Donna Terek: Donna's Detroit

Theatre Bizarre: A bloody imaginative fantasy party

Enclave of creative Detroiters makes a unique community

The Midway is empty; the exhibition barns are locked up. The aromas of cotton candy and corn dogs have faded to a memory.

But just across the street from the now-shuttered State Fair, the carnival spirit lives on at Theatre Bizarre.

Theatre Bizarre is a place, a community, a hallucination held in common by a group of people dedicated to its survival. They stage a few other events on the grounds, but most of the year is spent gearing up for the biggest, most imaginatively themed, "underground" Halloween party in southeastern Michigan -- if you can call something that sold out at 2,200 tickets this year "underground."

Technically it's a Halloween party, not just any Halloween party, mind you, but the most creatively elaborate, macabre, over-the-top Halloween party you can imagine. It's also a place, a half-a-city-block of houses where the contiguous alleys and vacant lots have been re-imagined as a replica of an abandoned amusement park.

But, beyond that, Theatre Bizarre is a community of people, some who live on the grounds, some who don't, all of them absolutely in love with the idea of this -- well, bizarre -- adult Disneyland. They are steadfastly devoted to John Dunivant and Ken Poirier, the two puppeteers who control the complicated web of strings that make the magic happen.

Six-foot fence shields homes

Driving west on State Fair Street from John R to Woodward in Detroit, you pass house after burned-out house until you come to a block with solid homes shielded from the street by a 6-foot fence. About 12 people live in five of these six houses. They have jobs from software testing to marketing display. If you're tall enough to peer over you can catch a glimpse of an elevated clown head that centers what appears to be a proscenium arch. Over one of the driveways is a fabric-draped pergola with a sign so faded you might miss it. This is Theatre Bizarre.

Theatre Bizarre is the externalization of the roadside attraction-fueled fantasies of John Dunivant, 38, a soft-spoken commercial illustrator, husband and father of a 2-year-old who lives in Lathrup Village. Based on a life-long fascination with circus history, Dunivant makes paintings of macabre sideshow freaks on canvas banners that flutter about the grounds and inspire costumes brought to life by many of the core group of volunteers at the party. He draws and designs the permanent structures and rigorously controls the color palette of everything in sight.

About 10 years ago Dunivant got the word from the management of Russell Industrial Center where he had his studio that his Halloween party had gotten too big and they weren't going to tolerate it any longer. So he teamed up with his friend Ken Poirier, who lived on State Fair Avenue. and had his own outdoor Halloween bash, and together they dreamed up Theatre Bizarre. Well, Dunivant dreamed it up; Poirier had the construction know-how to make it a reality.

Theatre Bizarre was conceived as an abandoned circus carnival and every stage, marquee and banner is made to look slightly decayed. Volunteers spend the weeks leading up to Halloween dragging in scrub trees gleaned from neighborhood alleys to give the impression that nature has had years to overgrow the midway and sideshows. They black-wash every piece of lumber to look aged and burned. Anything painted gets a wash of patina. Costumes, elaborately detailed and appliqued, are just as painstakingly abraded and dirtied to look like their wearers have been recently dug from their graves.

Rehabber invested in area

It all happens on property owned by Ken Poirier, 44, whose job is rehabbing homes for out-of-town investors. He's spent years buying properties of his own around the city of Detroit, but found their far-flung locations exhausting. So, on the advice of a mentor, Poirier began buying up properties on the block where he lived on State Fair as they became available, eventually amassing six homes and 10 lots.

Over the years, devotees of Theatre Bizarre have moved in, and a loosely organized collective has formed with the annual party project providing the glue that holds everyone together. Core members have spun off their own projects like Squared Circle Revue, Stolen Media Festival and Wonderland and the friends pitch in to make this work as well. Living at the "compound" is like being permanently at summer camp with impromptu parties growing up around bonfires at night.

The residents are the core of a volunteer force that ebbs and grows depending on the year but numbers around 30, give or take. They do everything from collecting trees to spreading wood chips to building structures and painting them to look decades old. Each year sees added acreage devoted to the compound with new structures needing to be built.

Volunteers are all ages -- even Dunivant's retired parents come up from Florida to pitch in -- and from all walks of life. There's Matt Pomroy the accountant for UAW-Chrysler, Nichole Davila the dental hygienist, and Chip Gillan the helicopter pilot. David Presnell, the makeup master, comes from Pittsburgh to help out. After seeing Theatre Bizarre one year he decided to go to school for makeup and special effects to secure his niche in the core "staff" of Theatre Bizarre.

Poirier and Dunivant each take a month off from their day jobs to work on Theatre Bizarre and other volunteers take days off without pay or simply show up after their workday and stay toiling and socializing till the wee hours. Dunivant often remains, painting his sideshow banners till 8 a.m.

"There's no other city where you could do this," says Poirier. "And no other neighbors would tolerate it for a millisecond." In fact, the one family that still lives on the block is all in favor of their wacky neighbors' project. "It's awesome," says Leslie Alexander, who usually attends the party at Poirier's invitation. "I enjoy the crowd. They have nice music. It's peaceful. They enjoy themselves. I don't have a problem with it," she said, then added, "I'll be there around 1 a.m." That would give her plenty of time to party, since revelers stay till 5 -- or whenever the sun comes up.

If Dunivant is the artistic visionary of Theatre Bizarre, Poirier is the self-titled "Grounds Keeper" and "grumpy old man," a pretty self-deprecating description from someone who fills the role of general contractor, director of operations and scout master to all the volunteers.

