Will, Cliff (both above), and I recorded this song in one take in late 1999. Though, calling it a “take” is overstating it. We were beyond silly drunk and lacked any talent for the task, but we had a mic in front of us, a guitar, and a willingness to open our mouths and let something — anything — fly out.

It wasn’t until Will said “This song is called Nukerator” that we knew what we were supposed to be singing about. We’d never sketched any of it out, or even discussed it. This was truly stream of consciousness, so as bad as it is, there’s also something endearing about it (well, at least to us).

Putting together the pieces from that night, we named our ad-hoc band “More Equipment Than Talent.” We’ve tried since to repeat the feat — the ingredients seemed easy enough — but we’ve had little success. Infighting, artistic differences, and a reasonable interest in raising the quality of our work have limited our efforts, but when this song appeared out of the blue the other day while iTunes was on random, I knew it was time to share.

Note: while listening to it last again night to get the lyrics, I realized there are a few lines about school violence that may be offensive to some today. The context, I hope, gives it the correct meaning.

Lyrics:

Will: This song is called Nukerator.

Cliff: No it’s not.

Cliff: What’s with you and f-major 7?

Casey: This is a song about a microwavable instant cook world. We live in this world, this over-abled world.

Casey: We got Cheez Whiz, we’ve got tacos, we got salsa, we got snack cakes, we got pizza feets. We’ve got everything we want.

Cliff: It’s a world of excess.

Casey: And it goes in the microwave and we eat it in five minutes. Cook it on 75% power, just throw it in the nukerator, just cook it now.

Cliff: It’s a world of excess.

Casey: Got pasteurized processed cheese spread.

Cliff: It’s a world of excess.

Casey: I love my bagel bites. My meatless breakfast sandwiches; seven minutes at 75% power

Cliff: It’s a world of excess.

Casey: Microwavable hamburgers, spaghetti, and meatballs.

Cliff: It’s meaningless.

Casey: Microwaveable, inflatable girlfriend.

Cliff: It’s a world of excess.

Casey: A Solitary, confined sort-of-life between the refrigerator, and the microwave, and the Walmart. The Super Walmart with the superstore. The food products, the pasteurized processed cheese spread. the stuff I eat from the microwave after five minutes.

Cliff: It’s meaningless. It’s meaningless

Will: Nukerator. We’re nukrawavable. Nukerator.

Casey: Microwave, my cell phone, my pager. It’s my modern world and I love it.

Cliff: We find it only makes us fat.

Casey: My microwave fries the dynabites, and the cell phone fries my head. And I talk about it all day long. Meaningless

Cliff: It’s a world of excess.

Casey: The average conversation on a cell phone goes like this: Hello, I’m here, I’ll be there later, no, I’m going there next.

Cliff: It’s a world of excess.

Casey: Meanwhile, driving my SUV, I drive through the school house, drive down all the kids, drive down the one with the gun who was gonna kill them all because he couldn’t stand it.

Cliff: Hello, I’m helping your environment. What can I do next?

Casey: I didn’t even realize it because I was on my phone with my counselor, who was fixing my hair. I didn’t understand it. My microwave was broken and my cheeze couldn’t be warmed. Just five minutes at 75% power.

Cliff: I hold no responsibility myself. I only put the responsibility on the head of my counselor. She has it all for herself. I don’t what I’m trying to say, but I don’t have any responsibility today. Will dropped his pick, it’s not his fault. He takes it in his hands. I’ll grab it for him…

Casey: I live in a microwavable, able world. A world of isolation and communication. False pretense, false friendships.

Cliff: Long hair is European, short hair is American.

At this point, Will and I looked at eachother and realized it’d gone too far. Sorry to all that we realized it so late.

drunkmusic, betrunkmusik, music, free mp3s, mp3, more equipment than talent, audio, song, silly, embarrassing, bad, nuke, microwave song, nukerator, drunk, alcohol induced poetry, social commentary, nuclear

The first license plate to remember Nevada’s history as the host of the US’s nuclear testing grounds drew criticism for featuring a mushroom cloud (see the plate on the right, above). Now it appears folks are at it again, this time with a plate that depicts the site’s area and includes the classic illustration of an atom’s electron cloud.

