Manic Panic!

The title of this post comes from a bodacious and obnoxious hair dye that used to sell in the 1980s.
It has to do with the first celebration on which I will make just a brief social commentary: New Year's Eve in Times Square last night (was that LAST night? Yeesh!). No, I wasn't there. I was snug in a cozy house in Weidman, MI watching the spectacle unfold on national television.

I have never been a fan of Carson Daly (in fact, I'm not even sure that's how you spell it), but I now feel a certain connection with him, or a kind of affection, born from the fact that as soon as we turned on the TV at 11:30, there he was looking and sounding terrified as he held on for dear life to some metal contraption high up in the air. He was saying stuff, but it was hard to concentrate on what he was saying because he was also talking so much about how scary it was to be that high up in the air and how he couldn't wait to be back down on the ground.

Once he was back on the ground, the TV host rambled on about how nice it was to be on the ground instead of in the air. He RIPPED the thing off of his head that whichever pretty quasi-celebrity he'd interviewed had put there, and then his eyes locked in to the teleprompter and he read like a robot. I hope he gets some comp time, or free medication, for his trouble, and I will hereafter view him as a human instead of a symbol of the decadence of American society. I think. Maybe.

I haven't finished reading I Am Number Four yet. I'm about 60% through. There is this totally disgusting puppy-love relationship between two of the fifteen-year-old protagonists and I'm all like, "eew! Gag me with a spoon!" The author, however, again describes feelings of panic in vivid detail, just like Carson Daly did. So. Although this book is clearly geared much more for age 10 than for age 35, there is still something relatable and appreciate-able about it.

Something else happened last night, as well. Shiloh took part in a New Year's Eve show. Despite the world not having ended on the 21st, the Doomsday Dashboard is still up and running (pandemic is trending in 1st place at the time of writing. A close second? Surprise! Economic collapse). I am happy that none of these disasters will prevent us from enjoying the timely record release of Shiloh's 2nd album on February 5th.

In other news, the Northwest Indiana Times reports that New Year's Resolutions are better if you post them publicly, so let this be my public announcement of my official 2013 resolution to be...more balanced.

There you have it. Do you have a resolution, or do you resolve not to make resolutions?

So close you can almost taste it...

...or so it would seem, what with my closest teaching neighbor constantly blathering about the dead bird that he soon intends to eat!

I'm just gonna say it once, because it's true, and then I'll drop it for the duration of the world's existence:

I am supposed to be in Peru right now, but I am not.

Lucky for us, Peru is still populated with tourists, and you can read about my friend's adventures there here, where she compare/contrasts independent and group travel. I have a preferred side of that fence, and I am hoping that by the end of her trip, she will be converted completely to my side. Let's keep tabs on her movements in Latin America.

Two more notes before we get down to business, both dealing with your Greater Chicagoland media. Please join me in impatient anticipation of Shiloh's new album by perusing this lite blurb in the Chicago Reader dealing with the record release which we will never get to experience due to pandemic/cataclysm/megaquake/polar reversal. Please ignore the bit about the puppets, and go to the Empty Bottle because I myself cannot, seeing as I have to teach the very next day in North Las Vegas.

And then, from our friends at the NWI Times via my dad:

Sometime over Fall Break, while riding through the corn fields having a fabulous time, I think I heard this song, which may be content-blocked for copyright reasons when you click on it, on a radio station that my clever friends tell their 10-year-old is Radio Disney.

Immediately, I knew that I would watch Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. And take notes. Here's the plot synopsis in case you forgot what an awesome year 1985 actually was.

(A saxophone will come in handy after nuclear annihilation.)

Max (12-year-old Mel Gibson with luxurious hair) wanders into Bartertown to retrieve his stolen car and makes a bad deal with Queen Tina Turner. At the last moment, he refuses to kill his opponent in the Thunderdome and is sentenced to gulag (ohhh, the 80s!). Halfway there, his horse collapses and is swallowed in a sandstorm, at which point he is rescued by his helper monkey.

He eventually collapses but is once again rescued, this time by a mysterious stranger who turns out to represent some happy people who live in the Narrows at Zion (though the movie was actually filmed in Australia). This canyon is filled with horribly noisy children and others who all believe that Max is their messiah. He handily destroys their worldview.

He punches a woman in the face and for some reason isn't immediately killed.

Of course she runs away anyway and a cohort of happies ends up back in Bartertown. They kidnap Bartertown's brain-person and the inevitable showdown in the middle of the desert ensues.

The good guys win, but Max ends up wandering around in the desert, and whose baby is that?

There you have it. You may now skip watching it, and you may thank me now or later. However, I recommend that you review it because Tina Turner will always be hott. Of course, I was looking forward to the appearance of Grace Jones at the end of the movie, but apparently I was confused, as she never showed up. I don't think I've ever seen Conan the Destroyer, nor do I think I ever want to, so I don't know what kind of short-circuit happened in my brain on that one. :/

This has been a movie review.

After I review the Last Thanksgiving Ever coming up before week's end, it will be time to turn my attention once again to young adult fiction.