10th year was biggest party

This was the 10th year for Theatre Bizarre. There was a two-year hiatus when, as Dunivant says, "Ken was done; he was over it." But then he went to Burning Man, the art festival held in Nevada's Black Rock desert and "got all inspired and came back and was like 'Let's throw a big party,' " says Dunivant, so two years ago Theatre Bizarre was back on track.

First, the main stage went up with Zombo the Clown presiding over the proscenium. Successive additions brought satellite stages like the Scaredy Cat Club. Revelers enter the grounds on party night through one of the houses facing State Fair. It is, of course, a haunted house. It's the home of Edgar J. Torrent, a fictitious serial killer, and it's stuffed with more body parts and gore than a full season of CSI. Partiers are forced to go through the houseful of hanging bagged bodies and down into the dungeon-like cellar and through a seemingly subterranean tunnel before emerging through transformational light and fog onto the Midway.

According to the elaborate back-story concocted by Dunivant, the tunnel was built by Torrent as an escape route to evade the police. When visitors emerge from the tunnel they metaphorically enter the imagination of the killer who, like Dunivant himself, is fascinated with all things carnie.

The entertainment reinforces the illusion with lurid burlesques and a group known as Pend Suspension, whose work involves a lot of dangling from hooks pierced through their skin. Then there's lots of fire: fire eating, fire juggling, fire hoop dancing and just plain fire shooting.

On the night of the party -- always the Saturday before Halloween -- Theatre Bizarre seems not so much a place, as an alternate reality. Costumes are de rigueur and their variety and elaborateness can be breathtaking. Siamese twins, Rubber Chicken Man and demented clowns cavort with beheaded brides and queens of the night. It's as if the cast of a Fellini movie took up residence on the midway of a defunct Coney Island.

All in all it's a bacchanal for kids who just don't want to grow up. "Adults are weird," says Dunivant. "I think, as a child, everything is so much more alive and magical. I don't want to grow up. That would be horrible. I don't plan on it."

I got hardcore surrealist programming on my system as a small child; simultaneously I was hipped to wonderful, awful, and wonderfully awful horror films.
I am forever grateful to......

The Ghoul!







I just figured he had an outlet for all his mad, vast energies: the world'd be a duller place if he took Ritalin. Eh what old thing?

People will do what they will do. People will also use "perceptions" gained through their faulty (at best) "senses" to evaluate other people's behavio/ur; to deem it 'good,' 'bad,' or 'odd.'


I remember that somehow all this was so much better with the polka music blasting.

I know not why.

Hiya kids! Hiya hiya hiya!

Froggy!!

As Miami's Cuban spy trial makes clear, the airwaves are full of intrigue, and all you need is a radio

By Brett Sokol
Published on February 08, 2001

In this high-tech era of worldwide Internet connections and satellite uplinks, an age when even junior-high kids are carrying cell phones, who on Earth still listens to fusty old shortwave radios? Spies, that's who. As the ongoing espionage trial of the Wasp Network of Cuban spies definitively reveals, cold war cloak-and-dagger intrigues are alive and well in Miami -- and that dinosaur of the communications spectrum, the shortwave radio, remains a key link between Cuban intelligence operatives on both sides of the Florida Straits.

None of this is a surprise to Chris Smolinski, a 34-year-old Baltimore software engineer who's spent much of his free time over the past two decades listening to the mysterious transmissions that continually pulse out of Havana.

"I was fourteen and had just gotten a shortwave radio," Smolinski recalls. "I was tuning in stations like the BBC and Radio Moscow, and then one day I just discovered someone reading off numbers." Twenty years later those strange successions of spoken numbers are still filling the ether, though Smolinski is hardly alone in his fascination with them. The Spooks e-mail list he runs has several hundred subscribers from around the globe, all listening in, jotting down, and attempting to make sense of these so-called numbers stations.

Of course you didn't have to be a Spooks member to hear the Nineties broadcasts currently being presented as evidence of Cuba's subterfuge in a downtown Miami courtroom. All you needed was a shortwave radio, and not even a very powerful one at that. Smolinski notes with some amusement that many Spooks members use much more powerful receivers than the hand-held Sony devices in the Cuban spies' possession when they were arrested.

Had you been living on the Eastern seaboard of the United States and simply flipped on your radio at the scheduled time and frequency, you would have heard the same thing the Wasp Network did: A young woman's voice would sharply announce in Spanish: ¡Atención! Then she would begin reciting five-digit strings of numbers. Both Spooks devotees and the Cuban spies in Miami were feverishly copying down the same sets of numbers, but as the Spooks crowd was left to ponder the latest installment of their very own X-File, the spies were punching those numbers into a computer program on their laptops. Thus began a decryption process, as the program changed these numbers into letters of the alphabet.

It may seem odd for Cuba to have its secret transmissions hiding in plain sight, able to be heard by virtually anyone. And if the ongoing broadcast of these numbers is any indication, Cuba already has inserted a new Wasp Network into South Florida to replace its captured spies. But the simplicity of a numbers station also is its strength. Unlike telephone, e-mail, and Net connections, receiving a radio signal leaves no fingerprint, no hint as to where the recipient might be physically located. And with the numbers-to-letters code known only to the spy and his handlers -- and with that code changing with each broadcast -- the secret messages they contain are theoretically unbreakable. Unbreakable, that is, unless you were able to make a copy of the same computer decryption program, which is exactly what FBI agents did in 1995 as they surreptitiously broke into at least one of the spies' apartments, allowing them to subsequently decipher the shortwave broadcasts the unknowing Cubans continued to receive until they were arrested in September 1998.