All of this generated enough interest to bring the local media out to the Atomic Testing Museum to gawk at the proposed plate, including an actual-sized rendition being shown off on a Lincoln Navigator.

license plate, license plates, atomic, atomic testing, atomic tests, nuclear, nuclear weapon, nuclear weapons, atomic testing museum, nevada test site, test site, museum, heritage, history, nuclear test site

I guess not everybody in Nevada loves the Test Site as much as this postcard might suggest, but hey, what do tourists know? The image comes from _roberta’s Flickr photostream, and she doesn’t seem too critical.

About 850 miles southeast today, the Trinity Site — where the world’s first atomic weapon was detonated in a test on July 16, 1945 at 5:29:45 a.m. — is open to the public.

It’s said that visitors have already scavenged all the atomic glass from the desert floor under ground zero. Though it’s not the sort of thing you really wanna have in your pocket anyway.

tags: alamogordo, alamogordo new mexico, nuclear testing, atomic, atomic bomb, atomic weapon, mercury, mercury nevada, nevada, new mexico, nuclear, nuclear bomb, nuclear test, nuclear test site, nuclear weapon, test site, trinity, white sands, white sands missile range, white sands new mexico, white sands test range

While looking for a picture for my memorial to the bomb, I found a number of related links. This blog is sometimes nothing more than an annotated bookmark list, and this is why….

The Bomb Project describes itself as:

a comprehensive on-line compendium of nuclear-related links, imagery and documentation. It is intended specifically as a resource for artists, and encourages those working in all media, from net.art, film and video, eco-intervention and site-specific installation to more traditional forms of agitprop, to use this site to search for raw material.

Google, however, pointed me to their old index. It’s there that I found links to Bruce Conner’s Bombhead and Robert Longo’s Nagasaki, part of his Sickness of Reason gallery.

Gregory Walker at Virgina Polytechnic’s Center for Digital Discourse and Culture maintains pages of information on the effects of nuclear weapons and nuclear war. It’s here that you’ll find three videos of nuclear tests, including a house blown away, planes destroyed, and trees snapped like matchsticks. These things are scary, even rotten.com has a page on atomic bombs.

Carey Sublette’s The Nuclear Weapon Archive is included in this list mainly because it quotes H.G. Wells:

…And these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men who used them.

Finally, Animation World Network has an interesting story on Walt Disney’s nuclear propaganda. More amusing than that, however, may be this 1957 atomic revolution comic book, from which the image above is taken.

Extra: don’t forget Blondie’s Atomic.

atomic, atomic bomb, bomb, bomb test, nuclear, nuclear bomb, nuclear test, nuclear tests, nuclear weapon

In what was to be the final act of World War II in the Pacific, the United States made the first and only use of nuclear power as a weapon in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th (US dates), 1945.

George Weller of the Chicago Daily News snuck in to Nagasaki in early September 1945 and became the first American journalist to see the destruction. His stories were censored, and official sources maintained control of news about the bombings and the aftermath for many years.

Mainichi Daily News has a pair of photo galleries of Hiroshima bomb damage and how the city remembers the bomb today.

Nuclear-related stories at MaisonBisson.

tags: 60th anniversary, atomic, atomic bombing, bomb, bombing, bombing of hiroshima and nagasaki, bombing of japan, destruction, hiroshima, hiroshima and nagasaki, hiroshima bombing, japan, nagasaki, nagasaki bombing, nuclear, nuclear bomb, nuclear power, nuke, pacific war, second world war, united states, war, world war II

Via Defense Tech: Slate did a series last week titled A Nuclear Family Vacation that visited the Nevada Test Site; Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Labs; and Trinity. Extra: a slideshow accompanies the text and the authors interviewed on NPR’s Day to Day.

