Broadcast signal intrusion

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Subject to change.

Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts because this is the internet, and that's how it works now.

I'm Eli Bosnik and I'll be calling the board this evening, but I'll need the cues to my blues.

First up, the bars and tones to my 10 count, Noah and Heath.

Oh, all right.

If anything, I'm the tone.

Heath is obviously the bars.

All right, I'm going with the bars.

But just in general, waking up on the couch to that long beep and the color bars, that made our generation what it is.

It was terrifying.

Middle of the night, there's just yesterday.

And of course, there's a man who always knows you're talking to him when you say cue talent cecil something italian yeah i know it's my time to hold the cue card straight at that point

right

before we begin tonight i'd like to take a moment to thank our patrons patrons without your money we'd be lost and adrift among the podcast signal but your dollars guide us back like a lighthouse in the storm and if you'd like to learn how to join their ranks be sure to stick around till the end of the show And with that out of the way, tell us, Noah, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event will we be talking about today?

We're finally going to get some fucking use out of concept.

We've said that the whole time.

I don't think we've ever done a concept before.

It's like four of them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Television broadcast signal intrusions.

Ooh.

And Cecil, you read the rundown.

You ready to take us to the airwaves?

I'm ready to wiggle this antenna till it finds the right spot.

Are you lie?

You tease.

So tell us, Cecil, what are television broadcast signal intrusions?

Rabbit ears, right?

Broadcast signal intrusions are rare quick moments when someone manages to hack a television or radio broadcast, breaking through the airwaves with a message that was never meant to be there.

Most last only a few minutes, some only a few seconds, but they genuinely freak the fuck out of anyone watching.

In fact, I was witness to one of these intrusions.

Pinning that for later.

Yes.

Pinning that for later.

1980s and 70s, a handful of incidents stood out.

In fact, these are the three that I found on Wikipedia.

So I'm actually going to use those.

So the dick on a Zoom call before it was cool.

Yeah.

I keep trying to tell you, Eli, it's still not cool.

Okay.

It's pretty cool.

I'd prefer if you were a cat man.

Or your dick was a cat man, maybe like yeah,

it does say what?

Meow.

It's not supposed to say that.

You should say that.

It's very sick.

So, Grandpa Cecil, what was traditional broadcast television, you may ask?

Well, back before streaming, we had a bunch of airwaves.

I was in a transcript.

He deleted my part where I said

back before streaming, we had a bunch of airwave channels.

A bunch?

Speak for yourself, city boy.

We had two and a half.

They would broadcast these channels via satellite to either your cable company or your local station, and then you would tune in using a cable box or just the antenna on the back of your television.

There were the common stations that showed programs across the nation transmitted through local broadcasters.

These were ABC, NBC, CBS.

Later, more stations joined the lineup, and you could also tune in your local PBS channels.

So if someone cuts into the broadcast back then, there would be no resetting the signal or reloading the app.

You just have to be subjected to some weird shit for a few minutes until someone at the networks took back the signal from the intruder.

Oh, man.

And that was the dream, right?

The like signal hacking fantasy.

You get to give your big speech.

So cool.

That might just be you, big duck.

What?

No.

No, you know, some of us became podcasters.

I get it.

I did the John Galt thing.

I was

like that boy.

That's who I think of when I think of good big speeches.

There was one other way for people to get a TV signal.

They could own their own satellite dish.

See, back then, there was cable, and then you could pay extra to your cable company for premium channels like HBO or Showtime.

Hey, Cecil, that's still the case.

You interrupted me before I say, but a group of mostly engineers started sharing how to create and maintain these satellite dishes.

And then you could get a lot of these channels, even the ones the cable companies made you pay for, for free.

This wasn't anything illegal like fake chips in a direct TV box.

These were just regular people with enough ingenuity to grab signals from the air and not pay the man.

Okay, that one friend's dad who had the dish in everybody's town.

I don't know if you guys had, I had one of these and he was so fucking proud of his

top secret dish.

It was like a spy thing, and you had to like

do this whole thing.

