Odd

Assalamu alaikum, I was awakened some time in the middle of the night last night by an Emergency Alert System (EAS) test on my XM radio, it was the long, beeping “attention signal” part that woke me up, and I heard something about a “coordinated monthly test” and “if this had been a national emergency” or something like that. See, Sirius/XM doesn’t broadcast local alerts for a given area, so if they were ever to come on for real, with an actual alert, it’d probably have national ramifications. And as I joked to my husband once, if they were to ever issue an alert like that, it probably wouldn’t portend any good, and that I’d probably just start praying or something.

Anyway, given how these sorts of things usually give me the creeps, I wasn’t actually scared out of my sleep, I was actually kinda having a strange dream at the time, and was preoccupied with trying to figure the dream out when the noise, which had actually been incorporated into my dream, woke me up. Anyway, and do you know that people actually make up fake EAS alerts and post them on YouTube!? Talk about having too much time on one’s hands. How does one get the sounds needed for this sorta thing, how does one put this sorta thing together, how long does it take, and who has that much time to do it? And who has the time to listen?

Well me obviously, because I’ve just spent the better part of the last hour listening to every kind of fake EAS alert you can imagine, from a nuclear war alert for New York to a tsunami warning for California. “It’s All Here”! As they say. And who got the idea for those awful tones before the warning! Those, well, not sure how to describe it, but the first sets of “beeps” that you here? Those are absolutely awful! Worse than the regular attention signal is or used to be.