This weekend is historically the busiest travel weekend in America. Be safe out there: make sure your apocalypse doesn't happen sooner than it has to.

Election Apocalypse?

Nah.

Sadly, again with the Jakob Dylan...I can't find a downloadable electoral map anywhere online that I can rip off and glue here.

I was sharing with my students today how I remember the election of 2000 and staying up until 2 a.m. in a hotel room in the rural underbelly of one of the Midwestern states. My coworker and I, being wherever we were for a regional conference, finally fell asleep and waited until the next day to find out that Al Gore had conceded the election to GWB. I was shocked at how quickly it was over last night. I mostly avoided the hype out of a desire to soak up the apocalypse as completely as possible, but I did watch various coverages of the election returns on the youtube election hub. And yes. I, too, enjoyed Diane Sawyer's display.

Many thanks to a faraway cousin of mine for posting the following as his facebook status:
"All of this political griping is ridiculous! Did you all forget the world is ending next month!"
And that's how I've been feeling about the whole election. Of course, I'm an issue voter and I have issues, so my decision was made a long time ago.

Too bad about the map. I did find something else to rip off and glue:

During Halloween staycation in North Las Vegas (during which, I must say, there were a gaggle of ghouls of the "terminally cute" variety!), I caught just a glimpse of Doomsday Preppers on the National Geographic channel. Although I have mentioned it in this blog before, lamenting that I cannot watch it, but following the Doomsday Dashboard with wild abandon...the best part was making fun of the preppers with Miss Gokey.

Interesting that mega-earthquakes are only trending at 15% on the Dashboard tonight, given that the Guatemalan president has announced 48 deaths resulting from the 7-and-a-half quake that hit San Marcos today.

Speaking of Halloween, Jodi sent me an interesting article about a real-life military training exercise which was of course in the beautiful locale of San Diego. Apparently, the soldiers and sailors took part in a zombie apocalypse exercise. The president of the Halo, Corp. security company that was running the exercise (sounds a little bit Resident Evil, no? Umbrella Corporation, anyone?) said that news of the simulated zombie invasion, useful because in many ways zombie actions replicate terrorist actions (zombies are terrorists!), invited calls from "whackjobs." Haha. You can read about it here.

That's about all I can say about the end of the world tonight. I have a lot of work to do that has nothing to do with apocalypse skills and everything to do with teaching strategies and the manipulation of the minds of little ones. By little, of course, I mean 14 years old.

I *do* have this, courtesy of the Northwest Indiana Times via my dad:

Creepy, huh? Don't worry, there's more where this one comes from.

Keep me apprised of any new developments in your own preparations, and I'll do the same.

Location, Location, Location

The problem with long weekends is that although it is fun to think about laying around all day, when it's 1:30 p.m. and you're still in your pajamas (therefore not fit for public viewing) you get a little bored.

If you're me, this means you type, "places to go during the apocalypse" into Google to see what comes up.
Turns out the first few results are from Business Insider and Mother Nature News.

I like the second article better, because although it is limited to the United States, it has actual information in it that you may not have known before. I personally had never heard of The Greenbrier Resort, Mount Weather or Cheyenne Mountain. I would love to begin an investigation into the location of Vivos, but I doubt I would have much success. If you sleep at night on top of large piles of money, this is the story for you, as you can actually purchase shelter. This reminds me of the NWI Times article about 1950s bomb shelters that I clipped over the summer. I particularly like the last place listed, "Your crazy neighbor's house." Haha. Indeed.

While searching for the aforelinked article, I participated in a survey question, "Should Hammond sell water to Illinois residents?" I voted, "no," and found out that I stand with the minority, 39%. Fools! Don't you know water is the most valuable resource in the New Economy? Ugh!

At first, I thought I would like the Business Insider piece, because it mentions Denver, and I like Denver, but later on it gets racist and/or takes the attitude that the U.S. can and should continue taking over the world, so...if you're like me and you prefer my website over and above all others, I've saved you some time. Apparently, that's the Business Insider style: snarky. I'm all about some snark, but I like to be on the giving end of it instead of the receiving end. Much more useful than the original article was this list of 20 things to stock up on, which I found in the Economic Collapse Blog while clicking away from the previous site.

Lest you think that all I do is search the internet for signs of gloom and doom, I thought I would post some photos of last weekend's trip with Miss Gokey to the Historic Railroad Tunnel Trail in the Lake Mead NRA. It is part of the national Rails-to-Trails Conservancy and provided some good practice, since walking long distances seems like it's going to be my M.O. after the end of the world. If you lack the time or stamina to read through the articles, I will tell you that the trail used to be a railroad line that shipped supplies in for the building of the Boulder/Hoover Dam. If you *do* read the articles, please take special note of the fact that this part of the rail line is particularly awesome because most of the rest of it is underwater. Ok, I have to go. I need to watch Northfork again. Since the theme of this post is location, I thought I'd share a good one. Enjoy.

Here's a distant view of what we've done to our hydroelectric miracle...

These concrete plugs were used as placeholders at the bottom of the lake before the water went in.  Then they got thrown off the side of the railroad bridge.

The remainder of these photos are the doorways to the tunnels &tc.