I signed an NDA to go see his fucking dish.

Come on.

So, but okay, so back then, if you had like the full-size dish though pre pre-direct tv you had to like point it at the correct satellites like we didn't have the none of this geosynchronous shit you guys have today right like we had a these little black market charts where you would have to adjust the azimuth and the elevation

like literally had to have a fucking compass at what we worked for our free porn back then damn it Well, in the mid-1980s, the companies that were transmitting these premium stations, they decided to start scrambling these signals.

The satellite owners could then buy more de-scrambling equipment and also start paying a monthly fee for stations like HBO, or they could slam their face right up against the tube TV and hope to look through the matrix long enough to catch a nipple on occasion.

I got a couple.

Yeah.

There's like that one second where everything's upside down, but you're like, that's a real picture.

And then it disappears.

Yeah, it's like, yes.

I haven't felt that good since.

3-2-1 contact.

Right?

Really think about how hopeful you were when the on and the boobs.

And now think about now.

It's not even close.

It's not close.

Hey, guys, I'm violently suicidal.

Give me one second.

Often these fees for the satellite owners were more than the cable company charged for the same service, even with these satellite owners actually owning all the equipment to get the channel in the first place.

To give you an idea of these prices, HBO was charging satellite dish owners $12.95 a month in 1986 which is about 37 bucks per month in today's dollars those people also had to fork over 395 bucks for a scrambler which comes to about 1150 dollars today yeah but the money my parents would have saved on glasses if i hadn't been trying to squint watch red shoe diaries for my entire teen years

well worth it my friends well worth it but but the audio wasn't scrambled it always just it felt like an upcharge for having a bad imagination imagination.

Okay.

One reseller of satellite dishes found that this pretty much killed his business.

People bought these things to get around monthly fees, not pay more for the privilege of having monthly fees.

So this man, John McDougal, decided to write some protest letters to legislators and spent some of his own money trying to raise awareness for this cause.

This didn't change anything, though, and he was forced to cut costs on his own business and then eventually get a part-time job at Central Florida Teleport Uplink Station, which uplinks services to satellites.

These new measures are making stuff harder to steal.

Who do I write to about that?

It's a senator.

I'm a senator.

On April 26, 1986, his co-worker left for the night.

His job was to uplink the movie Pee-Wee's Big Adventure to People's Choice Network on pay-per-view.

After the movie ended, pay-per-view.

People were paid

for people doing God's work in 1986 yes

oh yeah baby after the movie ended he logged off and decided to make a color bar message this was the typical color bar that you see when a station stopped for the evening but he put some words on it and the message read source of my trauma

Good evening, HBO from Captain Midnight.

$12.95 a month, question mark.

No way, exclamation point.

Showtime, movie channel, beware.

He pointed that back at the dish and into its storage, into its storage position, and he pointed it at the satellite that carried HBO.

He then transmitted that message to all HBO customers for four and a half minutes, interrupting the Falcon and the Snowman.

How dare he?

It wound up showing to the eastern half of the United States, which is about 14.6 million subscribers to HBO.

Okay, that's such a confusing little manifesto.

Like, if I'm watching HBO at this point, I'm happily paying more than $12.95 a month to make sure I can keep following the very inept manifesto guy.

I don't think he's sabotaging the station the way he thinks he is.

Well, the owner of that satellite noticed the jamming, and Wikipedia uses this language, quote, Hughes Communications.

owner of the Galaxy One satellite, immediately noticed the jamming and threatened to shut down HBO's satellite signal or alterless satellite's course with executives believing the hacker was a domestic terrorist.

End quote.

Then the HBO tech and McDougal had a wattage duel, each pumping up the power of their signal to push the other's signal out.

It probably made exactly that sound.

After a couple minutes, McDougal relented and packed up his shit and just went home for the night.

Calls the other guy, hey, were you making a meme, me, me, me, noise if you mouthed him?

You weren't okay, good,

good.

I love the idea of

like some tech right there, Ian, trying to explain to Mr.

