The myth goes that the UK has four nuclear submarines, at least one of which is just out there at all times, patrolling the ocean, and the rule is that we don’t contact it and it doesn’t contact us.
What it does is listen to BBC Radio 4 which, to explain for non-Brits, is the news/speech radio network broadcast both within the UK and globally on long wave.
This nuclear sub: the story goes that if it doesn’t hear the morning news programme on Radio 4, the Today programme, for three days in a row, the submarine captain assumes that London has been destroyed, and therefore launches all its missiles at Moscow. Exact instructions are in a letter in a sealed envelope kept in a safe on the boat.
I mean, is there really a nuclear sub under the ice-caps listening to the morning headlines?
It’s a very Cold War game theory thing to do, a Strangelove-ian Dead Man’s Handle meets Mutually Assured Destruction.
I don’t know whether the Soviets took it into account, but Brits are primed to believe in this kind of stuff…
The BBC license fee is a bargain. About 160 quid a year, and for that there’s a ton of TV, radio, podcasts, all the news and original journalism of course, sport (including all the Olympics coverage), and so on.
The story goes that the license fee is enforced by “TV detector vans.”
These are vans that drive around and can magically tell if you’ve got a television set. Every so often you see such a van, and they’ve got “TV licensing” written on the side and a spinning device on the top, straight from the props department, and everyone has a friend-of-a-friend who’s accidentally seen in the back of one of them and the van is always completely empty.
I don’t even know how this would work. Something something resonance? Whatever. It’s almost certainly nonsense. Most of us pay our license fee none-the-less.
In the middle of the night, Radio 4 broadcasts the Shipping Forecast and this is ostensibly a terse update on the current and changing situation in 31 different shipping areas around the British Isles, succinctly spoken for the benefit of sailors tuning in. But it’s also beautifully poetic, an incantation of numbers and mysterious, distant names, and (I’ll share this experience with many Brits) it lulled me to sleep through most of my 20s.
Listen to an infinite Shopping Forecast here.
Bonus: here’s Pharaohs by Tears for Fears, an ambient remix of the Shipping Forecast from 1985.
Here’s a letter printed in The Telegraph in 2015, reproduced here:
The African student who thought that the shipping forecast was a coded broadcast to British spies might not have been far off the mark.
For years I wondered why the broadcast would always end with the phrase: “No icing in South East Iceland.”
This ending hasn’t been heard since the end of the Cold War. I listen to the shipping forecast every day in case the mysterious message makes a return.
William T Nuttall Rossendale, Lancashire
No icing in South East Iceland.
What I find most interesting about these forms of haunting is that they’re not easily dismissed as ghost stories or conspiracy theories.
They’re not Flat Earth. Not Qanon. Nor the Black Knight. (The Black Knight satellite is a 13,000 year old object of extraterrestrial origin, in polar orbit around the Earth, covered up by Nasa.)
Instead they sit halfway between fact and fiction. I’m not prepared to fully believe… but I’m not prepared to fully discount. They seem to have a grain of truth.
But also I think the mode of haunting tells us something about radio itself. Broadcast radio is weird, and the nuclear subs and TV vans resonate with our efforts to understand it:
you listen, and there’s no way to know who else is listening – are you alone or in a crowd? If you’re in a crowd, who else might be there?
you listen, and there’s no way for anyone else to tell that you’re listening – a receiver is like listening at a locked door that can never be opened… but what if they can tell?
So what are equivalent hauntings of the internet? What stories do we tell ourselves?