"Someone on the Spooks list had already cracked the code for a repeated transmission [from Havana to Miami] if it was received garbled," Smolinski notes with a hint of pride. "Still it's nice to know we were right," he adds, referring to the reams of spy messages freshly declassified by the FBI for use as prosecutorial trial evidence. Now Smolinski can play before-and-after, matching up his own recordings of the original spy broadcasts with their decoded instructions to get chummy with American military personnel at the Boca Chica air base ("prioritize and continue to strengthen friendship with Joe and Dennis"), infiltrate the staffs of local Cuban-exile politicians Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, as well as the anti-Castro airborne group Brothers to the Rescue ("Under no circumstances should [agents] German nor Castor fly with BTTR or another organization on days 24, 25, 26, and 27"). Not least important was this reminder: "Congratulate all the female comrades for International Day of the Woman."

Shortwave spy broadcasts are hardly a one-way street. The U.S. government maintains its own array of numbers stations transmitting to the rest of the world (some in Spanish, some in English), using essentially the same pattern as Cuba: strings of recited numbers. Their shadowy existence finally was nailed down by William Godby, a retired naval intelligence officer who adopted the tongue-in-cheek alias Havana Moon because of his Spooks-styled obsession with spy numbers stations. In the late Eighties he headed for South Florida, and over the course of several drives up and down U.S. 1, he used signal-direction-finding equipment to trace numbers broadcasts to antennae setups at the West Palm Beach airport, in nearby Tequesta, and at the Homestead Air Force Base. All were aimed at the Caribbean.

The Homestead site fell victim to 1992's Hurricane Andrew while the others went strangely silent not long afterward. According to the Federation of American Scientists, most U.S. shortwave spy signals now originate from a sprawling base outside Washington, D.C. Just don't try to get a federal bureaucrat to confirm that.

In May 2000 a National Public Radio reporter asked the Federal Communications Commission to publicly comment on William Godby's (who died in 1996) findings and the ongoing numbers-station phenomenon. "We don't intend to discuss these stations, if any exist at all," declared John Winston, the FCC's assistant chief of the enforcement bureau. "And I'm not saying there are, [even] if your scientists say there are [stations] that are transmitting in this country. We know of innumerable ones outside of this country."

Indeed the most idiosyncratic broadcasts definitely are not from the United States. Collected on the recently reissued The Conet Project are four CDs of spy radio's greatest hits, mapping out a veritable who's who of undercover agencies. Great Britain's MI6 is represented by the Lincolnshire Poacher, so nicknamed because of the English folk song that plays on a calliope before its numbers begin, ostensibly to help an agent tuning in to easily locate its signal. A vintage 1971 snippet, thought to be from East Germany's Stasi security agency, commences with a spirited beer-hall polka and then the communist anthem "The Internationale" before getting down to the numerology. Magnetic Fields, a station of unknown origin, opens with Jean-Michel Jarre's new-age synthesizer ditty "Les Chants Magnétique" before launching into a mixture of Arabic numerals and the English phrase "again, again" as the message repeats.

"Witness the numbers station that employs the voice of a woman intoning numbers as if she were engaging in intercourse," writes The Conet Project's compiler Akin Fernandez in the collection's liner notes. "Who would dare use such a voice? Have the operators in the technical departments that run these stations lost their minds? And of course they must have had permission to use such voices, so does this insanity go straight up to the top levels?"

Echoing that ominous note is the broadcast recorded from Moscow during the aborted hard-line Communist Party coup against Boris Yeltsin: It's simply the number five repeated over and over again for hours.

Speaking to England's the Guardian about The Conet Project, former KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky (now working for British intelligence) confirmed that the disc's Soviet spy sound bites were authentic. But even Gordievsky had a hard time figuring out what was going on with Czechoslovakia's OLX. After decades of regular service, it vanished from the airwaves shortly after that nation's 1989 "velvet revolution," only to mysteriously reappear in late 1996. Was it a postcommunist case of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss?" Just who were Vaclav Havel's freedom-loving buddies spying on? The Germans, suggests Gordievsky. The Czechs distrust Germany and want "to know what they are up to. They may be trying to create a new network." (OLX went silent again in 1998.)

Despite the colorful competition, Chris Smolinski holds a special place in his heart for the Cuban numbers stations. "They're the worst-run of all," he laughs. "They have lots of transmitter problems that cause the signals to drift. Sometimes there are these horrible hums that drown out the numbers. Sometimes they even switch on the wrong audio -- Radio Havana Cuba will go on the air instead of a numbers station. Sometimes they'll be patched in on top of one another until somebody in the studio realizes their mistake." He sighs. "I feel really bad for the Cuban agents.  Here they are trying to copy down numbers, and the audio is so distorted you can't make it out. It must be so frustrating for them. I guess 40 years of communism will do that.  Obviously they're running on a shoestring.  I'm sure they're working with hand-me-down stuff from the Soviets."

None of that begins to explain why one of the ¡Atención! broadcasts Smolinski taped opened with a rooster crowing. "Maybe they were getting ready to make dinner, and somebody left the microphone on," he cracks.

Then there's The Babbler, featuring the familiar strains of Cuban spy radio. But instead of calmly reciting her numbers as in the ¡Atención! broadcast, The Babbler sings them with dizzying speed. Is her inflection itself carrying a hidden message? Is she perhaps trying to cheer up some lonely Cuban spy sitting in his dingy Hialeah apartment, pining for the homeland? Or is it just a case of too many cortaditos before starting work?

