North of the Border

 

At 6:00 AM on Friday morning, I received a text message from a friend who works at the Jodrell Bank Observatory. Two words: "Call Me."  If I had known what it was about I wouldn't have waited until after nine before rolling out of bed.  I would not have made coffee or calmly poured breakfast cerial into my bowl. I would not have done my Canadian Airforce workout routine or spent fifteen minutes washing myself in the shower. No. Had I known what it was about I would have jumped into my car in my pyjamas and gone down straight down there.
 

At 7:00 PM the previous evening, Jodrell Bank recieved detailed instructions on how to tune into a signal from a North Korean military satellite. A hand-scribbled set of co-ordinates, frequencies and authentification codes was sent down a telephone line to a fax machine from unknown office in Pyongyang.
"At 7.30 PM we thought it was a hoax," said Post Graduate student Khudhair Al-Muntafki "I mean no one has had anything like this since the late 1950's, We simply had no idea what had been sent to us. Was this an attempt to defect? Were we being given the location of a Nuclear Silo? One of the senior scientist postulated that we may be being shown the sight of some kind of horrific atrocity. There was a lot of talk about whether or not we should contact the military. Ten and a half hours later, when the image finally resolved, I knew exactly what were looking at, that's when I called you."

It is lucky that Khudar is a amateur Spot-Parker. It's lucky that he knows people like me that are able to take this image and disseminate it into the wider world. It's so lucky in fact that there has been some discussion as to whether or not the North Koreans were aware of both his presence at Jodrell Bank and his connections to the Spot-Parking world.

Very little is known about North Korea and it is hard to know what if any Western media is able to pass through the iron curtain. It could be that Gapping is even more popular and culturally significant there, than it is here in the West.

It has been suggested that the very act of taking part in a non-government sanctioned sport could be seen as a form of rebellion, especially something as individual and expressive as competitive parking. Parking can never be a team sport, it can only be done alone and as such, it breeds the kind of flamboyant superstars that are so abhorrent to the Junkte brand of self sufficient communism created by Kim Il-Sung.

It is also true that Spot-Parking is a sport that is completely invisible to the untrained eye and is therefore very difficult for even the most tyrannical of governments to clamp down on.

Khudarhas told me that while most of the scientists believe the whole exercise to be a wild goose chase, designed perhaps to see how easily a team of scientists can be distracted from their work, he will keep the set of instructions, close to hand.
"We've got this image." he said "The next one that comes could be extremely important, he might even get that forth wheel on the curb."

That would be something.

This grainy photograph is all there is to represent North Korea's oppressed Spot-Parking Scene