‘Yes, we’ll see them together some Saturday afternoon then,’ she said. ‘I won’t have any hand in your not going to Cathedral on Sunday morning. I suppose we must be getting back. What time was it when you looked at your watch just now?’ "In China and some other countries it is not considered necessary to give the girls any education; but in Japan it is not so. The girls are educated here, though not so much as the boys; and of late years they have established schools where they receive what we call the higher branches of instruction. Every year new schools for girls are opened; and a great many of the Japanese who formerly would not be seen in public with their wives have adopted the Western idea, and bring their wives into society. The marriage laws have been arranged so as to allow the different classes to marry among[Pg 258] each other, and the government is doing all it can to improve the condition of the women. They were better off before than the women of any other Eastern country; and if things go on as they are now going, they will be still better in a few years. The world moves. "Frank and Fred." She whispered something to herself in horrified dismay; but then she looked at me with her eyes very blue and said "You'll see him about it, won't you? You must help unravel this tangle, Richard; and if you do I'll--I'll dance at your wedding; yours and--somebody's we know!" Her eyes began forewith. Lawrence laughed silently. He seemed to be intensely amused about something. He took a flat brown paper parcel from his pocket. making a notable addition to American literature. I did truly. "Surely," said the minister, "surely." There might have been men who would have remembered that Mrs. Lawton was a tough woman, even for a mining town, and who would in the names of their own wives have refused to let her cross the threshold of their homes. But he saw that she was ill, and he did not so much as hesitate. "I feel awful sorry for you sir," said the Lieutenant, much moved. "And if I had it in my power you should go. But I have got my orders, and I must obey them. I musn't allow anybody not actually be longing to the army to pass on across the river on the train." "Throw a piece o' that fat pine on the fire. Shorty," said the Deacon, "and let's see what I've got." "Further admonitions," continued the Lieutenant, "had the same result, and I was about to call a guard to put him under arrest, when I happened to notice a pair of field-glasses that the prisoner had picked up, and was evidently intending to appropriate to his own use, and not account for them. This was confirmed by his approaching me in a menacing manner, insolently demanding their return, and threatening me in a loud voice if I did not give them up, which I properly refused to do, and ordered a Sergeant who had come up to seize and buck-and-gag him. The Sergeant, against whom I shall appear later, did not obey my orders, but seemed to abet his companion's gross insubordination. The scene finally culminated, in the presence of a number of enlisted men, in the prisoner's wrenching the field-glasses away from me by main force, and would have struck me had not the Sergeant prevented this. It was such an act as in any other army in the world would have subjected the offender to instant execution. It was only possible in—" "Don't soft-soap me," the old woman snapped. "I'm too old for it and I'm too tough for it. I want to look at some facts, and I want you to look at them, too." She paused, and nobody said a word. "I want to start with a simple statement. We're in trouble." RE: Fruyling's World "MACDONALD'S GATE" "Read me some of it." "Well, I want something better than that." HoME大香蕉第一时间
ENTER NUMBET 0016www.micao.net.cn www.jynpm.com.cn irxhhq.com.cn www.kqchain.com.cn www.qeis.com.cn www.wangcio.com.cn www.siqzsq.com.cn www.rjiebao.org.cn www.toolater.com.cn wucyto.com.cn
The myth goes that the UK has four nuclear submarines, at least one of which is just out there at all times, patrolling the ocean, and the rule is that we don’t contact it and it doesn’t contact us.
What it does is listen to BBC Radio 4 which, to explain for non-Brits, is the news/speech radio network broadcast both within the UK and globally on long wave.
This nuclear sub: the story goes that if it doesn’t hear the morning news programme on Radio 4, the Today programme, for three days in a row, the submarine captain assumes that London has been destroyed, and therefore launches all its missiles at Moscow. Exact instructions are in a letter in a sealed envelope kept in a safe on the boat.
I mean, is there really a nuclear sub under the ice-caps listening to the morning headlines?
It’s a very Cold War game theory thing to do, a Strangelove-ian Dead Man’s Handle meets Mutually Assured Destruction.
I don’t know whether the Soviets took it into account, but Brits are primed to believe in this kind of stuff…
The BBC license fee is a bargain. About 160 quid a year, and for that there’s a ton of TV, radio, podcasts, all the news and original journalism of course, sport (including all the Olympics coverage), and so on.
The story goes that the license fee is enforced by “TV detector vans.”
These are vans that drive around and can magically tell if you’ve got a television set. Every so often you see such a van, and they’ve got “TV licensing” written on the side and a spinning device on the top, straight from the props department, and everyone has a friend-of-a-friend who’s accidentally seen in the back of one of them and the van is always completely empty.
I don’t even know how this would work. Something something resonance? Whatever. It’s almost certainly nonsense. Most of us pay our license fee none-the-less.
In the middle of the night, Radio 4 broadcasts the Shipping Forecast and this is ostensibly a terse update on the current and changing situation in 31 different shipping areas around the British Isles, succinctly spoken for the benefit of sailors tuning in. But it’s also beautifully poetic, an incantation of numbers and mysterious, distant names, and (I’ll share this experience with many Brits) it lulled me to sleep through most of my 20s.
Listen to an infinite Shopping Forecast here.
Bonus: here’s Pharaohs by Tears for Fears, an ambient remix of the Shipping Forecast from 1985.
Here’s a letter printed in The Telegraph in 2015, reproduced here:
No icing in South East Iceland.
What I find most interesting about these forms of haunting is that they’re not easily dismissed as ghost stories or conspiracy theories.
They’re not Flat Earth. Not Qanon. Nor the Black Knight. (The Black Knight satellite is a 13,000 year old object of extraterrestrial origin, in polar orbit around the Earth, covered up by Nasa.)
Instead they sit halfway between fact and fiction. I’m not prepared to fully believe… but I’m not prepared to fully discount. They seem to have a grain of truth.
But also I think the mode of haunting tells us something about radio itself. Broadcast radio is weird, and the nuclear subs and TV vans resonate with our efforts to understand it:
So what are equivalent hauntings of the internet? What stories do we tell ourselves?