Today is Morse Code Day, so called because it is the birthday of Samuel Morse, the code's inventor.
Today is also the day in which I have come far closer than ever I have before, in achieving my lifelong ambition to learn Morse Code... Apparently, all that is necessary for me to learn something I've neglected for years, is to literally have nothing better to do with my time: in this case, it means having to work today
Now, I did not want to work today. It has been a long and trying week for me, and had it not been for the fact that we were working with a skeleton crew, I might very well have just taken the day off, and given other people and their problems a very wide berth. As it is, I took my dismal self in, feeling mournful, and bleary around the edges, having rather given up on the day before it started.... And thanks be to God and all His little helpers, it was a slow day. Very slow. Time-slowing-until-it-is-meaningless slow. So I, in an effort to avoid a pathetic death from the mind-numbing boredom, snagged one of the business-sized Morse Code cheat-sheets I had made for the general consumption of the public, and began scribbling away... I am now surprisingly close to having the alphabet memorised. Not quite there yet. I have to look up Q, and X and Z. And it is a good idea to double check J and V. However, most of the rest of it is finally lodged in my brain, and I filled uncountable little scraps of paper with things like this:
.. .-.. .. ..-. - -- .. -. - . -.-- . ... ..- .--. - --- - .... . -- --- .-- -. - .- -. ...
..-. .-. --- -- .-- .... . -. -.-. . -.-. --- -- . - ... -- -.-- .... --- .--. .
( I lift mine eyes to the mountains, from whence cometh my hope)
--- .-.. -.. --- .-.. .. .--. .- -. - .- -- .. / .... ..- --. . --- .-.. -.. .- -. -.. - .- .-.. .-..
(Old oliphant am I / huge, old and tall)
-- .- .. .-. . .. .... -... --- .-. . -..
(Maire is bored)
You will observe the degradation of my mind as the long day progressed.
However, the result is that I am close to being able to write in Morse Code from memory. I am not sure if I can read it yet or not-- I am, after all, only re-reading what I have written myself at this point, and not sure if I could do it cold for anyone else. Furthermore, having learned what I learned on the fly at the front desk, between placating the irate woman who was furious that she could not turn the 400+ page PDF of the complete Mueller Report into a word document that she could email to herself, so as to be able to read at her leisure on her internet-less home computer, and chasing the 50 year old guy downloading the latest World of Warcraft game pack, out of the Children's section, I clearly have no had the opportunity to harken to dits and dahs whilst I am writing them, and therefore can neither send nor receive code yet. However, with the exception of hardly used letters, I have done considerably better with it today, than any other time in these last 40 years.
Probably the first time I ever heard Morse Code was in Disney's rather scary short, Little Toot, where it makes several appearances, the most notable being when Little Toot sends the SOS both visually, through his smoke stack, and audibly, with his horn. (Just a side note: kids these days are soft-- all they get to watch are positive, educational cartoons, full of affirmations. None of them suffer from the sympathetic trauma of watching claw-armed buoys menace Little Toot!) For those as do not want to watch the full thing, skipping to 5:20 will allow you to see and here the SOS as Little Toot steams to the rescue:
Speaking of SOS, once you've heard it... well, golly, you've got it down by heart. Everyone knows what an SOS sounds like, and it shows up a lot. For example, just listen to what the music is doing in this scene from the first episode of I Dream of Genie. Or in the introduction to this song.
Apparently, embedding Morse Code into songs is A Thing.
And you can even learn how to write it into music yourself. Just check out this dandy website.
And you can even learn how to write it into music yourself. Just check out this dandy website.
Perhaps the most remarkable use of the hidden code is in this story, of how the Colombian government communicated with POWs through a pop song.
However, my current favourite use of Morse Code in music-- and the thing that is the current impetus for my renewed interest in the subject-- is how it is woven into this gorgeous theme song, the theme from Inspector Morse as well as a new prequel, Endeavour.... It spells out the name Morse:
