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Five Things – 4.28.14

Apr 28, 2014 ·

1. Fallout Shelters – I like to think of myself as a pretty handy guy; I’m good in the yard, I fix things around the house, I even build a thing or two from scratch sometimes.  I feel like if I lived in the 1960s, the nuclear paranoia would have probably been enough to motivate me to build a fallout shelter to protect my family.  Added bonus: once the paranoia died down, I’d have a clubhouse for the kids all ready to go.

That got me thinking of how I’d do it – would there be plans available? Would I have to hire a contractor? Would there be many options? Turns out that you COULD do it yourself, you COULD hire a contractor, and the options ranged from basically living in a big steel pipe to living in a second mansion just underground.

Fancy Fallout Shelter

The American Civil Defense Association, a private entity, specialized in fallout shelter awareness and how-to. Their informational materials combine the tone of that era with the design aesthetics for the day to create a really unique product:

Shelter Ad

The ACDA also produced a filmstrip that educated Americans in the specifics of shelter construction.  Those beeps between slides!

They weren’t the only one in the fabulous-fallout-shelter-design game, though.  FEMA’s handbook was fab:

Standards for Fallout Shelters

As were others…

Handbook

 

This one-page infographic-style run-through of what’s involved in a DIY fallout shelter kind of makes me think I’d probably lean toward hiring a contractor.  At least for the big stuff.  I’d still fill the water jugs myself.

Fallout Pamphlet

 

2.  Scrabble Game Show – Hollywood’s attempts to make successful stuff into other successful stuff were never better than Scrabble.  

Scrabble

This 1984 game show took the popular board game, added a little Wheel of Fortune, adjusted it to be more like a crossword puzzle, and slapped Chuck Woolery in front of it.  Throw in some crude computer animations and a little brassy game show music and you’ve got a show that actually holds up pretty well.

Scrabble had a good run from 1984-1990.  Not quite a piece of the American fabric like The Price is Right but at least it wasn’t The Singing Bee, either.

 

3. War of the Monsters – This 2003 Playstation 2 game took the old Monster B-Movie mentality, stripped the actual licenses off of the monsters, and threw them together into massive Kaiju battles.  It was pretty glorious.

 

4.  Ambient Windows – Here are the startup and shutdown sounds from all versions of Windows, slowed down 800%.  Ambient magic.

 

 

5.  Lapalux – Discovered this guy this past weekend at Moogfest.  One of the highlights of my trip!


-ds

 

design, Five Things, game shows, television, video games '50s, '60s, moogfest, music

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