And what about The Bored Man? "If you listened to him, it sounded like he really didn't care what he was doing," says Smolinski of how this announcer earned his sobriquet. Until August 1998 "he was on every Sunday morning at 9:00, although sometimes he'd start late. He'd make mistakes, back up, and start over. There are even cases where you can hear people laughing in the background. He just sounded incredibly bored with his job. It was all very odd." So odd, in fact, that several Spooks members are convinced that despite its use of a traditionally Cuban frequency and format, it was anything but.

"Some people believe The Bored Man must've been used by drug smugglers," he says, their purpose perhaps being to locate a cocaine drop or a clandestine rendezvous. "It was just so poorly done," Smolinski continues. "If it was really Cuban intelligence, you'd think they would take things a little more seriously."

For Akin Fernandez, Cryptic Messages Became Music To His Ears
By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 3, 2004

Akin Fernanadez, pictured on a London rooftop, turned his fixation with shortwave transmissions into "The Conet Project" recording. (Poppy Berry - For The Washington Post)

In a cluttered home office in the World's End section of London, Akin Fernandez is trolling the dial of his newly acquired shortwave radio. It's December 1992 and it's late at night, when the city is quiet and the mad-scientist squawks of international broadcasts have an otherworldly tone. Fernandez, the owner and sole employee of an indie music label, is about to trip across a mystery that will take over his life.

Shortwave signals are bouncing, as they always do, around the globe, caroming off a layer of the atmosphere a few hundred miles above the Earth and into antennas all over the world. Fernandez can hear news from Egypt and weather reports from China. But his browsing stops when he tunes in something startling: the mechanized voice of a man, reading out numbers.

No context, no comment, no station identification. Nothing but numbers, over and over, for minutes on end. Then the signals disappear, as if somebody pulled the plug in the studio. And it's not just one station. The more he listens, the more number monologues he hears.

"Five four zero," goes a typical broadcast, this time in the soulless voice of a woman with a British accent. "Zero nine zero. One four. Zero nine zero one four."

Numbers in Spanish, in German, Russian, Czech; some voices male, others female. When Fernandez lucks into hearing the start of a broadcast, he's treated to the sound of electronic beeps, or a few bars of calliope music, or words like "message message message." Then come the numbers. A few stations spring to life the same time each night, others pop up at random and cannot be found again.

At first, Fernandez figures it's a prank, the work of radio pirates with a sense of humor. But you need a license for this part of the radio band, and why would anyone break the law just to read digits into the dark yonder? In England the penalties are serious. Where's the comedic payoff?

Nobody has answers. Not the guy who sold him the radio, who claims they're weather stations -- which is crazy, because weather stations don't hopscotch to different spots on the dial, as many of these did. Not a manual he buys about shortwave frequencies, which has a chapter on "numbers stations" and describes them as a riddle that nobody has solved. Not the British Library, which seems to have catalogued every other sound on the planet.

What's with the numbers?

Answering that question, it turns out, would take Fernandez years, and it left him nearly penniless, at least for a while. It also brought him a horde of admirers on another continent, eventually earned him a credit in a Tom Cruise movie and sparked a legal battle with the acclaimed band Wilco.

Fernandez would study numbers stations largely because he couldn't stop even if he tried -- which is to say, he fell into the grip of an obsession. But along the way, by both accident and design, he discovered amid all that static the raw material for a point he likes to make, with characteristic zeal, about the future of rock-and-roll.

That, however, is later. In December of '92, Fernandez is just listening. And listening. He stays up till 4 or 5 every morning, jotting down frequencies and figures, looking for patterns. He keeps a detailed log, not for weeks or months but for years, without a clue about what exactly he is logging. Sometimes Fernandez doesn't leave his house for a week.

"You just get submerged," he says, on the phone from London. "You get immersed in it. There are so many questions and the only answer is to listen more, because no answers are coming from anywhere else."

The Secret Sounds

A few things you should probably know about Akin Fernandez: There's the basic background stuff -- that he's the son of Nigerian-born parents, that he grew up in Brooklyn and moved to London when he was 15 years old. He calls himself a geek. He believes UFOs are real. More mysteriously, there appear to be grooves carved into his clean-shaven head, the origins of which he politely declines to discuss. ("Irrelevant," he says.) He is now 41.

Also -- and this is key -- Fernandez hunts for audible thrills the way a shark hunts for meat, which is to say constantly and ravenously. This makes it a little easier to grasp his passion for numbers stations. They were unlike anything that had ever hit his ears.

The radio counting wasn't just new to Fernandez, it was beautiful. He's a disciple of an Italian named Luigi Russolo, who argued in a 1913 manifesto called "The Art of Noises" that the bustle of city life and industrial machinery ought to be included in our musical language, alongside chords and harmonies, violins and oboes. This proved a tough sell. In 1914, Russolo held his first concert with noise-making machines he called Intoners and the show ended in a melee: performers against the audience.

"I understand that shortwave noise is a kind of music," Fernandez says, sounding Russolovian. "And to me the numbers brought another level of beauty to the music."

One final thing to know about Akin Fernandez: He's prone to fixations. His first was a collection of Marvel comic books that swelled to 5,000 when he was a kid. In his twenties, he noticed that literary-minded prostitutes in London were advertising their services, and phone numbers, with saucy little poems written on cards glued to the insides of phone booths. ("Once upon a time in Earl's Court / reigned the wicked Love Queen . . . ") For months, Fernandez would mortify friends and family by painstakingly peeling the cards off the glass, until he owned more than 600 of them. In 1984, he published the lot in a volume called "The X Directory."

"My mother came to the book party," Fernandez recalls. "I couldn't believe it."

