Late Afternoon Fun Thread

Not really a Quick Hits. Just some blow-off tuff. Palate cleanser.

A house with a "luxury" underground bunker is on sale in Las Vegas for $5.9 million.

It's a pretty good bunker. But, as with an iceberg, 90% of this house, and its value, is underground.

Not sure people will pay six bills for that.

Here's the house. A Standard Reference Sedan is included in the photo for size reference.

Pretty modest, pretty blah for almost six millie.

But here's the bunker below. Fans of the underrated, very conservative-tilting Blast from the Past movie will get a kick out of this.

The bizarre luxury pad 2.5 miles east of the Last Vegas Strip was built for personal use by investor Jerry Henderson in 1978. A subterranean living enthusiast who owned a company called Underground World Homes, Henderson also owned a 45,000-square-foot underground house in Colorado. He even built two bedrooms and an 800-square-foot caretaker house into his sunless Las Vegas bunker, where he and his wife Mary lived until his death in 1983.

I'm sure that Blast from the Past was inspired by that bunker, now that I see that the guy died in 1983, and that it was a well-known thing.

If you haven't seen the movie, you should. The premise is that Christopher Walken is a JPL engineer who's a bit paranoid about the Russkies in the early 60s. He's built an extensive and sophisticated bomb shelter with supplies and power to last as long as the half-life of strontium 90 or whatever -- 30 years, he figures.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he incorrectly thinks LA's been bombed and he and his pregnant wife retreat into the shelter and lock the locks for 30 years. Their son is born in the shelter, and is taught the mores and etiquette of the 50s (and very early 60s) while the world above degenerates into, well, our world.

In the nineties, the son, now thirty years old, is sent out into the world to see if it is habitable or, if there are still too many mutants, to buy supplies to last another thirty years, and to find a bride to bring down into the shelter as well.

The joke is that he sees the world of the nineties with the piercings, tattoos, homeless lunatics, drug addicts on the street, etc., and thinks it really is a post-apocalyptic world recovering from the bombing. The other joke is that, having only socialized with his very square parents for 30+ years, he's very unhip and awkward himself.

But the other other joke is that, having been raised with the values and mores and cultural knowledge of the fifties, he is actually a paragon in all other ways apart from hipness, and is a total stud in all areas ranging from manners, to moral code, to self-defense (his dad taught him several times per week), and to dancing (his mom taught him every day.)

Really cute movie. Very conservative.

This is a man right here.

Florida Man is Best Man:

posted by Ace at 05:17 PM

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