Hughes why they can't just steer the satellite a little to the left.

Why doesn't it work?

What do you mean, reset it?

So

he tried to put the message, the manifesto thing into the color bars.

Like he thought people would like not understand it outside of the format of the color bars.

This made national news.

The network was pissed.

And when corporate overlords are mad about something, they do what they always do.

They got the government involved.

And then the FCC said that the television hacker would be prosecuted.

They in turn got the Justice Department involved, and they started narrowing down the satellites that could actually do this.

They cut it down from 2,000 to 580 by narrowing down a particular uplake satellites.

And then they tracked the font and the other characteristics, cutting that number down to 12.

They should have done, he should have done the fucking magazine cutout thing.

Jesus, fucking amateur.

Are there certain fonts that are like indigenous to central Florida or something?

These fonts have like they have an accent.

You can tell the fonts.

Interesting.

Then they visited these stations.

Then they visited these stations to investigate and finally got a tip that it was McDougal.

He was bragging about jamming the signal at a pay phone in a rest area near Gatesville and someone wrote his license plate down.

Hey, that's a weird phone call to make in your life that you like stopped stopped to make at a payroll.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Cheryl, I just can't wait to get home to tell you this.

Guess what I did, hon.

Oh,

I've endangered our livelihoods.

You at the rest area in Gainesville again?

Yeah, you should get out of there.

I'm making hard eye calls.

Just hang up for that really

switchy-looking dude.

He has a notepad.

Why does he have a notepad?

It's crazy how much a notepad he has.

The government brought charges that could fine him $100,000 and have to spend a year in prison.

So he pled guilty to illegally operating a satellite uplink transmitter.

And then he had to pay a $5,000 fine and spend a year on probation.

I feel like his probation officer was just way out of his league with the questions you would have to ask at this point.

He doesn't understand any of it.

He's just reading this shit.

How do you pronounce this?

Have you

done any

satellite?

It's your job.

Okay.

Well, are you checking in from a rest area near Gates?

Don't smoke pop.

McDougal was either regarded by the public as a folk hero or a terrorist.

The House of Representative Communications Subcommittee decided that Congress should pass a law making hijacking a satellite a felony.

and then made sure that things were in place to track what satellites transmitted what signal in the future so they wouldn't have to do so much investigation and only have a anonymous tip solve the case.

Wiki notes that the takeover and the press did not motivate HBO to change their pricing structure.

Huh.

Yeah.

To be fair, neither did they not having a good show since the early seasons of Game of Thrones.

But look, I've got some angry emails to answer, so let's take a quick break for some apropos of nothing.

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is it i don't i don't think so no it i don't know what that can we buy it what it what do you i don't i don't think so

feels important

your magazine smells like a mushroom

Uh, notebooks.

Got them?

Pencils.

Yeah, they have like big ones now.

It's crazy.

Big pencils?

Yeah, they're supposed to help them write better, I guess.

They don't start with the number twos.

And don't forget your raycon.

Jesus, what is that thing?

Oh, Cecil, you remember Randy?

Randy the Raw Dog?

Don't wear it out.

Right.

Hi.

Yeah, you just surprised me, I guess.

But Randy, why would you need Raycons for back to school?

Oh, I thought you said back to cool.

In which case, the Raycon classic earbuds would be a must.

Well, why is that?

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But what about battery life, Randy, the raw dog?

They've got up to 32 hours of battery life, quick charge for 90 minutes in just 10, and awareness mode when I'm out walking the dog.

Wait, you own a dog?

Of course I do.

Dogs are great.

That's confusing.

But, Randy, have you actually tried these things?

I have.

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All right, Randy.

Thanks.

I still don't understand why you shaved, though.

Why is it?

Because he's raw, Cecil.

Right.

Got it.

No, Connie.

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And we're back.

When we left off, HBO was totally pwned by a hacktivist badass

who was mad his illegal thing didn't work anymore.

Who's our next leet to skin the noobs, Cecil?

Now, in the other incidents that I found, the investigations didn't yield any suspects.

