Strange but true: “Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” is a mere fifteen days older than I am.

One of both Peter Sellers (back in the days when he might play half the characters in a film) and Stanley Kubrick’s greatest films, Dr. Strangelove is the ultimate send-up of the cold war mentality and the old “they can’t beat us if we wipe out all human life first!” mentality. While I didn’t see the film until I was in college, I was raised with plenty of cold-war “the Russians are going to bomb us all into oblivion” and “there might be a Russian sub off Long Island right now!” and air-raid drills in elementary school, all of which I’m sure goes a long way to explaining my fascination with the apocalypse.

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“Southland Tales” isn’t the only apocalypse targeting Los Angeles… “Right at Your Door” also concerns a Los Angeles apocalypse.

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62 years ago today the United States of America dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

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Since the “nuts” campaign saved Jericho for at least seven more episodes, CBS has put mildly renewed effort into promoting it, including rerunning it skipping most of the slow first part of the season and making the pilot available for free at the iTunes Store.

CBS Entertainment’s president, Nina Tassler, has also admitted that the long winter hiatus for Jericho likely contributed to its decline. I still think that if the episodes preceding this break had been stronger, the break wouldn’t have hurt it as badly. Being scheduled against American Idol couldn’t have helped much, either. She remains clear that if fans want CBS to continue running the show that they need to bring in more viewers.

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Apple’s iTunes Store has made the pilot episode for Jericho available for free download. Just follow this link to get it.

Free downloads on iTunes don’t stay free forever, and I can’t predict how long this one will stay free, so you might want to grab it while you can.

If you’re not familiar with downloading from iTunes, the first thing you’ll need is iTunes itself. You can download iTunes for free from Apple. It runs under MacOS X or under Microsoft Windows, and you don’t need an iPod or any other Apple hardware in order to use it to play music or watch videos.
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Just a note that reruns of Jericho begin tonight, Friday July 6th on CBS. Tonight CBS airs the first episode of Jericho, followed next week by the recap episode that summarizes the boring first half of its season, followed wisely by the less boring second half of its first season. If you want CBS to run more Jericho after its seven-episode second season order, watching it (and buying it on DVD when it comes out will probably make more of an impression than continuing to send them nuts.

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CBS is airing reruns of the pilot and second half of the first season of Jericho starting on July 6th. I suspect that before deciding on its limited renewal they weren’t going to rerun it at all. Keeping with the second half of the first season seems a wise idea… that’s when the story picked up and became more interesting.

Ain’t It Cool News’ article on the subject (link below) talks about the implausibility and general boringness of the first half of the season - which, combined with the winter break, is probably what sank the show - and how the show improved when it stopped being about life in a small post-nuclear-war town.

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With global warming all the rage, we don’t hear much about that other bugaboo of the 70’s - nuclear winter. The engine of global warming is the dumping of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere - these gases absorb more heat from the sun and raise the general temperature of the planet. Nuclear winter works the other way - exploding nuclear devices throw carbon soot into the atmosphere which shields us from the sun’s warmth and lowers temperatures around the globe.

With Russia’s Vladimir Putin accusing the US of trying to restart the cold war and the US’ proposed missile defense shield for Europe all over the news recently, perhaps we’re not as far away from nuclear winter as we might have thought.

In the 60’s and 70’s the only countries capable of a nuclear exchange that could bring on nuclear winter were the US and the USSR… recent rhetoric aside, fortunately that scenario has seemed unlikely for many years now, but it’s no longer the only possibility.
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I didn’t mean for this to be “Jericho Week” but apparently it is.

First - wonder what CBS is going to do with twenty tons of nuts? They’re donating them to charity, including a charity that will likely send some of them overseas to US troops.

With the most pressing issue dealt with, CBS has announced that they’ve struck a deal with the makers of Jericho to bring it back mid-season for at least 7 episodes.

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Possible congratulations, Jericho fans… rumor has it that CBS is caving to the pressure applied by almost 20 tons of nuts being sent to CBS in protest of the show’s cancellation.

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