Numbers stations, with their variety and quantity, triggered all of his impulses to catalogue and collect. The stations had personality, if you listened long enough. One always began with a few bars of "The Lincolnshire Poacher," an old British folk song. On another you could occasionally hear roosters or echoes of Radio Havana in the background, as though someone had forgotten to turn off a mike. One starred a young lady with an exotic accent who dramatically read words from the International Radio Operators alphabet, somehow making inscrutable phrases -- "Sierra. Yankee. November." -- sound life-and-death urgent.

While the rest of London slept, Fernandez chased these voices all over the dial, never sure when or where he'd find one. He wrote down the results in a green book bound with fake leather. A typical entry looked like this:

Sept 6 '93

Freq Time Signal

6.201 USB 12:30 am BIZARRE German Children's Voice

Station starts with beeps, then

GLOCKENSPIEL!! Then count

From 1 to 10 then ACHTUNG!

And message!! [expletive] Hell!!

There are a lot of exclamation points in Fernandez's log.

"You're listening, and all of a sudden you come across a really strong signal," he says. "It's the most chilling thing you've ever heard in your life. These signals are going everywhere and they could be for anything. There's nothing like it."

To pay the rent, Fernandez released music through Irdial Discs, which by then was part of a small ecosystem of clubs and record shops selling avant-garde music in London. Finally, after three years of wee-hours number logging, he heard about a book called "Intercepting Numbers Stations" by a guy named Langley Piece. He mail-ordered it from a place in Scotland, and when it arrived he sat and devoured it in a sitting. The book confirmed Fernandez's initial hunch -- the stations were no joke.

 "They're deadly serious, in fact," he says. "That little German girl reading numbers, she might be ordering someone to assassinate a person with a poisoned umbrella."

Mission: Indecipherable

Let's say you're a spy, out in the field, spying. You need instructions now and then from headquarters, but you don't want to risk exposure by picking up a phone (tappable) or getting an e-mail (traceable). Face-to-face meetings carry their own risks. What do you do?

One solution, dreamed up during the Cold War: Listen on shortwave radio at a predetermined time and frequency for a message that only you can understand. Numbers stations, it turns out, are the one-way chatter of espionage agencies to their spies. This isn't conspiracy theory hokum; it's referenced in a dozen-plus memoirs of assorted ex-spooks and defectors. And though numbers broadcasts might sound low-tech in the age of the BlackBerry, the idea isn't utterly cockamamie.

"In a two-way communication, you have to acknowledge the message," says David Kahn, author of "The Codebreakers," a history of cryptology. "But with a shortwave broadcast, anybody can listen, which means that nobody knows who the message is intended for."

The numbers, Kahn explained, are translated with the aid of what's known as a one-time pad, essentially a dictionary for a language that is spoken only once. Most pads are destroyed after a single use -- some of the Soviet pads, lore has it, were edible -- making them one of espionage's rarest artifacts. In 1988, three were found in a bar of hollowed-out soap when a Czech spy, posing as an art dealer in London, was caught by authorities as he sat in an apartment and transcribed a message sent via shortwave.

For Fernandez, this spy angle was a red rag to a bull. A dozen new questions arose, such as how much was all this costing taxpayers, and what messages were being sent? It irked him, too, that no government official, at least in Britain or the United States, would acknowledge this whole system was in place. He was unmoved by the argument that if the system were acknowledged it wouldn't be secret anymore. It didn't matter to him that the messages were totally indecipherable, or that nobody else seemed remotely worked up about them. The more Fernandez thought about it, the more outrageous it all seemed. British citizens -- and citizens of other countries -- underwriting secret messages, sent to agents, telling them to do God knows what.

"Even if you assume that most of the messages are 'pick up this money' or 'drop off the laundry,' think about what numbers stations represent. The only way a secret like this can be kept is if you live in a society where everybody is obeying and everybody is a little sleepy. But if you're a curious kind of chap you'll wonder, if your government can keep this a secret, what other secrets are they keeping."

If you knew Fernandez back in 1994, there was no talking him out of his numbers addiction. He claims he had a social life through his super-fixated years, but ask for the name of a buddy who knew what he was going through and he comes up empty.

Well, a girlfriend named Anne Marie came by one night and listened and her jaw dropped. More typical, though, was the reaction of a cousin who lives in London, who was perfectly baffled.

"I'd call and he'd say, 'I'm listening to something, do you want to hear it?' " remembers Enitan Abayomi. "And then I'd hear a voice over the radio. And I'd think, so? I just didn't hear what he heard in it. But he's very, very bright, and I often feel like he's leaving me miles behind. So I thought that people with higher IQs than mine might understand what he's talking about."

At some point, Fernandez began to think he'd never kick his numbers habit. It had pushed nearly everything else out of his life. He'd had enough, and in 1997, he tore himself, at last, from his radio. How did he do it?

"The Conet Project," he says.

The Leading Edge of Rock

In the annals of recorded music, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything rivaling the ambition and absurdity of "The Conet Project." (Conet, a word he heard often on the shortwave, is Czech for "end.") Four CDs with 150 different broadcast snippets from all over the world. More than 280 minutes of white noise, numbers and beeps. Plus a 74-page booklet with background, logs, playlists and a bibliography -- the sort of treatment ordinarily reserved for platinum-selling bands with a massive fan base. Fernandez poured everything he had into "Conet." It sold in the United States for $62.

This is a pretty succinct definition of obsession: a thing you feel you have to do, even though you don't, even if doing it will cost you everything, which is what it cost Fernandez. There were a few head-scratching reviews of "Conet" and sales of about 2,000 copies, modest even by indie standards. Fernandez closed up Irdial, and the last pressing of "Conet" was in 2001. He took a series of jobs that he'd rather not discuss.

