You’ve been there before, I’m sure. (How can you not, in a soci­ety fueled by caf­feine? Unless you make healthy lifestyle choices, of course.) You’re sleep­ing soundly in a warm bed some­where, and then BAM, Insom­nia is lean­ing over you and poking you in the eye. “Stop it,” you say. “You stupid jerk, stop it, I have work in the morn­ing, you’re a jerk and stop being a jerk.” What does Insom­nia say?

“No.” Keeps poking. You’ve just found a few hours’ free time!

It’s at times like these that you’re bound to run into odd phe­nom­ena, and I’m not talk­ing about ghosts in the mirror or bleed­ing portraits—I’m talk­ing about tele­vi­sion. There is some­thing in programmers’ minds that com­pels them to broad­cast weird, weird stuff during the wee hours, and prob­a­bly with weird reason. Good reason, I mean—good reason.

My weird­est encounter with late night pro­gram­ming hap­pened back in Illi­nois, when I stum­bled upon an episode of Image Union. It’s a pro­gram that fea­tures short films of vary­ing lucid­ity. Bingo by Chris Lan­dreth was play­ing, and var­i­ous people have since uploaded it online. Please try to imag­ine watch­ing this in the middle of the night:

More words after the cut