I try not to get sucked into TV shows. I have enough to do in my life. With the best writing happening on TV these days, once in a while I let my guard down and let myself get carried away by serials.

Looking at the EspressoMap image I posted the other day, I found myself seeing the Map of Destruction that the mysterious Hawkins fills in, noting incinerated cities across the land. Think of the coffee lost to civilization!

I’ve been hooked on watching the re-runs of CBS’s Jericho. It’s the story of a nuclear attack on the US, with a small Colorado town spared and isolated from the world. How will they survive? Do laws still apply? What moral codes should apply? Is America still a country? Will Jake and Emily get together again? When it premiered, my interest was piqued, but I pooh-poohed it - just like I did when Lost premiered, much to my regret.

The show is actually pretty good, and fairly true to reality. I have my nits (20kt isn’t that big, right?), but of course I grew up truly under the shadow of nuclear weapons on various Air Force bases across the globe. It was never an abstract danger to us. I lived in Britain during the early eighties, when tensions were very high between the superpowers. The base I lived on was on high alert quite frequently, with our fathers being called by loudspeakers at 3am to man their stations every now and then. It was all very exciting to me, but the fear soaked into us kids. One night, my brother was having some kind of terrible waking dream, and I had to literally slap him out of it. Later he told me it was about a nuclear war. I haven’t delved too deep into my own nightmares, but they were common. Films like The Day After made things worse, of course.

Posted in Life, Film & Video