The past several days, I've seen a few "news" references to Texas ranchers running telephone signals over barbed wire.
So what else is new?
I first heard that tale back in the 1980s, from a co-worker who'd been stationed in Texas sometime in, I guess, the 1970s - post-Vietnam and before he ended up in Silicon Valley.
In his version, it was the actual phone company ("East Texas Ding-a-ling" as he called it) using fence wire for parts of its network. If memory serves, they were using actual Earth-type ground for the return.
Voice-grade (on a good day) analog telephony over whatever wire is handy: who knew that was a thing?
Update: I looked at one of the stories beneath the clickbaity headline, and apparently the "news" is that someone's discovered that Texas ranchers were using their fences for communication back when telephones were the latest hot tech, not that anyone's been doing that lately. (I expect they mostly use some combination of cellphones and walkie-talkies nowadays, but up until a couple of decades back field-expedient telephone wiring might have made sense.)
Afterthought to the update: In other breaking news now making the rounds, Vikings didn't wear helmets with horns on. Er... duh? Haven't we known for ages that horns/wings/whatever were an artistic embellishment from long after the Viking Age? But apparently someone's dug up helmets from some older, and unrelated, civilization that do have horns, and the news it that it wasn't the Vikings, which... wait... how do the Vikings get into the headlines, anyway?
Addendum to the afterthought to the update: While the Vikings did colonize North America, they most assuredly did not wear shaggy bison headdresses, even in caricatures, so please stop using the term "Viking" in reference to that QAnon loony.
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