Wasteland wrap-up #90

An eclipse in Paris, my performance with the Kronos Quartet from last year, fallout shelter toilets, some not-great films and one pretty fun summer movie...

The exciting thing this last week was the European eclipse, which happened on Wednesday. In Paris, the sun was 92% occluded, which, if you haven’t seen one, sounds a lot more impressive than it is. I had seen a 90% eclipse in New Jersey back in April 2024, and it was about the same as that. Back in 2017, I saw a total eclipse in Missouri, but it was under cloud cover and so the most dramatic aspects were alas not visible to me.

But even under cloud cover it was clear there is a big difference between 90% and totality when you are talking about eclipses — in a total eclipse, it gets much darker, cooler, and animals start acting strange. A ~90% eclipse is basically not visible without special glasses, although I felt like it was indeed a little bit cooler and the sky did dim a bit compared to normal.

The Parisian eclipse, near maximum occlusion, as seen through eclipse glasses held in front of my phone camera. I have found — now having done this a couple times — that if you are trying to photograph an eclipse through eclipse glasses it helps to hold the glasses out in front of you like I am doing here, because otherwise the autofocus will get very confused.

I was meeting up with two buddies at Trocadero which is across the river from the Eiffel Tower to the west. Trocadero has fabulous views of the tower, but as the eclipse was around 8pm, the sun was well into the west (though still several hours from setting), and so it wasn’t possible to get a picture from that angle that included both the eclipse and the tower.

I’m not sure how well it would have come out anyway, given my meager photographic resources (my phone’s camera is not that impressive, as you may have noticed), but I had fun trying to photograph it anyway through a pair of eclipse glasses that one of the people I was seeing it with had helpfully brought.

Some of my feeble attempts to capture the Paris eclipse 2026

Trocadero is pretty crowded and tourist-heavy even when there isn’t an eclipse, but it wasn’t too bad. I was joking with someone that you are trying to find Trocadero, just wait until you’re somewhere where nobody is speaking French, and you’re probably there. Spanish was the most common language I heard being spoken.

The two guys and I took a few selfies on one of their phones, and as per usual I thought I looked pretty ridiculous (the eclipse glasses, alas, did not make me look more fashionable). Of course without the glasses, the eclipsed sun just looks like the sun — perhaps a bit dimmer than usual, but nothing that you would easily notice. But I noticed that the lens flare seemed a little “deformed,” and when I zoomed in close on it, I was very amused and surprised to find that a tiny version of the eclipse was visible. That felt like a little easter egg.

Three American expats and a secret eclipse

Over a year ago I mentioned that I had, bizarrely enough, taken part in a concert performance of the Kronos Quartet during the Noble Laureate Assembly put on by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. For some reason this week I had the idea to actually see if the performance of that had ever been posted online, because I don’t think it was at the time.

And it has been! The entire concert in Chicago can be watched on YouTube below. My segment is during “Tusen Tankar (A Thousand Thoughts)” which starts at 01:43:55. But the whole concert was really good.

The whole performance is great, including of course Allison Russell’s singing of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” at the end. But I also particularly enjoyed their performance of Sun Ra’s “Kiss Yo’ Ass Goodbye,” and the other spoken word parts were really well done. Scott Sagan’s part, where he read a transcript of a recored meeting run by Saddam Hussein, is for some reason not included in the final video. Maybe it is a copyright thing? My recollection is he did a great job and was a hard act to follow; it is too bad it is not up there also.

Somehow we are well into August now, which is unbelievable and yet somehow true. How do the summers go by so fast? I blink and they’re over. We had another heat wave, with yesterday’s temperatures going above 100ºF / 38ºC, but it didn’t seem so bad as the ones in the beginning of the summer which did not even reach such temperatures. Am I more used to it? Is it something to do with the humidity or other environmental differences? Am I resigned? Has my brain gotten boiled to the point that it no longer cares? I don’t know. But it wasn’t so bad.

Lyndon takes advantage of the cover provided by some chairs to stalk pigeons. He has found that if he stays very still for a long time, the not-too-bright birds will apparently accidentally walk right up to him, not realizing until they are a few feet away that he is sitting there, grinning. Then they make a “oh, I think I have some business to attend to over here” turn and quickly waddle away.

My wife was out of town the last two weeks, so I was free to work and work and work without any sense of time passing, which perhaps helped with the heat wave stuff, I don’t know. I am very glad she is back as my time blindness is really acute when there is nobody else around, and while I do appreciate the sense of getting a few things done — I got a couple things out the door, finally, including a review of a new coffee table book on the Trinity test, which I’ll post about when it is published — I also find the experience of “I’ll sit down and do a little work… wait, how is it suddenly dark outside?” a little disconcerting.

For Doomsday Machines this week, I wrote about a topic that I’ve been wanting to cover since I started this blog: the problem of toilets in fallout shelters. This seems quite niche, I grant you, but I try to make a case for why this actually encapsulates both what I both love and hate about Civil Defense literature. It’s the kind of thing that comes up if you try to take surviving nuclear war very seriously and treat it as a real, tangible problem. But it is also the kind of thing that makes it quite clear that the “survival” in question is going to be a very ugly one.

The name is an allusion to a popular video game (which I have not played — it does not look like my kind of thing), but I think it works even if you don’t know the reference. Maybe it works even better without it.

I have been thinking about fallout shelters a lot the last few weeks, as I have been working on the summer game development for Oregon Road ‘83. I’ll post a more significant update of how that has been going in a week or two, as the phase of work for my summer students is wrapping up. We made some significant progress, but as always there is more to be done.

I have a few draft posts in the works for next week — we’ll see which one grips my attention most tightly, in the end…