beam information to spies, using one-time coded number messages. Officially, they aren't acknowledged, but unofficially, they are used all the time, and have been for some time. Shortwave radio buffs tune into them and there's apparently a subculture devoted to listening to them and studying them. They are very odd. Some folks have even YouTubed some of them, made kinda creepy videos to accompany the broadcasts...
Odds are that the coded messages are things like "Don't forget the payoffs, Sven" and so forth (again, every country seems to use these numbers stations), but it's just weird to think of that stuff just floating through the air, undetected, all this cloak and dagger stuff communicated through numerical codes on shortwave.
Maybe it's just the audiophile in me, but there is something about bad signal that horrifies me. Especially bad signal that isn't simply noise, but actually carries information. The blurry photograph of something mysterious, an odd and garbled transmission -- even a telephone ringing in the wee hours of the morning (or night) when there's no reason for it to be ringing -- those things scare me, creep me out, and have even since I was a kid. I don't exactly know why, but I feel it very viscerally, instinctively. I remember, as a boy, drawing pictures of space probes beaming back the last picture of something eating the probe. Something about that just gives me the creeps. And hearing that static-laden broadcast with its seemingly random (but not really random, only encoded) messages on it spooks me!
