I happened to come across carpetsforairports.com on AOL’s home page today. It’s a site that is devoted to, of all things, airport carpets. Naturally, I was enthralled. I immediately checked to see if they had the generally unattractive carpet from BHM, my hometown airport. (It’s a pretty ugly carpet, if you’ve never seen it. Ash always comments on how bad the whole airport looks, to give you some idea.)

Luckily, they have it. They have BHM’s TV-static-inspired carpet. I’m not kidding. They have a short biography of the designer (Steven Freeling) and his wacky ways, as well as his untimely, yet Darwin Awards-worthy, demise:

Steven Freeling was one of the brightest and best carpet designers of the early 1980s. His designs broke new ground in their use of 18-foot repeats and Italian-style faux finishing. His innate artistic genius allowed carpet manufacturers to overlook his somewhat eccentric character. Never quite happy with his creations, Freeling labeled even such acknowledged masterworks of his as BGR, “tired”. In an attempt to push the boundaries of carpet design to the maximum he ended up gazing at the static on television screens for hours on end, jotting down the designs he thought he saw amidst the white noise. Soon he began to believe that the television was speaking to him, whispering of patterns undreamed of by man. On July 3rd, 1989, after an uninterrupted 76-hour session in front of the static, something snapped inside Steven Freeling’s brain. He was found naked on his living room floor, his head thrust through the television screen. He had been electrocuted, but not before he had managed to program his dye-injection machines with the pattern for BHM. It remains the strangest of carpets, its pattern a seemingly ever-changing swirl of indistinct shapes perpetually slipping out of focus. Rumours that BHM was installed on top of an old Indian burial ground have been repeatedly denied.

In case you’ve never actually seen the carpet at BHM, here is the picture from the website.

If you didn’t read the bio above, the designer thought he was seeing images (and eventually messages) in television static. He was so enthused he eventually (apparently) tried to enter the TV. Quite literally. Much to the chagrin of carpet enthusiasts everywhere.