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PLAYING THE NUMBERS
Got a shortwave radio? You’ve got yourself a ticket to an obscure, enticing enigma – the weird
world of numbers stations, which broadcast random-sounding streams of digits in a variety
of exotic accents. First noticed by amateur radio enthusiasts during the Cold War, they are
assumed to be a way for espionage agencies to communicate with their spooks. Operatives
presumably know to tune to a certain frequency at a certain time, and if anyone else is listening
in, it doesn’t matter: the numbers are meaningless without a decryption key. It’s old technology,
but still perfectly usable today: they require no sophisticated equipment to be heard, and
unlike online communications, there’s no trail left from sender to recipient. Numbers stations
have, inevitably, acquired an avid online following, with several websites trading recordings,
frequencies, schedules and theories. And now there’s a book: Lewis Bush’s Shadows of the State.
A photographic travelogue, it features satellite images of suspected numbers stations, alongside
spectrograms of the sounds they broadcast. The series took Bush two years to put together,
during which time he tracked down the sites of 30 suspected stations from North Korea to
Australia. The book, like the stations themselves, is compellingly eerie and weirdly beautiful.
bravebooks.berlin AM •FRIGHT THERAPY
There’s nothing like scaring someone
to cure their hiccups. It mightn’t
actually work, but it turns out
medicinal spooking has a storied (if
discredited) history. Fright therapy
reached literal heights in the 1920s
when doctors used stunt planes to
deal with various ailments. First
up, in 1921, was American man
Henry Renz, Jr., who had stopped
talking, possibly as a result of war
injuries. Suspecting the problem was
psychological, his doctor reckoned the
problem was nothing a short, sharp
shock from a nosedive or loop-the-
loop wouldn’t sort out. Renz’s first
words after his hair-raising ride were,
“I don’t know whether I can talk or
not,” proving he wasn’t quite out of
the woods on the health front. The
medical (and aviation) world went
into a spin when they heard about
this newfangled treatment, and
started sending patients skywards in
droves. Reports came in of deafness
and stuttering being cured. One doc
even – supposedly successfully – sent
his hard-of-hearing collie up. It
didn’t take long, however, for some
disappointing results to surface, and
after a couple of fatal crashes in the
late ’20s, the craze fizzled out. Besides
which, the pilots discovered carrying
mail – a new avenue of employment –
was a much cushier job. LK
THE GRID GAME
Remember Hank from the original
Tw i n Pe a k s? He was the villain who
slunk around the Double R Diner
sucking on his trademark domino,
creeping everyone out. Man, that
domino was menacing. Well, imagine
if David Lynch had included a
Hank-inspired character in the new
season of the show, but instead of
a classic domino, he sucked on one
of these classy Grid Game pieces.
Would that work? Not sure. Still,
these look great, and can be played
just like regular dominoes. Just try
to keep them out of your mouth.
thegridgame.co MO