Daily Archives: July 24, 2013

Lefty loosee, rightee tightee

Posted on July 24, 2013 by | 10 comments

For all the good it does.

 

That Chinese steel T-Bar doesn’t have the strength to take a cheater.  I should have bought that half-inch drive electric impact wrench at the Midland Harbor Freight when I had the chance, but was too smart and miserly to do it.

I planned to upload some pics of the blessings of trying to get the RV up off the ground high enough to change the tire, and why it ain’t worth doing because of a Chinese steel T-Bar lug wrench.

I think I’m going to have to try to drive this booger to town with a disintegrating tire on the inside rear and cross my fingers that I don’t blow another one, or that this one doesn’t come apart in a way to keep me off the road half-way between here and there.

Seems I’ve managed to piss off someone who has the knowledge and wherewithall to deactivate the functions of the WP text editor.  For now, maybe from now own, WP text editor won’t activate the buttons to allow me to upload image files nor post tags on the blog entries.

Ah well.  My old buddy Rich went through something of this sort a while back, he tells me, when he got crosswise with the same folks I evidently angered with my views on the Bible and a particular modern secular nation.

Life goes on.  They haven’t dragged out the really heavy artillery for me yet, the way they did him.

Old Jules

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Posted in Adventure, Senior Citizens, Transportation, Trucks

Alas Babylon, by Pat Frank – sculpting post-1959 culture

Posted on July 24, 2013 by | 4 comments

Before Alas Babylon hit the bookstores and was made a movie the US population hadn’t yet done any heavy thinking about the implications of Sputnik 1 and hydrogen bomb arsenals capable of being delivered to the US heartland.  Strategic Air Command was centered in Omaha, NE, and B47 bombers filled the skies.  Civil Defense was mostly the local mortuary because they owned the ambulances.  Complacency with having been victors of WWII, affluence, abundance and confidence in the future were the rule of the day.

Then along came Alas Babylon.   The story of a small piece of Florida spared the bombs and fallout from an attack by the USSR and a prolonged nuclear war.   Because it was early in the day the post-nuclear-holocaust genre hadn’t yet decided everyone had to die or turn into mutant barbarians.

The story was subdued enough to be believed.  And Americans believed it.  Beefed up Civil Defense, began the individual preparedness planning that would be required if they were to survive.

The first 20 pages of Alas Babylon describes the days leading to the war, all the usual suspects you’d hear tonight if you watched the evening news, minus the USSR.  A buildup of tensions, a US Navy fighter-bomber pilot mistakenly releases a bomb over a port in Syria destroying an ammunition train.  Secondary explosions and the beginning of mutual destruction for the US and USSR.

The book is a microscope look at the minds of the US citizenry as they existed in 1959, before ICBMs, before the moon launch, before the oceans were filled with attack and missile launching submarines.  Martin Luther King was still in the future, along with the Vietnam War, race riots in US cities, Kennedy assassinations. automobile seat belts, gas mileage and foreign cars.  Women were there to be protected, first into the lifeboats of whatever safety could be constructed during and after a nuclear war.

Alas Babylon is a good read, a great study in sociology and a particular slice of history frozen in time. 

Old Jules

 

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Tags:  alas babylon, pat frank, nuclear war, books, book reviews, reviews, history, society, sociology, human behavior, movies, psychology

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Posted in 1950's, 2013, America, Book Reviews, Books, Education, Emergency Preparedness, Human Behavior, Movies, Survival