Oh, she's sore so.

Let's not get crazy.

Let's not get crazy.

This next trip.

That's a new one I learned.

This next one takes place in 1977 in southern England.

The transmission occurred at 5.10 p.m.

on Saturday, November 26th.

Independent Television News was doing an evening report on clashes in Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe.

There was a buzz that came over the signal, and then the speakers started to talk in a distorted voice for about six minutes, and they they read this statement in part.

I didn't include the whole thing, but part of it.

Quote, this is the voice of Ritland, representative of the Ashtar Galactic Command, speaking to you.

For many years, you have seen us as lights in the skies.

We speak to you now in peace and wisdom, as we have done to your brothers and sisters all over this, your planet Earth.

We come to warn you of the destiny of your race and the world so that you may communicate to your fellow beings the course you must take to avoid this disaster, which threatens your world and the beings on our worlds around you.

This is in order so that you may share in a great awakening as the planet passes into a new age of Aquarius.

End quote.

Okay, I feel like there was an argument in the writer's room with these like genius aliens or whatever being like, okay, how do we start?

I'm going to do, oh, hello today.

This is Rylon.

No, that's that's stupid.

Saying, I'm saying my name.

We have wisdom.

I don't know.

Why speaking to you?

Obviously, you're speaking to me.

It's also,

it's crazy to me how often the aliens brave the intergalactic void to offer fucking banalities, right?

You

know, I should pause here to listen.

If you put a lot of work into this, and we're just telling them, like, vaguely, over like the course of a couple minutes, something they should just be nice to.

Laughs.

Fuck.

Are we still open to if you sprinkle when you tinkle, please be neat?

I like that one better than this.

Thank you.

I like that.

Can we go back to that?

Thank you, Mark Lar.

I'm Brylon.

What?

Jesus, your mouth sound the same.

I'm John Travota

from the movie Sword Fit Shift.

Hey, podcast sister.

I'm sorry me and Heath don't come for the rest of the show.

It's just us fucking cracking up in my sword fit reference.

So I should pause here to let you know that the name Ashtar isn't chosen out of hat for this prank because it sounds spacey.

This was the name that channelers used since the 1950s when they channeled space aliens.

In fact, this eventually became a spiritualist religion and they predicted the apocalypse.

So

maybe someone puts on their citation needed watch list this Ashtar thing.

Anyway, I'm just continuing with the quote here.

Quote, the new age can be a time of great peace and evolution for your race, but only if your rulers are made aware of the evil forces that can overshadow their judgments.

Be still now and listen, or your chance may not come again.

Guys, did we just get one, two, three eyes on me by aliens?

You did.

You got to sit

Here's the quote, all your weapons of evil must be removed.

The time for conflict is now past, and the race of which you are part of may proceed to the higher stages of its evolution if you show yourselves worthy to this.

That's really awkwardly worded.

Continuing the quote, you have but a short time to learn to live together in peace and goodwill.

They're pretty sure what we were missing for world peace was a time limit everybody

locked that up.

Wait, so how did the fucking perpetrators see this going?

Right?

So he figured the fucking USSR would be like, well, you know, some alien on British television did seem pretty sincere about giving up our moots.

So, right?

What the fuck?

So he goes on for a bit about being good, and then he issues this warning, quote, be aware also that there are many false prophets and gods at present operating on your world.

They will suck your energy from you the energy you call money and put it to evil ends giving you worthless dross in return and they'll charge you 12.99 a month for it even after you buy the fucking discrambler can you believe this shit

continuing on your inner divine self will protect you from this you must learn to be sensitive to the voice within that can tell you what is truth and what is confusion chaos and untruth learn to listen to the voice of truth, which is within you, and you will lead yourselves onto the path of evolution.

Don't be fooled by weird speeches about false prophets.

The boomy voice speech givers are probably lying.

Trust your gut.

This is a real one.

Except for this one.

And this one.

Start toasting your gut now.

That John Travolta movie was cool.

So good.

Now.

No, it wasn't.

