h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Drinking Your Way Through the Apocalypse: The DIY Fallout Shelter Snack Bar - A87856618
Author: Dmitri Gheorgheni - U1590784

This is a cheerful little DIY project you can undertake with your friends.

Then you can all sit around and argue about what liquor and CDs you want to stock up on for the nuclear holocaust.

NOTE FOR ARTISTS:

There are links in here to the original, so that we can use the cover illustration and the instructional drawings as on-page illustrations.

If anybody wants to colourise that cover, go ahead.

This would be funny if the perpetrators weren't so obviously serious.
Do you know Raymond Brigg's 'When the Wind Blows' and the film based on it? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090315/

I got a bit lost in all those measurements. And yet, nobody seems to have thought what you're supposed to put in the thing in terms of food! or , or?

I put in a link to that question over in my journal. In the UK, the Ministry of Food was generating reams of paper about it. Some Yank researchers dug it up and ordered (and read) the lot.

I think somebody in the US actually bought a house where they found an intact shelter, complete with supplies from the 1960s. I believe the supplies went on permanent display.

Oh, here it is. And since it was in Wisconsin (sigh), they're taking it seriously, too:

http://beprepared.com/blog/13307/emergency-preparedness-supplies-of-a-1960s-fallout-shelter/

Perfect h2g2 Entry thank you Dmitribut I would make a towel/s top of my list of essentials followed by tins of beans and air freshener

I had to laugh at your mention of "cocktail wieners" - what memories that evoked - no party was complete in the Seventies without an aluminium foil covered potato pierced with cocktail sticks speared with alternate cubed cheese, pineapple chunks and cocktail sausages. I prepared many myself

GB

Zotz 'n zotz of tequila.

Also, at least enough 198 proof Jamaican rum to fuel up a Piper Cub for one last flight.

(Quality alcoholic beverages improve with age anyway.)

In lieu of mixers, among other things, for example, condensed cherry and grendadine syrups, a prodigious quantity of lime aid powder. (Antiscorbutics are important.)

For safety reasons, major supplies of alcoholic beverages should be warehoused separately from the actual shelter, only limited supplies aboard there adequate for the duration of the initial emergency.

Sure do agree on towels and also paper supplies, which can be used to cushion breakables against impact shock.., etc.

On food, I'd start with basic staples like mattress covers packed full with things like lentils, hominy corn and alfalfa seed that keep well in dry storage almost forever, along with enough bulk seed carefully selected for the local climate and global winter conditions, each, to plant a farm.

The major part of this should be warehoused separately from the main shelter, though, though even there, staple seeds and grains should be substituted for bedding.

In general, though, the main shelter should be restricted to things that will be needed during the initial emergency, with emphasis in foods on things that can be eaten without cooking, med kit, sanitation kits, spare clothing and an oubliette for disposal of hazardous waste.

Fuel and automotive supplies.

Charcoal, tons of it in raw unmodified form, for water and air filtration.

At least two or three water purification systems, including a high capacity still, preferably solar powered.

Pioneering tools, enough sets to go around.

Lots of sandbags.

It's obvious you've all thought about this. How about the next Guide Entry is about what to put in your shelter?

We could get an 'official' list from the Cold War, and then canvas h2g2ers for their own suggestions.

Advantages and disadvantages of lentils as a post-apocalyptic crop, extremely hardy, even weedy looking, comes up about ten inches high, moderately difficult to harvest, can be done with a lawn mower equipped with a catch basket, prior to winnowing.

Ditto, alfalfa, which in the form of sprouts can keep the scurvy away.

Sorghum succeeds when corn fails.

Seed can be used for just about everything that can be done with corn.

Sorghum and corn stalks pressed, or shredded and boiled, filtered and condensed by means of boiling, can provide molasses.

Winnowing can be done in close quarters using a carding method, placing seed and chaff on an inclined plain and using card to gather, lift and pour chaff and seed an the top of the plane so that the seed bounces out and rolls to the bottom.

Well dried chaff of all three can be ground to powder and pressed with binding medium to make animal feed and emergency bicuit.

Grinding tools, mortar and pestle, metate, ball mill.

Library including agricultural manuals.

Storage containers.

Moving to entry.

Does that mean you're going to write an entry? Good.

But whether or not, please don't put any more extensive information on foodstuffs here - it will just make it harder for whoever has to subedit this eventually.

Your Guide Entry has just been picked from Peer Review by one of our Scouts, and is now heading off into the Editorial Process, which ends with publication in the Edited Guide. We've moved this Review Conversation out of Peer Review and to the entry itself.

If you'd like to know what happens now, check out the page on 'What Happens after your Entry has been Recommended?' at EditedGuide-Process. We hope this explains everything.

Thanks for contributing to the Edited Guide!

To quote 'Doctor Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb'

'Shoot! A fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.'

<BB<

That's about it.

As Franz Werfel said about 1940, 'The situation is hopeless, but not serious.'