Okay, so this is wild and we’re going to need a little bit of time to unpack this but earlier this week Blink-182 frontman Mark Hoppus (the one who is still in the band and does not believe in aliens) answered a tweet from some guy called Mike Hoye asking: ‘What is the least plausible story about yourself that’s true?‘
And his answer is so supremely cooked and strange and WHAT THE? that it must be spread across the fertile soils of the internet: Hoppus wrote that he shared his ideas about how to capture Iraqi war criminal Saddam Hussein with a navy admiral who was on his way to meet with the Joint Chiefs of Staff while on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf in 2003. Yep, okay.
https://twitter.com/markhoppus/status/1011755149541298176
I don’t even know where to begin with that one. Let’s first go back to 2003, the year that Blink-182 released their self-titled fifth album featuring ‘I Miss You‘ and a guest spot from goth lord Robert Smith, and that an American-led Coalition – including Australia – invaded Iraq, sending then-president Hussein into hiding until he was captured in December that year.
If you too MUST know what Hoppus’ ingenious plan was, he’s fully elucidated it on Twitter, and it’s a LOT.
My idea was to have truck with big speakers drive around BLASTING time code just out of the frequency range of human hearing, but within the dynamic range of the video camera’s microphone. When Saddam released a [videotaped message to his followers], he would have inadvertently recorded the time code. Using the time code, you could go back and pinpoint a general radius from where the truck was…
https://twitter.com/markhoppus/status/1011759465710751744
Reads like someone still thinks his plan could’ve worked.
Ultimately though, Operation Red Dawn found Hussein the old-fashioned way: by interrogating former members of his Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party. He was then tried by the Iraqi government for crimes against humanity in 2005, and sentenced to death by hanging in 2006.
2003, huh? What a year.
