Duck and Cover

Today I'm sick which is a bummer because it's my first day back to college and I was supposed to go in all gun ho for the sake of moral and whatever because exams are like a month away and I know about as much science as the special olympics. Even though I was taking a full on day off I had a big dumb essay to do on philosophy. I'm doing a class in philosophy because in UCD you can do a class in whatever you want each semester and I did a really neat easy philosophy class in first year was all about like some main topics in philosophy. What was easy about it was that you had to talk about things from your own point of view so it was hard to go wrong as long as you wrote with some clarity. The one I'm doing now sucks though, because you have to learn what loads of famous hard lads think of the hot topics so you can definitely go wrong. I did the essay anyway but it took forever. I'm glad I do science because when you're learning the facts and stuff there's very little room for misinterpretation. It's black and white, but complicated enough to be interesting. I picked chemistry for my third year though which will be hard but I guess it could be fun.

If I could go back in time I'd like to go visit America in like the late forties and early fifties when the cold war started. I was looking at loads of propaganda videos yesterday that were way cooler than anything around today. Particularly this one:

Fuck yeah 'merica fuck the reds

I don't know much about the history or anything, but the cold war happened after world war 2, where America and Russia were allied against the Nazis and the Japanese if Call of Duty 5 is anything to go by. The war ended with America winning so I guess the country was pretty happy with itself. I think they might have made lots of money as well and there was a huge depression in the 30s so things were going class, but then Russia started playing around with Nuclear weapons. America might have taken this as a threat but I'm not actually sure there was any solid threats made.
The bits I like best about all this is America trying to deal with the idea of Nuclear war. It's like a cool juxtaposition between the fine dandy swell life American people had and the idea of something totally grim like a nuclear attack. While not much was known about nuclear weapons this video was made and it's one of my favourites:

Duck and Cover!

Nuclear Fallout wasn't discovered untill around 1953 I think so this was actually a pretty useless idea in this regard. If you weren't instantly burnt to a crisp, an explosion would leave loads of really dangerous particles in the atomosphere that would just kill you slowly. Not to worry though, the lads have a suggestion. Build a teeny tiny room in your house or come to one of ours and live there untill all the bad is gone away. They speculated it would take a few weeks or months for the area to go clean but I'd say it would have taken way longer. This is a small cartoon with an egghead scientist saving your life with diagrams

"He's finally getting the message, are you?"

On the 5th of December, 1951, New york had the biggest air raid drill like ever. Everyone except for resteraunt patrons had to like drop what they were doing and go to designated shelters. If you're really interested, there was like a guide on how to survive living in a public fallout shelter which is actually kind of scary

Part 1

Anyone who's played Fallout 3 will see the inspiration taken from this kind of thing.



I also had a look at some other videos from around this time, about things like how to date girls, and like ads for camel cigarettes where doctors are full on backing camels saying they're right on and it made me think. The standard of living back then seemed pretty peachy, and it doesn't seem obvious that there was much like paranoia about things like there is today, such as like cancer, and aids and climate change and racism and sexism and homophobia and all. Not that this means they were better off, that's another issue, but like they might have been less terrified, which just makes me think of the next fifty years.