She sucked his dick while he was having.

it was uh that was the best test it gets cool she was having

so fast he's such a good hacker

they close with quote we here at ashtar galactic command thank you for your attention we are now we are now leaving the planes of your existence may you be blessed by the supreme love and truth of the cosmos end quote love ashtar oh love are we saying love again should i do a sign-off with love?

Okay, whatever.

Bye.

Wisdom.

The thing we said.

I don't know.

Check out that movie.

Okay.

Look, I'm not saying that wasn't aliens.

I'm saying if they were, based on their message, I'd still want us to have ignored them.

The most boring ass, hippie fucking aliens.

Look, if you want me to listen to that kind of shit, you have to give me drugs first, okay?

So the prankster took control of a transmitter near the main transmitter, sent the signal through their own equipment, and that's how the broadcast was sent.

The people investigating it thought because of their own configuration of these transmitters, a relatively low power signal sent in the right way could do the trick.

It would require a lot of technical know-how, but it could be done pretty easily.

They never caught anyone, and no one ever came forward to claim the hoax.

It was Ashtar, Cecil.

He just told us that he was a message.

He was teaching Drylon of.

Yeah, Jesus.

It's kind of hard to catch them, though, after they leave this plane of existence.

Right.

Oh, look under this Calabio manifold over here.

No, it doesn't make any freaking sense.

It's too small.

Couldn't look under that.

Immediately after the broadcast, there was a public uproar.

People started calling the television station after the signal, worried there was an alien asking us to be nice to each other.

The next day, the newspapers announced the signal takeover and the news organizations around the world spread the story.

Personally, I'd have given it a couple of days to test the sort of watchman hypothesis, right?

Oh, what do you guys think?

We're all going to be afraid of the giant octopus?

No, no, okay, okay, it was a scam.

I also want to say this is something that some people took at vase value, too.

There was a,

they thought that there was an actual alien that came to broadcast this signal on a small station in

southern England during the evening news on a Saturday so that mankind could be nice to each other and gain a higher stage of evolution.

One editor of a newspaper in Oregon said, quote, Nobody seemed to consider that Asteron, they misspelled it, may have been for real,

or that he may have made a great deal of sense, and quote.

Hey, I want to be mean to that editor.

And, like, I realize I won't be doing transcendent evolution or whatever.

I see the irony in this.

That's so stupid.

No, yeah, no, look, I put away my weapons of evil.

Now I get to make fun of the motherfucker.

That was the whole list, wasn't it?

It was the whole imperative I saw.

That's it.

So, this last signal intrusion happened in Chicago, and I actually caught it live on the air.

Ooh,

explosions, broadcast hacks,

whatever's happening to Tom.

What haven't you seen, Cecil?

I don't want to see what's happening to Tom, though.

The other ones I did, yeah.

Nobody does.

On November 22nd, 1987, a prankster hijacked two signals in two different local stations about two hours apart.

The first intrusion happened on WGN during the 9 p.m.

news.

The Bears had beaten the Lions 30 to 10, and Dan Rohn was giving the recap.

Okay, is it just like a fucking Bears fan to bring up a fucking 38-year-old victory?

The Lions won yesterday.

We haven't had a recent one.

No,

let me have my 30 to 10 victory.

A Jax fan would never listen to me.

Then, for 30 seconds, the picture was replaced with a loud buzzing sound and terrible rim tone.

On the screen was a person in a Max Hedrum mask.

Now, Max Hedrim was a computer-generated character that was popular at the time.

Actually,

so sorry to 80s nerds who just didn't see so.

But Max Hedrim was a real guy made up to look like a computer-generated guy because CGI was so fucking bad, you couldn't actually make a dude with it yet.

Point take it.

Absolutely true.

You're absolutely right.

I will yield to your 80s nerd knowledge.

The background of this picture was a spinning piece of corrugated metal meant to simulate the very basic line geometrical patterns that the actual character had in their videos.

The person in the mask didn't say anything, just sort of bobbed back and forth for a few seconds, picture cut to black, and then back to the news.

