by Casey Lynn

Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Apparently a countdown to the European music awards has begun, and whereas I’m sure the show will be swell (hosted by Katy Perry of “I Kissed a Girl” fame and featuring a performance by Kanye West), that news isn’t exactly geeky enough for us here at [GAS]. However, this is:

As spotted by the folks at a Rick Astley fansite, the source for the MTV splash page contains a hidden message in binary:

01010111011001010010011101110010

01100101001000000110111001101111

00100000011100110111010001110010

01100001011011100110011101100101

01110010011100110010000001110100

01101111001000000110110001101111

01110110011001010000110100001010

01011001011011110111010100100000

01101011011011100110111101110111

00100000011101000110100001100101

00100000011100100111010101101100

01100101011100110010110000100000

01100001011011100110010000100000

01110011011011110010000001100100

011011110010000001001001

The translation? “We’re no strangers to love / You know the rules, and so do I.”

The fansite says that they found the hidden lyrics “upon closer examination of the source” of the page, which (though I’m sure it didn’t happen this way) brings to mind some hardcore Rick Astley fan whose job it is to surf the Internet all day, searching every nook and cranny for mentions of the singer–which apparently includes checking out every webpage’s source code. For that kind of attention to detail, I salute you.

Of course, the geekiest part about the whole thing is that a lot of the comments to the fansite’s blog entry are in binary. I’m not fluent myself, so I had to use a translator to follow the conversation.