Weekly Wrap-up Post #32

Springtime in New Jersey, pro-wrestling, and the new NUKEMAP effects library...

Spring in New Jersey this year has been unusually volatile. One day it’ll be shorts and T-shirt weather… then it transitions to multi-layer coat weather… and then it rains for three days. Spring is always back-and-forth but the extremes feel stranger than usual here; even a single day can vary by enough temperature that a simple question like, “do I need a jacket?” is a tricky one. Especially if you walk to work, like I do.

Some spring dog portraits from this week, as I don’t have a whole lot else to report:

Lyndon with some spring flowers. Somewhat on par for New Jersey, I have cropped a dead rat out of the frame. Seriously. I didn’t notice it until after I took the photo. And neither, fortunately, did Lyndon.

Reservoir dog, with the slate blue sky that I associate with winter and spring in the Northeast. They have started taking down most of the fence that prohibited direct access to the water in the newly-reopened reservoir, so I guess their environmental impact study decided it was non-toxic. I did not let Lyndon get in the water regardless, to his irritation.

Bored at home on a rainy day. It is hard to imagine these strange, contorted poses are comfortable, but he’s the one who makes them, and it’s within his power to change out of them, so, I guess they’re OK.

Lyndon insisted on going up onto this viewing platform for reasons known only to him, and then gave me a “why are we up here?” look. You tell me, buddy, you tell me.

Some cherry blossoms — or something similar — in full bloom. Lyndon seems fairly oblivious to them, alas.

This week I started what I intend to be a multi-part series on the history of Preppers. As these will only be three (or perhaps four) blog posts, they will not be deep scholarly studies, obviously. But I’m fascinated with the emergence of the figure of the “Prepper,” and the earlier, related figure of the “Survivalist,” and was surprised to find that there was very little historical work on their emergence so far. So these posts are just the results of me poking around a little bit, trying to build up what feels to me like a good conceptual framework for thinking about what make a Prepper a Prepper, and where/when these ideas developer. Part 1 was posted to Doomsday Machines on Friday, in case you missed it:

I really like the image above, which is from a 1959 Civil Defense poster promoting a pamphlet on how to build your own family fallout shelter. It’s a few years before the big fallout shelter push of the Kennedy administration, and the way it depicts the lady of the household is rather surprising for the Eisenhower era of Civil Defense. At some point in the near future I will do a quick, image-laden post that is just focused on the ways in which families are depicted in Civil Defense pamphlets, because there’s a lot that can be said about that, I feel.