Today's useless information - abstracted from Wikipedia

[Karl W4KRL]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/99/Kilroy_Was_Here_-_Washing
ton_DC_WWII_Memorial.jpg

Kilroy was here is an American popular culture expression that became
popular during World War II; it is typically seen in graffiti. Its origins
are debated, but the phrase and the distinctive accompanying doodle - a
bald-headed man (sometimes depicted as having a few hairs) with a prominent
nose peeking over a wall with the fingers of each hand clutching the wall -
became associated with GIs in the 1940s.

In Britain, the graffiti is known as "Mr Chad" or just "Chad".

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Killroy.png

A theory suggested by a spokesman for the
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Air_Force_Museum_London> Royal Air Force
Museum London in 1977 was that Chad was probably an adaptation of the Greek
letter Omega, used as the symbol for electrical resistance; his creator was
probably an electrician in a ground crew. Life suggested that Chad
originated with  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REME> REME, and noted that a
symbol for alternating current, a sine wave through a straight line,
resembles Chad, that the plus and minus signs in his eyes represent
polarity, and that his fingers are symbols of electrical resistors. The
character is usually drawn in Australia with pluses and minuses as eyes and
the nose and eyes resemble a distorted sine wave. Similarly, The Guardian
noted in 2000 that several readers had told them that "Mr. Chad" was based
on a diagram representing an electrical circuit. One correspondent said that
in 1941 at  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Yatesbury> RAF Yatesbury a man
named Dickie Lyle drew a version of the diagram as a face when the
instructor had left the room, and wrote "Wot, no leave?" beneath it. This
idea was repeated in a submission to the BBC in 2005 that included a story
of a 1941 radar lecturer in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire drawing the circuit
diagram, and the words "WOT! No electrons?" being added. The RAF Cranwell
Apprentices Association says that the image came from a diagram of how to
approximate a square wave using sine waves, also at RAF Yatesbury and with
an instructor named Chadwick, and was initially called Domie or Doomie, the
latter name also being noted by Life as used by the RAF. As alternatives to
Chatterton or Mr Chadwick as the origin of the name Chad, REME claimed that
the name came from their training school, nicknamed "Chad's Temple", the RAF
claimed it arose from Chadwick House at a Lancashire radio school, and the
Desert Rats claimed it came from an officer in El Alamein.

 

In his first novel,  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V.> V.,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Pynchon> Thomas Pynchon quips that the
popular graffiti character  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here>
Kilroy "had sprung into life, in truth, as part of a band-pass filter".
Wikipedia notes that this circuit is actually a band stop filter. I think it
is more correctly a notch filter.

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