What a blast it was to receive such a positive response to last week’s show which celebrated the great Tom Lehrer’s 89th birthday. And yes, I use the word “blast” in the context of this promo most deliberately! It’s nice to know so many of the Mushroom Crowd appreciates his irreverent humour and wit, along with his musical and literary genius.
One of the songs we played on last week’s show is an old favourite of mine, a song about nuclear annihilation done in the style of a rousing gospel hymn, called “We will all go together when we go”.
Added to that, on Bonnie’s recommendation, this week I read an old sci-fi book set during the height of the cold war, in which the Soviet Union sought to hijack a US space shuttle. Ooh, things were pretty tense for a while there, that I can tell you. It looked at one point as if the two super-[powers were going to make Tom Lehrer’s vision come true and blow us all up.
Bonnie has told me that as a girl, they had bomb shelters at her school and would do drills from time to time. That’s something we didn’t experience here in New Zealand.
Well that got me thinking, if a nuclear war had been started, how would we have learned about it on the radio? I’ve done some research, and have uncovered some incredible, captivating, if not spooky and macabre facts and recordings. And while we think of the cold war as a thing of the past, the world is still not a particularly safe place, so we’ll look at modern means by which we might learn of our imminent demise or the demise of a major metropolitan centre.
If you have memories of your country’s emergency broadcast system being tested, or used for real, or you remember drills, it would be fascinating to learn about what that was like for you.
Yeah I know this is a heavy, heavy subject, I mean like, totally not cool dude, but as a broadcaster who has broken his share of big news stories, I’m fascinated by the way big stories are covered and the preparations that are made for them.
But fear not I say, this section of the show is only but a part. We’ll be keeping things light and breezy for much of the time with some fabulous 1970s cheese! Do you remember who the youngest Osmond is? No cheating now. No Googling, I have a key logger built into this message, so I’ll be able to tell. OK sorry I made that last soup up. It’s Jimmy! You know that, right? He celebrates a birthday, and that’s a good reason to play lots of cool Osmonds stuff. I do like the Osmonds, and my older sisters were totally besotted! Besotted I tell you!
Every day that I spend with my beautiful bonnie Bonnie is such a precious gift, and she’ll be back with another groovy bulletin.
We’ll look back at today in history, and of course hear plenty of your contributions via email, Twitter, and the phone. What a time we shall have!
All you need to do to be a part of it is to lock in Mushroom FM at 2 Pm Eastern, 7 PM in the UK, 6 AM in New Zealand, and join me for The Mosen Explosion. If you don’t, well, the fallout could be considerable!