"They were jobs," he says. "Just jobs."

That might have been it. But something happened. "Conet" slowly acquired a cult following. A fervent cluster of devotees cropped up in San Francisco, around a store called Aquarius Records, a haven for the musical avant-garde, the sort of place that crows about albums such as "Insect Electronica From Southeast Asia." To Aquarius's owners and regular customers, "Conet" was a little ridiculous and totally irresistible. They posted a chart behind the cash register that tracked the store's "Conet" sales, and asked everyone who bought a copy to pose for a photo. They stopped with a photo of customer No. 386.

"It works in a lot of different ways," says Allan Horrocks, a co-owner of the store. "It's kind of creepy and mysterious because of what it is -- this secret thing that you can't understand. We'd think it was cool if it was just an experimental drone record. But it's more than that."

Much more, actually. "Conet" gives off a whiff of the vaguely forbidden: Maybethe government doesn't want you to hear this. And your parents won't get it. And if you listen today, in the age of Code Orange, it actually sounds a little sinister, with echoes of the "chatter" the Bush administration is always warning us about. What could be more frightening than "chatter"?

"Conet," in other words, delivers a couple of the slightly subversive thrills that rock could once deliver without breaking a sweat. It feels new, a little dangerous, a ticket into a subculture of sorts. That's an experience you don't find in record stores much anymore, in part because rock has been around for 50 years -- and can anything that old really feel dangerous? -- and in part because corporate America long ago figured out there's gold in the underground, and now mines and mass-produces it faster every year. In a way, "Conet" is a measure of just how fringeward you need to head these days to find something that delivers the frisson of the margins.

Which is part of Fernandez's point. From the beginning, his label released what he calls "fine art noise" and "underground dance music," all of it made by a batch of artists you will never see on the charts. To Fernandez, Irdial's niche product occupies some of the only fertile ground left in music. It's his heartfelt belief that rock-and-roll has been dead for years.

"Rock bands now are just following the path that's already been marked," he grumbles. "Right down to the riffs, right down to the production. These people are copying their fathers' record collections.

"I think the truly creative people have left this area. A real artist would look at the canvas and find the corner that hasn't been painted yet. Nobody is doing that. . . . The first thing that anyone in a band with a guitar and drums should do is put down their instruments."

So what's a rock band to do if it wants to keep the guitars and churn new ground? How do you make something so familiar seem daring?

Enter Wilco, a quintet that started as an alt-country act and is now boldly going where no rockers have gone before. Two years ago the group released an album with a song called "Poor Places." It starts as a droopy ballad, but eventually the drums fade, the melody evaporates, and up roars a truly terrifying hurricane of sound. As it builds to a climax, a woman's urgent semaphore peeks through the noise:

"Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot. Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot. Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot."

It's a track from "Conet," the voice of Ms. International Radio Operator herself. The band sampled it and used it to name the album. "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" would earn Wilco its strongest reviews ever -- it was No. 1 that year in the Village Voice national poll of music critics -- and it sold decently, too.

At various moments on "Yankee" you can hear lead singer and co-songwriter Jeff Tweedy struggling with the where-do-we-go-now question. And he finds an answer, or at least part of an answer, in the same place as Fernandez, way way out there, in the ionosphere. Which is apparently where you wind up now when you seek the unpainted corner of the musical canvas.

It's enough to make you think that what's left of rock's frontier isn't very pretty; there isn't even music playing there. At some point -- after punk crested, perhaps, in the late '70s -- innovation in guitar pop became a matter of creative arithmetic. Blind Willie McTell plus Led Zeppelin times garage rock equals the White Stripes. The Velvet Underground plus the Cars divided by an intercom system equals the Strokes. But this has limits, too. The Strokes' second album, "Room on Fire," is just a rehash of their first. It's redundant and kind of gutless. It's everything that Fernandez hates.

"Conet" ultimately defines the crux of rock's problem in middle age. How do you double back without seeming timid? How do you roll forward without seeming incomprehensible for its own sake?

On the Record

Though Fernandez and Wilco might sound like kindred spirits, they never exactly cozied up. The band didn't pay for that "Conet" loop, and in 2002 Fernandez sued.

For years, it's been Irdial's policy to post free downloadable versions of every song in its catalogue. (Head to Irdial.com to download any Irdial title, including the entirety of "Conet.") But Fernandez makes a distinction between personal and commercial use of his work. If you're going to make money from his labors, he thinks he should share in the wealth. At minimum, he thinks you should ask nicely. In 2001, he granted Hollywood director Cameron Crowe the right to several "Conet" cuts for use in the film "Vanilla Sky," free of charge, because Crowe requested permission. The cuts are heard in those arresting moments when Tom Cruise shows up in Times Square and discovers that he's all alone.

Wilco, the band's lawyers would eventually explain, figured there was no copyright on sound that anyone could have heard on the radio, that obviously wasn't a song and that hadn't in any way been artistically altered. Whatever the merits of the case -- and Fernandez says the law in England is clearly on his side -- Wilco settled out of court, saying it preferred to skip a drawn-out fight. That was in late June. The band's label sent Irdial-Discs, aka Akin Fernandez, about $30,000 to cover his legal costs, plus a royalty payment several times that sum. See if you can guess what Fernandez did with the money.

Today he is married, to Anne Marie, the one person who seemed to grasp the lunacy and charm of numbers stations, and they are raising four children. Some family men might take a windfall like the Wilco loot and renovate the house, or take the kids on vacation. Fernandez didn't do that.

