Mr Speaker

Well, things look shaky for the happy continuation of modern society. Either global warming is going to get off it's lazy bum, wipe out our food supply and leave us living on the juice of cockroaches (lucky I live in Sydney). Or global warming will be averted due to the fact we have run out of fuel to burn, in which case food transportation and production will be halted and leave us living on the juice of cockroaches.

Either case will have the same result of course - our shortage of fuel/food will be balanced by an over-abundance of commercial television's delightful shock-reports that no family can afford to miss. I might try and tape as many of those as I can actually... If we can dig up a VCR they will be hilarious to watch in 40 years time.

When society finally crumbles and we are forced to fend for ourselves I am confident that people will remain calm, distributing the remaining supplies amongst everybody equally and working harmoniously toward a new beginning. Should that not happen, however, we may have to piss-bolt for our lives and live out the rest of our days in a cave. And boy, without the Internet, that is going to suck.

Keeping entertained during the immanent Apocalypse.

I don't know which will be first past the post (I've got my money on Peak Oil at the moment) but I guess we've got at least a good 5-8 years head start on either of them. As it stands, all I know about survival is that if you get lost then stay exactly where you are. Therefore I've decided to learn a bit more about living without today's mod-cons, like water.

There are three main things required for survival: Entertainment, food and water, and shelter. I figure Entertainment is the most important as there is really no point being alive if you can't do it in style, so I'll concentrate on that one and maybe delve in to the others if time permits.

So much time, so little to do.

Strike that. Reverse it. Here's a list of things I need to learn before I lose my Internet connection to crazed looters:

• Solar energy - Better get on to this one first for a couple of reasons. One - I don’t wont to live in a world without electricity, and Two - once other people realise they don't want to live in a world without electricity they will buy up all the solar resources from E-Bay. Better get in quick.
• Alcohol - Once we've got electricity we have to be able to get drunk and talk about technology. I've been meaning to try my hand at homebrew anyway. I just need to take it a step further, and learn to ferment weeds and grubs into a kind of vodka. Can't be that hard.
• Radio - I think its pretty easy to whip together a crystal set out of some twigs and some blu-tak. People smarter than me would have figured out how to broadcast signals. God I hope there's no "Morning Crew", or "The Drive-time Shenanigans", or whatever. There probably wont be ads though.
• Ham Radio - I don't know what that is, but in the first episode of A.L.F. the father is talking to his friend in Russia, or somewhere in Europe or something before he is interrupted by an alien signal. Which could be useful. And hardcore nerds are into it. Sounds like the Internet of tomorrow, today really.
• Water - purification and um, getting. And growing food that doesn't need many resources. I know, I know.. it's not real exciting, but perhaps could prove useful.
• Shadow puppets. That'd be great.
• Fire making. Serves a variety of purposes: you can't have fireworks without fire.
• Basic electronics. I wanna learn that anyway.
• Wood working and plumbing - There'll be heaps of timber and PVC left in the decaying cities and surrounding suburbs. It would be good to be able to whittle a small bird feeder or spice rack.
• Learn from the masters - watch as many episodes of The Wombles and Gilligan's Island as possible. I think I've seen a couple of both. I didn't really like Gilligan's Island but I supposed studying isn't always easy. Oh, wait, scratch Gilligan's Island. Make it The Good Life. That's got Felicity Kendal.

Better get cracking.

That's the list I came up with just then. Apart from the grammatical and typographical errors, it looks pretty fair. As you should have noted by the bullets, it's an unordered list so I might tackle the last one first and the first one second. I doubt bit-torrent has many of The Wombles episodes, so off to the video store. I have to return Shaolin Soccer anyway. Next I'll get some small solar panels and try and figure out how to power my old lappy with them. Or, failing that, my old "Computer Battleships" game.

I'll document it but. So you can at least expect a review of The Wombles on return. Stick with me, people of the internet, for important lessons in surviving the tedium of survival.

Part Two of Keeping entertained during the immanent Apocalypse