Related: previous nuclear stories at MaisonBisson.

tags: albuquerque, defensetech, lawrence livermore, los alamos, national lab, national labs, nevada test site, nuclear, nuclear family, sandia

George Weller won a Pulitzer Prize, a Polk Award, and was named a Neimann Fellow during his fifty-some-odd year career during which he covered much of Europe and Asia for the New York Times and Chicago Daily News. Weller died in 2002 at age 95, leaving behind a body of work that tells much of the 20th century’s events. His 1943 story about an appendectomy performed by navy pharmacist’s mate Wheeler Lipes in a submarine 120 feet below Pacific waters amid the concussive blasts of depth charges is legendary. But Weller also left mysteries, like his early reports from the ground in Nagasaki (geolocation) shortly after the US bombed it with the second nuclear device used in war. From his obit:

As U.S. forces neared Japan, MacArthur forbade correspondents to go ashore. Mr. Weller hired a Japanese rowboat to take him to Nagasaki, and the general retaliated by killing all 30,000 words Mr. Weller filed.

Others (one, two, three) are less generous and claim a government cover-up of the facts of nuclear weapons and fallout was the motive for burying the story. Whatever the reasons, Weller’s stories about Nagasaki never saw publication, and were thought lost until now.

Japan’s Mainichi Daily News reported yesterday that Weller’s 60-year old report has been discovered by his son who is still researching the files in Weller’s old apartment in San Felice Circeo, Italy (geolocation).

The stories had been typed and carbon-copied. The paper on which they had been printed had browned. The stories were typed out on about 75 pages and comprised some 25,000 words. There were also another 25 photos taken of Nagasaki soon after the bombing.

Weller’s reports included some of the first descriptions and photos of the then unknown effects of radiation.

“These patients begin with slight burns which make normal progress for two weeks. They differ from simple burns, however, in that the patient has a high fever. Unfevered patients with as much as one-third of the skin area burned have been known to recover. But where fever is present after two weeks, healing of burns suddenly halts and they get worse. They come to resemble septic ulcers. Yet patients are not in great pain, which distinguishes them from any X-ray burns victims,” Weller wrote, adding that most of these patients died after no longer than five days.

– – –

Context: Christopher Simpson’s Science of Coercion tells of how the US government and military became very crafty with their use of the media to shape public opinion during the 20th century. According to Simpson, censorship and “information” campaigns were common and often leveraged the complicity of those in the media and academia.

tags: censorship, chicago daily news, george weller, governement censors, hiroshima and nagasaki, information campaign, nagasaki, new york times, nuclear, nuclear bomb, nuclear device, nuclear weapon, radiation, radiation poisoning, radiation sickness

The above image is my followup to my Nevada Test Site Tour post from last month and comes courtesy of Adam Schneider’s very useful GPS Visualizer (you really need to see it full-sized, though). I still don’t have a cable to connect the ancient Magellan GPS I used to a computer, so I manually entered the waypoints I marked into the form and selected a few options, and viola.

Here are the points so you can have your own fun (the image above doesn’t include ‘A’):

name,desc,latitude,longitude
A,Atomic Testing Museum,36.114444444444445,-115.14916666666667
B,Main Gate,36.645833333333336,-116.00194444444445
C,Mess Hall,36.66083333333333,-115.99722222222222
D,HazMat Spill Test Facility,36.801944444444445,-115.96944444444445
E,Railroad Bridge Test,36.79944444444444,-115.93666666666667
F,Control Point,36.93444444444444,-116.05111111111111
G,Bilby Crater (208KT),37.06027777777778,-116.0225
H,Ice Cap,37.08083333333334,-116.04555555555555
I,Sedan Crater (100KT),37.177499999999995,-116.04833333333333
J,Aircraft Anti-terrorism Ground Training Site,37.055,-116.10166666666666
K,House Damaged By Effects Test,37.04555555555555,-116.07833333333333
L,House Damaged By Effects Test,37.04222222222222,-116.07

Click on the links to go to Google’s high-res images for each area.

Related: Vegas Guide Part Three: Nukes and Moon Hoaxes and Chernobyl Tour.

Technorati Tags: gps, las vegas, map, mercury, nevada, nuclear