This is a great video for one of my favourite songs from my favourite Linkin Park album

It's 'Burning in the Skies' from A Thousand Suns. RIP Chester Bennington. It's hard to believe it's been six years since you died.

Oh, one last thing before I do that

Years ago we had a 50s Day at work, and I had a couple of interesting pictures to share. The first is of me with a Clinical Symposia journal with an exploding nuclear bomb on the cover, which is really from the early 60s, but I tried:



The second I waited to share until I was sure it was okay per company policy, as someone else is in the picture, but since the face isn't shown, it was okay. We had a hula hoop contest. I didn't win--but I did have fun. Those were the days:

Yep--here it is

Did an ancient nuclear war kill life on Mars? Conspiracy theorists claim to see a 'mushroom cloud' on the red planet

*shakes head*

Worries and hopes regarding the dangers of radiation in Japan

Hiroshima survivors fear new nuclear fallout

The cities flattened by last week's earthquake look eerily similar to the decimated buildings Shigeko Sasamori saw after an atomic bomb was dropped on her hometown in 1945.

The floodwaters from the tsunami -- the waves of debris and bodies -- remind her of the rivers in Hiroshima, Japan, swamped with corpses.

And the struggle to contain radioactive emissions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant makes Sasamori, 78, wonder if the crisis there will plague a new generation in Japan.

"Radiation is the most horrible thing, and it's more horrible to me because humans make it," she said from her home near Los Angeles. "We don't have to make that."

Sasamori is a hibakusha, or heat radiation survivor -- a name given to those who lived through the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States at the end of World War II.

For them, radiation is an invisible enemy that has haunted them, claimed their loved ones, altered their bodies and threatened their lives.

Always good to know the Air Force is on top of things

Well, except that whole live-warheads-over-your-hometown thing. Well, and I still wonder about Project Blue Book.

Wannabe Bond Villains' Last Line Of Defense

But what happens to the maintenance crew? Do they get trapped inside? Really, though, in defence spending terms, $10 million to secure the 450 Minuteman III silos is well worth it in my opinion, having spent a couple of years living in the midst of missile silos (I think ours were Titan II's, in Kansas) and another 10 or so on Air Force bases (read, Ground Zero for nuclear conflicts [a child of the Nuclear Age and Cold War, I didn't so much worry about surviving a nuclear war until I moved to Kentucky]).

But check into the plug if you plan on having a secret underground base from which to achieve world domination.

And they were flying to the Air Force Base where I grew up

VOA News - Pentagon: Nuclear Warheads Domestic Flight was 'Serious Error'

which is a little scary. I mean, I knew my father wore a radiation badge while loading bombs, but I guess I didn't really understand nuclear weapons back then. So Barksdale is where you send nukes to be destroyed. No wonder I, a child of the Cold War, never worried about surviving a nuclear attack--I knew we were up there in terms of targeting. It's one of the centres of the Strategic Air Command and the base of operations for the 8th Air Force, if I remember. It also has a honking big missile set up like an obelisk right as you go onto the base. Ah, the good old days. Did I mention the lakes filled with water moccasins and alligators (okay, one alligator, named Old George, I think) and the pine woods full of copperheads? It's amazing I lived through my childhood.