It is my privilege to live in Irvine, CA with my sweetie and a prohibition against erecting a TV antenna within the city limits. TV arrives at each home in an ecologically sound (underground cable) and dialectically pure process (no Mexican stations until quiet fat payoffs materialized - then every sort of ethnic and religious skank found its wallet) for a mere $(whole bunch)/month. You could pay a little less and get only eight stations, or pay a lot more to see substandard female nudity and bleeding heart Liberalism graphically unscrambled before your eyes. The static generously decorating all stations is added free of charge, courtesy of Cox Cable Co. You could erect a satellite dish and view what you please as long as you did it in the barbarian hinterlands of Tustin. When the Irvine Company runs a monopoly, it stays a monopoly. If you want democracy, move to a ZIP code where junk mail says K-Mart, not Buffums.
The recent cable rate increase attendant to the continuing decay of picture quality frosted me. My officially mandated inability to view the Brazilian bombshell Xuxa on KMEX children's TV marching with a coterie of Nabokovian nymphs, knees thrust high beneath their miniskirts, long leather boots clinging to their calves... pushed me over the edge. I was as mad as hell and was not going to take it any more! I remembered those dizzy days of my youth when I stripped the ends of an extension cord and plugged a dormitory phone system into the wall socket. Given that phones operate at 28V DC and wall sockets dispense juice at 120V AC, my displeasure was overwhelmingly recognized by the university though I chose to remain anonymous.
I am more mature now, and fiber optic cable conducts modulated monochromatic near-infrared light, not amperes of electricity. I therefore sought out a similarly enraged acquaintance whose passion it was to dabble within the sub rosa world of digital electronic hacking. He unscrambled satellite feeds, eavesdropped on Pentagon conversations, and jammed police communications whenever they found a new donut shop. He said it would be easy.
We started with one of those New Age biofeedback units. It fed through an operational amplifier cascade, a carrier wave oscillator and super-heterodyne modulation mixer, and a ten kilowatt traveling wave tube amplifier spliced into the power lines preceding my meter. (Paying for ten kilowatts each hour was outside our budget.) My hacker rigged a few dozen repeater units with massive infrared laser diodes spliced into cable access boxes throughout Irvine. It took a few weeks, but we persevered. Many local companies manufacturing the most esoteric Pentagon MIL-Spec electronics came up short on inventory and wrote it off budget as Desert Storm losses. We were ready.
As we affixed silver chloride cerebral leads to my scalp with electrode paste the fellow remarked that though he had carefully constructed his parts list and the assembled equipment therefrom, he had dozens of 220K resistors left over. We flipped toggle switches and rocker switches and dials as a sensuous electronic hum inflated within the room. The sun set upon the Irvine masses returning home from work to sit down before their TV sets. My spirit was about to ride ten kilowatts of power straight into their desiccated, family-valued, Christ-besotted Republican minds.
With my finger poised upon the first stage pre-amp toggle I roused the full force of my ponderous intelligence to vividly fantasize buggering Flipper. I popped the switch just microseconds before my co-conspirator screamed,
"I forgot the limiting resistors on the op amp feedback loops!"
As near as we can reconstruct it, the pre-amp launched into an exponential spiral before it melted, said puddle of copper and silicon occurring after it shoved its best into the main amps. The main amplifier bank exploded just after its awesome output pulse detonated the traveling wave tube, whose nominal ten kilowatt rating was probably exceeded a thousand-fold in the fractional second before the power lines blew off their insulators at the house junction. The dozens of repeater units Roman-candled as their laser diodes were driven into quantum mechanical places unvisited since the Big Bang. Fiber optic bundles gorged with photonic glut as a hundred miles of underground cable blasted molten silicate into the air like detcord gone insane. Detcord propagates at Mach 25. We were riding lightspeed as Flipper writhed and bucked and screamed.
I could spin tales robust with boasts of derring-do and other obvious fabrications. I could intimate that thousands of Irvine residents snuggled upon their couches before their wide-screen LCD and plasma TVs that night tore out their own eyes in agony and descended into irreversible screaming insanity. I think that the Irvine World News that Thursday best summarized the whole affair: