The House in the Middle (cue ominous music)

Mark Shea with some pithy commentary (including a good Chesterton quote) on this strange little public service message:



Yeah, making sure your magazines are put in a rack is going to save you in the event that a nuclear bomb falls in your neighborhood. Why don't they tell you to do something useful, like get under a table?

I only wish they had fleshed this drama out a bit. Here's the pitch I'd write for The National Clean-Up Paint-Up Fix-Up Bureau:

In the moment after the atom bomb fell, Betty realized that her tidy white house with its pretty sidewalk border of pansies would be the only one left partially standing on her quiet, residential street long after the ramshackle eyesore belonging to the Hobarts, as well as the Jeffersons' unpainted, rotting hovel, had gone up in flames, their screaming inhabitants igniting as quickly as the bottles, trash and unsightly old newspapers which littered their yards and which had so vexed Betty every laundry day. As she fell back against her plastic-draped sofa, upsetting her spotlessly tidy coffee table, she recalled how the Hobarts' cat had always pooped in her azaleas and she felt a keen satisfaction at its annihilation - or was that just the sensation of being vaporized?