Numb3rs Season 3 Episode 22

Episode Title:

The episodes title is a reference to to the 1981 song by Queen & David Bowie of the same name.

Flip Cards: The example Charlie gives of changing the message in a stadium flip-card display without the card-flippers' knowledge actually happened at the 1961 Rose Bowl, when the Minnesota Golden Gophers played the Washington Huskies.

The Rose Bowl stadium frequently hosted Caltech home football games, but a group of 14 Caltech students were miffed at the idea that their school's perennially weak team would never play in the bowl game itself. They heard that the Washington cheerleading squad planned a massive halftime flip-card show and decided to sabotage it.

They stole the sheets with the plans, altered some of the fifteen displays, then replaced them. On the day of the game, 2 January, the card display went off as planned until the twelfth sign, which was supposed to be the image of a husky. The animal displayed looked more like a beaver. Image 13 was supposed to be the word HUSKIES. Instead it came out backwards: SEIKSUH. The cheerleaders thought this was just a glitch, and signalled for the 14th image. The cards flipped, and there, in front of the entire stadium and broadcast by NBC onto millions of television sets around the country, the Washington fans spelled out...CALTECH. The 15th image never appeared.