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Minor Strangeness (IHTM)

Some minor strangenesses...if that is a word!

First things first, I absolutely love this thread! What a great idea :)

Here is my first story. When me and my now husband first moved in to our first house in Huddersfield, we were beyond broke. His work offered us an old black and white security television that they no longer had any use for. It was a bog standard black and white tv and continued to be so until about a year or so after we moved in when it suddenly became colour. It shouldn't have been possible for it to show colour pictures, but it did. Like many people after episodes of strangeness, we shrugged it off and appreciated the colour! I wish i knew why that had happened!

I once spoke to a ghost in York train station. He chastised me about my smoking and then abruptly said that I was on the wrong platform and my train was about to leave. He pointed to the far side of the station, I looked briefly to where he had pointed and then turned to thank him -he had disappeared! He was very old and had a massive suitcase with him, so couldn't have moved far in a second or two. He was right though, I just managed to catch the right train!

Thanks for reading :)
 
ginoide said:
i LOVED the tv story. thank you!
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Me too. :) I want to ask sensible questions like - are you sure it was b/w in the first place? But I get the feeling that's missing some fundamental point about how things like this work ;)
 
It was definitely a Black and White TV! It was just used for watching the security tapes and was very old, probably even made before colour TVs were available, lol. It was baffling!

Those photographs are interesting! I think the hand against the curtain looks as though it has been stitched, like a dolls hand and the ectoplasm emerging from the mouth looks like muslin to me, but the ones of the music box playing are very intriguing...I just wish it was a video, so I could have seen it happen! :)
 
Violets said:
It was definitely a Black and White TV! It was just used for watching the security tapes and was very old, probably even made before colour TVs were available, lol. It was baffling!
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That is fascinating! I have no idea how that would happen.

Back in the early 80s, as a student, I stayed in a flat that had a really old colour TV.
It started off OK, but after a few months, 2 of the colour guns died, leaving only a predominantly monochromatic picture with a yellow tint (giving us a very 'jaundiced' view of the world). I understand how that could happen, but not the other way round.
 
There were devices on the market that were claimed to be able to turn b & w into colour television. Like x-ray spex, the truth was disappointing: just a cellophane screen attachment that was divided into three horizontal tone-zones. I never saw one but I gather the top was blue for sky, the middle amber for flesh-tones and the bottom green for grass. If the scene was not a landscape with a couple making outdoors whoopie, you were stuffed.

I am bound to ask the original poster how good the colour was. Did it resemble at least the ordinary colour tv pictures of the time? Maybe some angular prismatic effects were perceived as colour. On a small screen, even a smidgen of colour might suggest something more to the eye. :)
 
Ha, no mushrooms involved...honest! 8)

The pictures were just how you would expect a normal colour tv look. If anything there was a slightly green tinge on one channel...made snooker even less interesting, but that is about it!
 
Might it be a float from Jersey's Battle of the Flowers, a long time after the event????
(I had that on a puzzle once :D )
 
There was an experiment on the BBC, about 1968, where they broadcast a colour picture (not a very good one) that could be seen on BW TV's. On Tomorrow's World, I think. Done with diffraction patterns or something.
 
Cochise said:
There was an experiment on the BBC, about 1968, where they broadcast a colour picture (not a very good one) that could be seen on BW TV's. On Tomorrow's World, I think. Done with diffraction patterns or something.
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Yup, I remember that one, it didn't actually show colour but it gave the impression of colour albeit very faint and tenuous.
 
My Grandad used to adamantly maintain that their black and white television used to randomly show colour. This would have been in the mid 1970's. I never saw it do it, and my dad used to explain why it could never happen. Don't rememeber what Nan had to say about it though.
Might have been a wind-up for us kids.
 
jeff544 said:
My Grandad used to adamantly maintain that their black and white television used to randomly show colour. This would have been in the mid 1970's. I never saw it do it, and my dad used to explain why it could never happen. Don't rememeber what Nan had to say about it though.
Might have been a wind-up for us kids.
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I don't think I can explain Violets' post, but I might be able to provide an explanation for Jeff's: on colour TV sets with analogue tuners (that is, receiving analogue signals, even if the act of tuning is done digitally), you could get a black-and-white picture by off-setting the tuning from the correct frequency by a very small amount. I used to use it as a trick to display weak signals from outside our normal TV region. If they were tuned in to the actual frequency, the colour image was unwatchable (warped, scrolling images etc.) but de-tune slightly and you'd get a watchable black-and-white image. I believe this is to do with how the colour information is encoded in the signal.
It's just possible that your grandad's TV wasn't tuned in properly on all channels, or if it was, that there was a fault in the circuit(s) that decoded (a) the colour information and/or (b) the tuner itself.
Perhaps the occasional bursts of colour where when whatever was wrong with the circuit (such as a dry solder joint) momentarily fixed themselves, or small, occasional variations in signal frequency arriving at the TV knocked the tuned frequency perfectly back in line with the actual received frequency?
Long shot but I think it's possible!
 
