Total Eclipse

(Originally posted on LJ Cyberpunk @ 2005-05-14 01:12:00)

Last Word
I went to visit my parents today. As I do, I checked out my old room for random stuff of mine.
I found an issue of OMNI magazine, dated back July 1991.
(BTW, does anybody know whatever happened to OMNI?)
Anyway, this issue contained an article I was particularly fond of, so I thought I’d give it tribute, and type it out here for all to read.
Hope you enjoy it as much as I did, 13 years ago.

MAKING WAVES:
Radio signals wreak havoc on an unsuspecting public

By Stan Sinberg

Ask any creative person like Robin WIlliams or Isaac Asimov, “Where do you get your ideas?” and he almost always replies, “I don’t know” or “From everywhere” or something equally vague. Although this is an intelligent answer – After all, why should he tell you? – It’s not the truth.

I’m going to tell you the truth. Not only do I know the source of ideas, but I can tell you where almost all thoughts originate. Not only thoughts either, but also why sometimes when you are walking down the street you suddenly find yourself humming some old song you haven’t thought about for years and may not even like.

Even worse, you can’t get it out of your mind.

Inventing, say, new cheese and humming a Barry Manilow song might seem like pretty different phenomena, but they both come from the same place: renegade radio waves.

Scientists have been telling us for years that radio waves don’t disappear; they just keep drifting off into outer space until they come in contact with another civilization. This has always been considered positive because it ensures that singers like Janet Jackson will still be stars 10 million years from now, although perhaps in another galaxy.

But because of factors like tall skyscrapers and pollution, a fair amount of radio waves are trapped here on Earth, just floating around the atmosphere waiting to be picked up by unsuspecting passerby. Radio waves enter through your ears, hook up to your “idea center,” and the next thing you know, you’re thinking the thought.

The logjam of renegade radio waves explains a lot of things. Why do two people often invent the same gadget or come up with the same joke simultaneously? Because the idea for the invention is floating around some cigar store until two inventor types tune in to it.

People walking around the city talking to themselves aren’t crazy, as you might suspect. Rather, they’re walking radio receivers. That’s why they’ll carry on an animated conversation with themselves one minute and break into song the next.

Speaking of songs, the tune “Doo Wah Diddy” is legendary for floating around street corners waiting to leap into innocent minds and compel people to sing. Haven’t you ever wondered why almost everybody has hummed it, even though most people think it’s an asinine tune?

Renegade radio waves even solve one of the biggest mysteries of recent years: what the heck the guys who attacked Dan Rather meant when they said, “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” They were trying to tune in to Dan’s brain waves so they could send messages directly to him while he was reading the news, forcing him to alter his broadcast, and thus influence America’s thinking of an issue.

Pretty insidious, indeed. Fortunately for us, Dan fought them off.

People in big cities seem to get many more ideas than folks in, say, Nebraska, because places like New York are beset with constant barrages of renegade radio waves. Sometimes innocent bystanders are hit by two very different waves at the same time, causing people in New York to get weird ideas like charging 20$ for a plate of spaghetti, which is okay if you call it pasta.

People out in the boonies, however, have to sit around a long time before they’re hit with inspiration – that is, a random radio wave – and then it might be something like The Archies singing “Sugar, Sugar.”

That’s why most creative people move to cities, although they don’t know it.

Psychiatrists have suspected this business about floating radio waves for a long time. That’s the main reason most of them stopped having their patients free-associate. A recent study found that rather than tapping into their subconscious, many patients were merely picking up the ideas of the person who was previously in the room.

As a writer, I’ve trained my mind to be empty most of time, in order to receive stray ideas. When one strikes, I immediately stop whatever I’m doing (usually nothing) and do a piece about it, before another writer on the same frequency picks it up and accuses me of getting the idea from him. Which, come to think of it, maybe I did.

Cheers

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