"The kind of guy who releases 'The Conet Project' isn't the kind of guy who goes on vacation," he says.

How about a new car?

"Absolutely not," he says.

Fernandez revived Irdial with the money, and he re-released "The Conet Project." New copies went on sale July 13 and the sales chart at Aquarius Records is back in action. In just a few weeks, the store has already sold 120 more copies.

"Conet," of course, will never earn a profit, but that was never the point. Fernandez calls it a total artistic triumph because it's in the Library of Congress, because it's in the British Library and because numbers stations are less of a mystery than when he first ran into them, 12 years ago. In 1998, a U.K. government spokesperson acknowledged for the first time that shortwave radio is indeed used for espionage.

"These [numbers stations] are what you suppose they are," the spokesperson told the Daily Telegraph, in a story that was prompted by the release of "Conet." "People shouldn't be mystified by them. They're not, shall we say, for public consumption."

To the untrained ear this might have sounded like an unremarkable brushoff. To Fernandez, it sounded a lot like "uncle."

Over Shortwave, Anyone Can Listen
By James Gordon Meek
New York Daily News
Friday, December 29, 2006

It turns out that anybody can tune in to the world's top spy agencies talking to operatives. All you need is a cheap shortwave-radio receiver, the kind available at any drugstore.

Tune it to 6855 or 8010 kHz.

On the hour, you might hear a girlish voice repeating strings of numbers monotonously in Spanish. "Nueve, uno, nueve, tres, cinco-cinco, cuatro, cinco, tres, dos . . .," went one seemingly harmless message heard last month on a Grundig radio.

It was the Cuban Intelligence Directorate or Russian FSB broadcasting coded instructions from Havana to spies inside the United States.

Turn the dial up to 11545 kHz, and you might hear a few notes of an obscure English folk song, "Lincolnshire Poacher," followed by a voice repeating strings of numbers. That's believed to be British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, broadcasting from Cyprus.

On 6840 kHz, you may hear a voice reading groups of letters. That's a station nicknamed "E10," thought to be Israel's Mossad intelligence.

Chris Smolinski runs SpyNumbers.com and the "Spooks" e-mail list, where "number stations" hobbyists log hundreds of shortwave messages transmitted every month. "It's like a puzzle. They're mystery stations," explained Smolinski, who has tracked the spy broadcasts for 30 years.

While hobbyists guess at the meaning of each cryptic message or which spy service sent it, it's no mystery to intelligence officials, who confirmed the purpose is espionage.

The signals are too strong to be made by amateurs and are often on licensed frequencies. The State Department once complained to the Israeli Embassy in Washington that "E10" was blocking a U.S. broadcast, a source said.

"I can't imagine who else would waste the time in front of a microphone reading numbers" but a spy, said James Bamford, who has written about intelligence. Bamford calls number stations "simple but effective" spycraft.

"It's extremely effective," agreed a senior intelligence official. "If you have a one-time pad, the code can't be broken, and you can send out dummy broadcasts as much as you want to confuse your enemy."

A "one-time pad" is the key to unlocking coded shortwave messages that the CIA calls "one-way voice link."

It is low-risk because it's known only to the sender and the recipient and used just once before being destroyed, said retired CIA officer Tony Mendez.

Mendez said he would often imprint the code on microfilm or even a cigarette paper. Once inside the target country, a CIA operative could make a shortwave receiver out of simple materials. "The voices are not real people," he added. "They're computer-generated."

A CIA spokeswoman declined to comment.

One-time pads and coded radio began in World War I, said Thomas Boghardt, a historian at the International Spy Museum. Little has changed since, judging by recent espionage cases involving shortwave radios, including that of a man detained in Canada last month and accused of being a Russian spy.

In Miami last week, Carlos and Elsa Alvarez pleaded guilty to lesser charges after the United States accused them of spying for Cuba. A prosecutor alleged in a court hearing this summer that they received shortwave "messages in five-digit groupings." An FBI interview transcript shows Alvarez admitted going into his bathroom "on Fridays to listen at 11" for messages aimed at the couple, code-named "David" and "Deborah."

Click pic

Aren't numbers stations a trip?
I wonder what on Earth they are.

Is it spy spook-talk? Telecom comp'nies testin' new stuff? Aliens? Seditious Esquimaux? fundaMENTAList xians spouting bib-lee passages? Eastern Yuropistanis? Rootin' tootin' vladimir putin carryin' on an old Russistani trad? Rosicrucian mail-order lesson numbers? Bilderberg? Illuminati? A bingo game?

Numbers station @ wikipedia
Lincolnshire Poacher @ wikipedia
The Conet Project @ wikipedia
NPR: Lost and Found Sound - Numbers Stations
NPR: The Conet Project
simonmason.karoo.net
simonmason.karoo.net/page30
simonmason.karoo.net/page32
simonmason.karoo.net/page34
simonmason.karoo.net/page35
simonmason.karoo.net/page36
simonmason.karoo.net/page36
Ian Rowan
mikeandsniffy.co.uk
dxing.com/numbers
spynumbers.com
spynumbers.com numbers stations database
spynumbers.com/YosemiteSam
home.luna.nl/~ary
Code-cracking contests
espionage-is-in-the-air
wired.com

Mom, her then-boyfriend, and I once rented a small and inexpensive villa named S-, in a little community called M- B- for a Jamaican holiday. It's a lovely little one storey, conical-roofed place with two bedrooms and a large sitting/living/dining room. It's a series of three round sections, each with a pointed, round roof. The living room is a vast, round room, and is the large round bit in the middle as seen from the road. It has shuttered doors all along the back which lead to the wrap-around back veranda. There's a large bedroom and bath to the left and a smaller bed and bath to the right. They are the other two round bits nestled against the larger center one.
It even came with a wonderful Jack Russell Terrier mix goddess-dog named BB, but the ghost wasn't mentioned.

Strange things began happening after the first day.

I found the cold water in the kitchen sink running full blast, and no one was in the house but BB and I. Mom and her BF were out running errands. The maid insisted she'd been busy in the (separate) cottage with the laundry, and seemed well surprised. The gardener was off that day.

I took a shower one morning, and when I opened the door I saw a multitude of shadows on the hallway wall heading both to and from my bedroom and the living room. Most looked human, but there were also dog and cat shadows. The shutters were closed, and any shadows they'd've caused would have been stripey and these were not. The hallway door to the living room was shut. I was standing stock-still, as you can well imagine, and my shadow fell nowhere near the wall anyhow. Again, everyone else - including BB - was outside. I never saw a single cat in M- B- during that holiday.
The shadows were there almost every time I showered, no matter the time of day/night, light source/s, or which door/s were closed.

One evening while playing cards we decided a snack was in order, but couldn't open the kitchen door. We went out onto the veranda and around to the front and entered the kitchen.
The refrigerator (a vast and heavy Yankistani affair, not a miniscule European one) had been pushed six to seven inches (15-17 cm) across the floor so it blocked the door. It was a real job for the three of us to push it back, and it was also very noisy as it scraped across the floor. Then we saw the bolt had been thrown, too. None of us ever bolted that door. The maid and gardener had both been gone for hours, the gate was closed, and there was no evidence of a visitor - including the fact that BB never barked. BB is quite prompt about announcing visitors, even the maid and gardener.
That one really gave us the creeps, and it creeped out the maid and gardener who insisted they'd never thought S- had a duppy.

The pièce de résistance came one evening during a card game, with many witnesses and a scared-witless Xtine.

Our friends S-, her son J-, and our dear old pal J- were all playing cards at the dining room table with the three of us. BB was snoozing cutely somewhere. The maid and gardener had taken off hours before.
We were all having a great time. The game was close, superb tunes were in the air, and we had nice snacks.
The table is at the far left end of the living room. It sits lengthwise near the big bedroom's door, and the chairs on the far side are almost up against the shutters. There was barely enough room to pull the chair back for my little self, so only young J- and I sat on that side. Two empty chairs separated us.

We'd played for quite a while, laughing and talking. Then someone tapped me hard on my shoulder and I stood up, yelling, and shoved my chair back bang into the shutters. That tap felt cold as ice, and I shivered, hair on end as I stood there.
My goosebumps became contagious once I related what had happened.
Young J- insisted he'd had nothing to do with it, and everyone else said they hadn't seen him move. No one had left the table for a long time. There was nothing on the floor which could've bounced off me from above; there were no bats or big moths present.

None of the three of us had experienced poltergeists before, and the house itself never felt creepy to any of us nor any of our friends. The maid and gardener have said such things have never happened at S- before or since our visit, and the late owner's son was mystified and surprised.

I later met a close friend of the late owner who said,
"If I have ever known anyone capable of haunting a house, it was he."

Rabbit Scratches Door Until Couple Wakes
July 25, 2008

MELBOURNE, Australia --  You've heard about hero dogs and even hero cats -- but how about a hero rabbit?

Fire officials in Melbourne credit a pet rabbit with saving a couple from a house fire.

Metropolitan Fire Brigade commander Mick Swift said that when the fire started, the family pet, named Rabbit, scratched at the couple's bedroom door, waking them.

Officials didn't identify the couple by name. But firefighters said the couple woke in time to escape the fire without being hurt.

Angry puffer fish goes nuts

The Sydney Morning Herald

A puffer fish ... but this one's probably not enraged.

A Cambodian teenager was recovering in hospital after a puffer fish attacked him in the groin, local media reported on Tuesday.

The Khmer-language Koh Santepheap daily ran a picture of the unnamed 13-year-old in a hospital bed with heavy strapping around his testicles, saying he was lucky to be alive.

The paper quoted the boy's father, Sok Ly, as saying the fish had become enraged when it was accidentally trapped in the boy's net and, when it was freed, had attacked the boy's scrotum.

Cambodian legend has it that the bite of the fish is even more dangerous than its poisonous spines, especially for boys, and Cambodian boys are traditionally advised not to swim in waters where the fish is common.

The victim, from Prek Pneuv commune outside Phnom Penh, was expected to recover from yesterday's attack, the paper said, but the extent of the damage had yet to be determined.

DPA

May 26, 2008

BARBOURSVILLE, W.Va. (AP) -- One young shopper at a Wal-Mart in West Virginia had to watch out for more than falling prices.

A 12-year-old girl picking up a seedless watermelon from a bin was stung Sunday by a tan, inch-long scorpion that had apparently stowed away in a shipment from Mexico.

Megan Templeton, of Barboursville, was taken to the hospital as a precaution but later released. Her father, William Templeton, said the pain was a little worse than a bee sting.

He initially didn't believe his daughter when she said she had been stung by a scorpion, but then he saw the critter scurry underneath a box. It was captured by Wal-Mart employees.

Most of the nearly 2,000 kinds of scorpions are not dangerous to humans.

Richard Coyle, senior director of international affairs for Wal-Mart, said store employees believe the problem was with a single shipment of watermelons.

"We are very concerned," he said. "This is a very rare incident. When I spoke with the store manager, she said in her 17 years she had never heard of something like this."