On the Anti-Terror Frenzy

Wired has a great piece up about dumb ideas, Rube Goldberg devices, outright cons and such like in the anti-terror apparatus mania. It's taking my mind back to the golden age of the Soviet A-Bomb obsession, when schoolkids all learned how to hide under their desks, as if to prevent from--what, exactly?

And in particular, the fallout shelter. Your own backyard bunker, best when stocked with lots of dry candy bars and bottled water (and a shotgun to fend off the neighbors) to protect you against the little squigglies in nuclear dust.

My mother, by then a grand mother, would lament about going to live in a hole in the ground "where you would just linger a little longer." In time, she turned it into a marketing scheme "Grandma's Linger-Longer."

I wonder if there still are fallout shelters; probably so, now doubling as tool sheds. Here's how it went: