Our speaker will be long-standing US member Lainie Petersen, who will deliver a webcast address on The Max Headroom Incident—in which the television signals of two stations in Chicago, Illinois, were hijacked on November 22, 1987, briefly sending a pirate broadcast of an unidentified person wearing a Max Headroom mask and costume to thousands of home viewers. (For the benefit of younger viewers, Max Headroom had his own satirical TV show in the Eighties, billing him as the the world's first computer-generated TV personality, although in fact he was played by actor Matt Frewer, wearing prosthetics and a plastic suit to give the illusion of low-quality video rendering.)

The talk is a revision of an essay originally entitled ‘Max & the Flyswatter’ and presented on February 27th, 2023, at the Chicago Literary Club.

Although the meeting will be taking place at the Bishop's Finger as usual, Lainie will actually be live-streaming her talk from Arkansas. Those who can't make the meeting will be able to watch via YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/live/KhjunKyixc8. (We are also hoping to set up a simultaneous Facebook stream: watch this space for details.)

Those at the meeting will be able to watch the live-stream on our big projector screen. (This is something we did once before, with great success, when Tony Reid delivered a talk from his home and we watched it live at the Wheatsheaf.)