Brooklyn Nuked!! Nation Cheers As Millions Of Hipsters Are Annihilated!!

It’s almost like something from The Onion, but it’s a mock newspaper from Civil Defense propaganda from the early 1960s promoting fallout shelters. I found it via John Ptak’s collection of ephemera, but he found it at this long and detailed post about the history of the fallout shelter at a blog called CONELRAD Adjacent, which focuses on that era. That post also has this excellent photo of officials putting up a fallout shelter sign in front of the Massachusetts State House:

Next time I’m over by the State House, I’ll look to see if it’s still there. I’ll bet it is. Of course, Brooklyn is still there, too. For now.

Larger version

Nothing like a little infographicporn to brighten one’s day. This one asserts that if you took all 300 million-or-so inhabitants of the United States and packed them all into one place at the population density of Brooklyn, NY (which is to say 35,000 people per square mile), everybody would fit into an area about the size of the state of New Hampshire. (graphic found at Strange Maps, actual origin unknown)

Now, if you really wanted to pack ‘em in, you’d want to go with the population density of Mumbai, which has a population density of 76,793.5 people per square mile. That would squeeze everybody into a space the size of Connecticut, with each person’s own space coming to about a little over 4,600 square feet. Heck, a one-bedroom apartment in New York is lucky to be 750 square feet, so that’s PLENTY of room for each person!

Sorry, no pets, no smokers.

I guess conditions are a bit milder in the New York City area, because here’s a first-hand account in the NYT from a woman who got to help out with a small sugaring operation right in the heart of Brooklyn. And by “small operation” I mean one sugar maple in some guy’s backyard, but they still do the whole thing with the taps and plastic tubing and buckets just like the farmers in Maine and Vermont. She got two gallons of sap for her efforts and then set up her own evaporator station in her kitchen to boil it down into Grade A syrup. You need 10 gallons of sap for 1 quart of syrup, so she didn’t get much finished product, but the very idea of boiling your own maple syrup on your stove seems like it would be a kick.

Here’s a clip from my favorite TV show, Dirty Jobs, where Mike Rowe, the host, helps a maple syrup farmer tap his trees, to help you get a sense of what the job is like. You can do it in your own backyard, too, if you have a sugar maple tree. This webpage has a video that tells you how to distinguish a sugar maple from other maple trees (which do not produce edible sap), since sugar maples are not as common in settled urban areas as Norway maples.