And then a stunned reporter said, Well, if you're wondering what happened, so am I.

And then Dan joked that the computer running the news took off and went wild.

Yeah, someone spent way more time on the how than they did on the what.

What do you mean you froze, man?

I was like, What?

Have you guys?

Spoilers, by the way, for what Cecil's about to tell us.

So, about two hours later, on a different channel, this time it was our PBS affiliate, WTTW.

There was another signal intrusion.

So, this last one I actually saw live on the air.

It was a school night, but every Sunday night, my dad let me stay up to watch Doctor Who with him.

And Doctor Who ran from, I think it was like 10:30 to midnight.

Whoa, it was a big deal.

Yeah, it was a big deal for a middle school kid.

Yeah, it was huge.

So we're watching Doctor Who, and then the signal fades, and a guy in a max headroom mask starts talking in a really distorted voice.

It's hard to understand.

I'll get to what he says later because without subtitles, it's actually really tough to make out.

Anyway, this guy

has like a whole prop comic routine he goes through that ends with him getting his bare ass picked with a fly swatter.

And then I remember asking my dad, I was like, what the hell was that?

And he said, and this is a quote, quote, I don't think it was fucking Doctor Who, end quote.

The bare ass comes out at the same time.

You're both like, hey, you're doing a weird

eye contact, but you're doing a weird prank,

Cecil.

I know I kind of blew the first one, but trust me, when I get my butthole tonight on

PBS, people are fucking lovely.

It's going to be so funny.

Amazing.

So I'm actually going to quote from the wiki here, the actual description, because they actually do a really job.

It's pretty concise.

So, quote,

the mass figure spent the next minute or so making a quick series of brief and seemingly unrelated comments and cultural references interspersed with excited noises and exclamations.

He was first heard to make a comment about nerds, and then he called the WGN sportscaster Chuck Swirsky a freaking liberal, held up a can of Pepsi while referencing the catch the wave slogan from a recent ad campaign for Coca-Cola featuring the real Max Hedroom.

Bobbin and Weaving.

Held up a middle finger near the camera inside what appeared to be a hollowed-out dildo.

Okay, I'm trying to track.

The ideology is getting really muddled.

Like, I'm not sure.

He's not going to get any better.

After some random moaning, the masked figure sang the phrase,

your love is fading, hummed part of this theme song from the 1959 animated series Clutch Cargo and said, I still see the X, which is a reference to the last episode of that show.

He also feigned defecation, complaining of his piles.

Feigned?

Come into the bed asshole.

I know you're going to show your ass.

You might as well shit out of it, too, right?

Claiming that he made a giant masterpiece for all the greatest world newspaper nerds.

Now, WGN,

their call letters stand for world's greatest newspaper, so they suspect that's a reference to that.

And he put on a knitted glove on one hand while commenting that it was dirty and his brother had the other one.

What is that?

I don't know.

You need to watch it.

It's on Wikipedia.

It's crazy.

After a crude jump cut, the main figure appeared mostly off-screen to the left with his partially exposed buttocks visible from the side with a female figure wearing a French maid costume, which stirred something inside my young mind, by the way.

When they appear to be in a mask appearing from the right edge of the frame, unworn.

At some point, it was like, all right, the one-knitted glove thing is going badly.

We got to just cut to our awesome ending.

Unroll tape on the spanking.

Go to the spanking.

Cut the spanking, Cam.

So he's, while he's leaning over, the unworn Max headroom mask is briefly held in view.

And then the voice cried out, oh no, they're coming for me.

I'll make it stop.

And then the female in the French-made outfit started spanking Max with a fly swatter.

The image faded to static, and the viewers were returned to Doctor Who broadcast after that total interruption of about 90 seconds.

End quote.

Okay, Doctor Who needs to make an episode that intersects with this moment you do.

There you go.

I don't want this to sound mean, but sometimes when we do like live shows, we do meet and greets afterwards or during or something, and someone has very clearly planned a bit, but I'm a human being and not the scripted podcast character they expect.

