I'm posting this story just as an interesting, goofy, fun thing I noticed while watching TV, not in any way as a complaint or criticism of KARE11 or NBC.
Over the course of about 20 minutes on 1/15/2014, TV station KARE11 in the Twin Cities in Minnesota (NBC affiliate) broadcast the following image three times. The first image appeared at about 5:57 PM as a teaser during NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. The second image appeared at about 6:00 PM as a beginning-of-newscast teaser, and the third image appeared at about 6:12 PM during the actual story.
All this is just fine and good. It's a procedure done hundreds of times a day by legions of TV stations. The story, in this case, was about why commuter trains were sitting idle despite the fact that construction on the new track was apparently complete.
But as I watched the KARE11 news broadcast, I noticed that the images were different. Aside from the KARE11 footers, it's somewhat difficult to see with a casual glance what might be different about these three images. But if we zoom into the location highlighted below in each image, the difference becomes apparent.
Zoomed images below. I remember seeing the "DO NOT HUMP" notice painted on the train's cover during the first teaser at 5:57 PM. I thought the phrase "DO NOT HUMP" was funny and could perhaps be interpreted as a little controversial :-). Was KARE11 subliminally trying to make a political statement that folks should practice sexual abstinence? Nah, I figured that it might just have something to do with trains, maybe train lingo warning not to stack the train cars or something...
Then, as I was watching the news at the top of the hour, the image appeared on the screen again. I noticed something was different, but couldn't quite put my finger on it. So I reversed my DVR and saw that sure enough the "DO NOT HUMP" sign had disappeared, along with a small "window" in the train cover! If you have some experience with editing digital images and you look closely at the following image, you can see that sometime between 5:57 PM and 6:00 PM, the image had been edited probably by copying a plain blue rectangle from another part of the train cover and pasting it over the sign...
Too funny! But by the time the complete story actually aired around 6:12 PM, the image inexplicably changed again! This time, the little window in the train cover re-appeared, the "DO NOT" portion of the sign re-appeared, and the word "HUMP" had been blurred out (sometimes called "air-brushing")...
Now, again, I'm not meaning to complain or criticize, just detailing a fun goof I saw!
And, I also wonder what the conversation taking place between KARE11 broadcast executives and the graphics team must have been like: "Did that teaser just contain a picture of a sign saying 'DO NOT HUMP'?" "Yep." "We better change that quick..." "Sure. No problem." Then later: "OK that was a nice quick edit, but maybe someone will notice the difference in the picture. Can you change it again so the window and the 'DO NOT' come back, then blur out just the word 'HUMP'?" "Sure. No problem."
By the way, this interested me enough to actually research what "DO NOT HUMP" means in the context of trains. Cecil Adams wrote an excellent explanatory article about this in 1986, which you can read here!
(I took these images off my TV screen with a digital camera so I apologize for the poor quality)
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