Disparate gems

[nmg]

With the current world political climate being the way it is, I decided to go and cheer myself up by seeing if I could find a copy of that fine Thatcher-era public information pamphlet Protect and Survive, which told us how we were supposed to distract ourselves from the likelihood of dying a nasty lingering death from radiation sickness by constructing jerry-built shelters (sorry, "inner refuges") in our living rooms out of the back door and a few suitcases of earth. I was not disappointed:

You can also get a video of the accompanying public information film from Amazon, for the princely sum of £11.69. Good stuff.

On a rather different (but tangentially related) subject, I was rather galled to learn that there has been a protest against the name of the second Lord of the Rings film. To quote: "We believe that Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema's actions are in fact hate speech. The movie is intentionally being named The Two Towers in order to capitalize on the tragedy of September 11." You can't make stuff like that up...

Maybe JRR should have stuck with his original title - The Treason of Isengard.

Comments

[ias.livejournal.com]

*lifts jaw from desk*

Twa Too'rs/protect & Survive.

[noradrenaline.livejournal.com]

If that ISN'T a gag itself, then fuck'em if they can't take a joke. Twin Towers: Boeing, Boeing Gone!

Did you ever see (and this WAs a while back) the analysis/pisstake in SOUNDS of the P&S leaflet? The illustrations were by one Alan Moore before he got famous (I think under his Curt Vile nom du plume). Great little things like a bloke bricking up a window with the caption "First brick up all the Conservative Voters in your street" and so on.

Re: Twa Too'rs/protect & Survive.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Alas, no - I was too busy reading Moore's stuff in 2000AD at the time. Any idea if there's a scan online anywhere?

Re: Twa Too'rs/protect & Survive.

[noradrenaline.livejournal.com]

Probably. I just have no idea where. Try a search on "Alan moore" and then trawl through thr 46,000,000,000,000,038 sites that it turns up. Bound to be there somewhere...

Of course, what's worse is that I had the pages for a couple of years. I'd been clipping the "The Stars My Degradation" comic strip, that Moore had been doing on a weekly basis for the magazine (as Curt Vile), for a while and as the P&S feature was on the back of one of them I kept the whole spread. A couple of years later I passed these on to an acquaintance and then lost track of them. C'est la fromage, as the hirstute one once wrote..