This moment is what happens 100% of the time.

What's up, knuckle fucker?

I brought you some shit tits to suck on.

And I'm like, that's my wife.

And they're like,

you're doing a jump cut here in.

What are you doing?

I'm getting stuck.

I'm doing the fly swatter.

He's doing

a jump cut.

He's doing his asses out.

I like the French made outfit, though.

It looks good on you.

And we're back.

Did you say and we're back?

And then you spanked your own.

Okay.

So the first signal.

Now that was a good movie.

The first signal at WGN was counteracted by engineers on staff within a few seconds.

They changed the frequency of the signal and locked out the hacker.

The WTTW one, though, happened after

the engineers on duty left for the night at the Sears Tower.

So there was no one there to stop it.

And we all get to see this uninterrupted bit.

No one ever claimed responsibility for this hack, even after the statute of limitations had reached five years after it happened.

People suspect it was a disgruntled WGN employee or a former employee because of the references to WGN.

It's also possible that it could have been carried out by the local Chicago hacker community.

And if you had to summarize what you learned in one sentence, Cecil, what would it be?

You're going to hijack a television signal, maybe write a set list.

That's right.

I don't know.

Right?

There you go.

Script it, and it'll sound like improv.

And are you ready?

Broadcast it out, dude.

It's hanging out, spanking, whatever.

Tuning in.

Go for it.

All right.

First question is the obvious one.

Why did the hacker dude just stare at the camera like a fucking idiot the first time around?

A, he was a fucking idiot.

Came by a nice one.

I think it's ASOP.

It's probably.

B,

he couldn't see the on-air light because he was wearing a mask.

That's probably, yeah, sure.

C, it was the first instance of the are we on moment that starts every live stream.

100%.

That's what it was.

Or D, The alternative was whatever the fuck happened the second time around, and he knew that, right?

He knew it was either that that or silence.

Yeah, I, you know, I feel like all of them are great, but definitely A.

If you watch it, it's fucking A.

Come on.

It's definitely A.

All right, Cecil.

What's the name of our signal hacking heist movie?

A Ocean's 8-bit.

B, Computer Tower Heist.

C, the Italian Fog.

Okay, I'll get that.

I'll get that one.

Or D

Now you TV.

Jesus Christ, dude.

I mean, 8-bit makes no sense.

And also, like, nobody remembers that movie.

Nobody remembers that movie unless they were like the fucking magician consultant.

I'm going to go with B for how he spelled heist.

Thank you.

Swordfish with a P-H.

He spelled, listener, he spelled heist.

He sit.

Yeah.

Keith, I want you to know from the minute we started making swordfish jokes, my nose bled with the effort of me trying to come up with a swordfish one to add on to the swordfish with a pH.

Come on.

All right.

You good?

Your nose okay?

Bam.

He popped.

Okay.

Cecil, I got one more for you.

All right.

So, aside from the very mysterious guy getting spanked with a fly swatter during Doctor Who,

what's the best conspiracy program on PBS?

A

Degrassi Knoll.

That's so amazing.

You only need to

grassy knoll.

I spent a lot of time working with like a porn version of the PBS stuff, but it was all very upsetting what I came up with.

I bet I was switched to

a one-off.

Yeah, you definitely know.

Certain worlds should never mix, Heath.

Yeah, it's a grassy knoll.

There you go.

The magic school bussy is part of the release.

There it is.

They get jizzed on in an episode.

Come on now.

They do.

That's why Heath wins.

All right.

Let's hear from Eli next week.

All right.

Well, for Noah, Tom, Cecil, and Heath, I'm Eli Bosnick.

Thank you for hanging out with us today.

We'll be back next week.

And by then, I will be an expert on something else.

Between now and then, you can listen to our other podcasts.

Sometimes Tom shows up for those.

Jesus.

And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com slash citationpod or leave us a five-star review everywhere you can and if you'd like to get in touch with us check out past episodes connect with us on social media or check the show notes be sure to check out citationpod.com

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