Gas prices increase, food prices increase, ammo prices increase while availability decreases…man, its an interesting time we live in.
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Watched the season finale of ‘Jericho’ the other night. I think the shark has been jumped. They’ve drifted into Jerry Ahern country. While I suppose the apocalypse will not be a pretty event, I don’t think its going to be a series of increasingly larger gunfights. This is not to say that there wont be occasions calling for an exchange of lead, just that the more mundane things like food, water, shelter, and medicine are going to be causing more frequent crises than organized groups of looters. Your mileage may, of course, vary.

Everyone, naturally, has their own idea of what the end of the world will look like. Contemporary fiction has, by and large, shown it as a largely Mad Max-ish thing. I would say that from a rural perspective the most realistic portrayal (in my opinion) was in ‘Alas Babylon’. The everyday needs of food and water were just as critical as fighting off bad guys.

Understandably, its hard to market a 450-page book about hunting down wild asparagus and scrounging for toilet paper. The buying public wants action and adventure. Thus, CBS cant really do an hour show of people trying to heat their homes with Sterno and dried cow dung…I understand this. It seems like many people on the various discussion boards, however, do not. They ask why we don’t see people suffering from cholera from failed water delivery systems, why we don’t see people eating the grass off their lawn, why we don’t see the rotted stinking piles of food in refrigerators. Because as true to life as that may be, it just isn’t something advertisers think people are gonna sit down and spend an hour of their lives watching. I know I wouldn’t watch an hour of someone throwing out spoiled food and washing out a fridge with bleach. Gotta go where the money is and that’s a) action and b) drama.

By the by, regarding Jericho, whats on that train? My guess: improvised ‘weapon of mass destruction’ such as a couple tankers of chlorine gas or something wired to wipe out the town while leaving the resources intact. Poor mans neutron bomb.

Also, everyone has an AR-15 but Hawkins has a freakin’ nuclear bomb. He’s the man to beat. And now he drives a tank. And he had a supply of medical morphine. And access to recon satellites. When I grow up, I wanna be Hawkins.

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More noise is being made about reclassifying .50 BMG guns as ‘destructive devices’ or banning them altogether. Realistically, I don’t think a .50 BMG is in my future. However, I am thinking that a .338 Lapua in a good long-range gun may provide the same benefits at a reduced cost.
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Reminder that theres about three and a half weeks until the end of the Group Buy on Mountain House #10 cans. This’ll be the only buy this year for these.
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Zombie goodness is nigh…the movie ’28 Weeks Later’ is in theaters. The guy who wrote the movie adamantly maintains that these are not zombies since they are not dead (or undead, I suppose). Whatever…it’s the same damn thing. Only difference is that headshots are optional. I’ll go see this flick with the girlfriend first chance we get. Movies like this are always interesting. I find them fascinating from the failed-infrastructure perspective rather than the constant gunbattle perspective.

I’ve posted this before but I’ll say it again – I think that fiction has a role in the plans of the prepared. Why? Well, as clever and smart as we are we cant possibly foresee all the possible problems and solutions we may encounter. Fiction allows us to see scenarios and situations that we might not have imagined and start a new avenue of problem solving. Jericho, for example, even in a very limited way provides some of that ‘what if’ thinking for some people. While we try to plan against problems we foresee happening theres always going to be something that we didn’t think about that’s going to bite us on the ass. Ever read a story and thnk ‘Yeah, but if that happened in real life I’d probably do this….’? That’s what I’m talking about. Fiction gets you thinking ‘outside the box’, as it were.

I won’t list all the cool fiction that I’ve read over the years but I will bet that I’ve read as much as can be found without getting into the truly pulp stuff like Johnstone’s ‘Ashes’ series or Axlers’s ‘Deathlands’. (Regrettably, Ahern’s “Survivalist” series started strong but ran outta steam after less than a dozen books…not that that stopped him from putting out a dozen more. And, in a case of life imitiating..uhmm…’art’…he wound up buying the Detonincs pistol company after relentlessly pimping their guns in his books.)