THAT’S OUTRAGEOUS!
DID YOU HEAR THAT?
BY Nathaniel BasenCREEPY CHORUS For about a
year, residents of the British town of
Ipswich suffered from what seemed
to be a collective nightmare. They
were awoken at night by the sound
of a child singing ‘It’s Raining,
It’s Pouring’. Last September, the
cause of the vocals was revealed to
be freakier than the disembodied
lullaby itself: spiders had been
triggering a motion sensor on a
property, activating an audio clip set
up as a theft deterrent. The song is
no longer in use, allowing the town’s
old men to snore in peace again.RINGING REMINDER In 2004,
Jerry Lynn of Pennsylvania wanted
to run TV cable through his walls but
wasn’t sure where to drill the hole.
He tied an alarm clock to a makeshift
harness, set it to go off in ten minutes
and lowered it behinda wall
from a second-floor vent,
so the sound would
guide him to the ideal
location. His plan,
however, went off
track when the clock
fell inside the wall- where it stayed,
ringing every day around 7pm for
13 years. After his story was reported,
an air-conditioning specialist
removed the device for free,
making dinnertime significantly
less alarming.A WHALE OF A TALE Paul Gilman,
a self-proclaimed sound-wave
expert and whale whisperer,
promised US investors that a
technolog y he called ‘sonication’
could revolutionise the oil and gas
industry. For three years, Gilman,
who produced a documentary
in which he used the ‘universal
language’ of music to speak to
whales, claimed to use ‘sound-
wave’ technolog y to lower the
viscosity of oil, and hasten t he
water-purification process. Now
he’s being sued on the basis that his
claims were nothing but
white noise. Gilman is
accused of using the
US$3.3 million he
received on, among
other things, hotels
and designer clothes- leaving investors
ILLUSTRATION: PIERRE LORANGER lost at sea.
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