Step One: One Should Not Panic

Even when ‘staring into the abyss’, as they put it, the English man can still find time to make schoolboy jokes in Latin. I can practically smell the sweat from the yellowing nylon shirt through my screen. I daresay much care was taken to lay in adequate supplies of Marmite and Ovaltine. I can imagine them in their bunkers discussing imaginary weather and long-ago test scores (as in cricket: a subset of Sport).

Now I shudder. And now I take myself to bed. Nighty-night. Cheeriebye.

Benedick: J Wilkinson, hair fell off before wicket, 0.

The bunker in the civil defense video today
http://www.flickr.com/photos/megulon5/sets/72057594128279199/show/with/142257964/

Stop, drop, and roll, need one have more of a plan? Does no one remember Atomic Cafe?

Stop, drop, and cover, sorry.

Still waiting for the skinny on salvia, anyone?

@Promnight: I remember stop, drop and cover but only because our school had the same plan for hurricanes and tornadoes. One cower fits all.

Heaven help me, I actually laughed at Karlifornia’s comment on this post.

@Jamie Sommers: We had a “civil defense” course in ninth grade, and while it covered nuking the shit out of us, I don’t recall duck & cover — I think it was already a joke by then, at least in the enlightened precincts of western Oregon.

Still good for nightmares, though.

In my literary studies, I read much of the supposed deep change in worldview, post atom-bomb, ever since we have all been always living with the possibility of imminent worldwide conflagration.

I do think its all bullshit, it has always been the normal state of human life, the tribe next door was always a threat to overwhelm your trible, annihilate your world as you know it.

As with any perceived threat, the zeitgeist response is first panic, then complacency, then renewed fear, then complacency, this is the pattern of the “nuclear threat” through my life, more than half of the human experience of constant threat of conflagration.

We like to, always, people like to, believe that their time and their situation, is unique in world history, its sorta kinda like temporocentrism. Yes, the scope and scale of the devastation, from a distant perspective, from nuclear conflagration is greater, but the personal effect on those who die, each individually, is the same as the effect on those who died at the hands of medeival viking raiders, or the native americans who died from the epidemics of european diseases.

All people, in all time, have lived with the constant threat of seeing their world, albeit a smaller world, uttterly destroyed.

Remember that BBC movie about a nuclear attack that wasn’t shown for many years?

http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/W/htmlW/wargamethe/wargamethe.htm

redmanlaw: Well there was “The Day After” (for U.S. American audiences), and the more raw “Threads” for our British viewers. (Threads is complete with a philandering young man wanting to, ahem, have another go, just before The Bomb blowed Sheffield up real good. It’s Youtubed in its entirety, in 13 bite-sized pieces, here.)

Kim Jong-il’s a film buff, right? Slip him a slice of that before he tries to throw a missile at Honolulu.

@redmanlaw: Somewhere in the archives I have a Xerox poster I made called The Day After: 3-D.

The hype around that show was fantastic: “Too real for TV?” Turned out be a story about conventional cardboard characters suffering a Hollywood disaster. Soon after that, “Nuclear war? But what about my career?” started showing up.

@chicago bureau: Kiss me, you fool.

nojo: My last moments kissing a guy? Well, when in Rome, do as

[shock wave hits]

ADD: Please remember that it’s a motherfucker — don’t you know? If they push that button, your ass gotta go.

Props to Glenn Ford for pronouncing Orygun correctly.

Oh, and Signal, if PDX evacuates, can you loot Powell’s for me? kthxbai.

I liked the part about getting Sleater-Kinney back together again.
I loved Sleater-Kinney.
I’d allow Portland to get nuked in order to have Sleater-Kinney back again, well, only if Cyn, my niece and a couple thousand other people can clear out first.
Including Sleater-Kinney.