1. Fallout Shelters – I like to think of myself as a pretty handy guy; I’m good in the yard, I fix things around the house, I even build a thing or two from scratch sometimes. I feel like if I lived in the 1960s, the nuclear paranoia would have probably been enough to motivate me to build a fallout shelter to protect my family. Added bonus: once the paranoia died down, I’d have a clubhouse for the kids all ready to go.

That got me thinking of how I’d do it – would there be plans available? Would I have to hire a contractor? Would there be many options? Turns out that you COULD do it yourself, you COULD hire a contractor, and the options ranged from basically living in a big steel pipe to living in a second mansion just underground.

The American Civil Defense Association, a private entity, specialized in fallout shelter awareness and how-to. Their informational materials combine the tone of that era with the design aesthetics for the day to create a really unique product:

The ACDA also produced a filmstrip that educated Americans in the specifics of shelter construction. Those beeps between slides!

They weren’t the only one in the fabulous-fallout-shelter-design game, though. FEMA’s handbook was fab:

As were others…

This one-page infographic-style run-through of what’s involved in a DIY fallout shelter kind of makes me think I’d probably lean toward hiring a contractor. At least for the big stuff. I’d still fill the water jugs myself.

2. Scrabble Game Show – Hollywood’s attempts to make successful stuff into other successful stuff were never better than Scrabble.

This 1984 game show took the popular board game, added a little Wheel of Fortune, adjusted it to be more like a crossword puzzle, and slapped Chuck Woolery in front of it. Throw in some crude computer animations and a little brassy game show music and you’ve got a show that actually holds up pretty well.

Scrabble had a good run from 1984-1990. Not quite a piece of the American fabric like The Price is Right but at least it wasn’t The Singing Bee, either.

3. War of the Monsters – This 2003 Playstation 2 game took the old Monster B-Movie mentality, stripped the actual licenses off of the monsters, and threw them together into massive Kaiju battles. It was pretty glorious.

4. Ambient Windows – Here are the startup and shutdown sounds from all versions of Windows, slowed down 800%. Ambient magic.

5. Lapalux – Discovered this guy this past weekend at Moogfest. One of the highlights of my trip!

-ds