He did yes. My impliciation was that perhaps the set was actually a colour set which was faulty or incorrectly tuned. I didn't spell out the implication in my post though, for which I apologise.
 
Coming back home the other night my wife was driving, I noticed by the side of the road a person sitting on a bench under a street light wearing a hoody. The thing was he appeared to have some form of white cloth mask on.

As I craned around to get a better look as we had turned the corner the figure quickly got up, (as if he had realised he had been noticed), and walked off.


I know there are those hoodies out there that combine into a mask/face cover but this did'nt seem to fit right with what I saw.
 
There are hoodies that zip all the way up to the top of the hood. A lot of the time they have designs like a skull across that section, or a superhero mask.
Maybe he/she was wearing one of those.
 
In the last few weeks, in five separate incidents, I've found a total of 85 quid on pub floors: two twenty pound notes in pubs at home, a fiver in the Baillie in Edinburgh and a total of 40 quid (a twenty pound note in one incident, two tenners at another time) at a place just round the corner from there.

The thing is, I don't profit from it, which is a bit frustrating - I have a bit of a thing about found money bringing bad luck, so I always hand anything I find over to the staff to put in the tip jar.

I mean, I know it's not that unusual to find dropped money - but five times in three or four weeks...?

I'm thinking of giving up my day job.

Edit: Incidentally, does anyone else have a superstition about found money? I have no idea where I got that one from, although I have a vague idea that one of my grandfathers (ironically, the dodgy one) might have passed it down to me. Or have I just invented it and made myself needlessly altruistic?
 
Hmmmm.....In the last few weeks, in five separate incidents, I've lost a total of 85 quid: two twenty pound notes, a fiver and a total of 40 quid (a twenty pound note in one incident, two tenners at another time)......
 
LaurenChurchill said:
There are hoodies that zip all the way up to the top of the hood. A lot of the time they have designs like a skull across that section, or a superhero mask.
Maybe he/she was wearing one of those.
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Yeah as I said I considered this, it looked like a pillow case really. It was his response on being spotted that made it eerie. I'll never know who or what it was.
 
This eveing I was trying to post something, but my screen image was jiggling up and down. And then a paragraph I'd just typed disappeared!

I decided to reboot, and now everything seems OK, except that I get the impression that stuff is now appearing in a smaller font.

Anyone else had board trouble tonight?
 
rynner2 said:
This eveing I was trying to post something, but my screen image was jiggling up and down. And then a paragraph I'd just typed disappeared!
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Hmm, were you typing with both hands at the time? :D
 
rynner2 said:
This eveing I was trying to post something, but my screen image was jiggling up and down. And then a paragraph I'd just typed disappeared!

I decided to reboot, and now everything seems OK, except that I get the impression that stuff is now appearing in a smaller font.

Anyone else had board trouble tonight?
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Laptop?
Running from battery?
It's probably switched to a lower powered graphic processor. If you're running Vista or Win 7, this switching process can turn off Aero (and it might change the font settings too).

Or am I guessing wrong?
 
The Smilies seem smaller too...

this one now seems to have a moustache - :D
 
Mythopoeika said:
Laptop?
Running from battery?
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Nope.

It's probably switched to a lower powered graphic processor. If you're running Vista or Win 7, this switching process can turn off Aero (and it might change the font settings too).

Or am I guessing wrong?
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Idunno!
 
Have you changed the browsers 'View' zoom size? Firefox, Chrome and Safari all let you enlarge/reduce the whole page (I deny IE exists so don't know for sure it has the same feature). Am sat in front of Mac rather than PC at mo', but i think the keyboard shortcut is ctrl - to 'zoom out', ctrl + to 'zoom in'.

Other option - I think all browsers let you set the size and font used as 'standard' or 'fixed width'. For instance in Safari you go to preferences>appearance...

Or maybe your computers haunted....
 
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