This is cute and clever. Kevin Parry made a stop-motion video with just a water hose sprayed at a wall -with him between them. Here’s a look at the process.
In the 1980s, we were always on the verge of a total nuclear war annihilation because we had a Republican president (the fear and promotion thereof died down when we got the second Republican president of the decade).
Although perhaps children of other earlier decades also would have thought the same. Ray Bradbury’s 1950 story “There Will Come Soft Rains”, collected in 1950’s The Martian Chronicles, includes this vivid passage:
Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air with scatterings of brightness. The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titantic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hand raised to catch a ball which never came down. The five spots of paint- the man, the woman, the children, the ball – remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer. The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling light.
Hey, the way 2020 is going, a nuclear exchange almost seems likely. Although I’d bet on India/China rather than anyone involving the U.S. But these are strange days indeed.
I had an idea for a similar story about the same sort of thing called “The Last Span Falls” about the last bit of a bridge falling sometime in the far future. I never got around to anything but the title and conceit, though, the bad habit of which leaves me with only three books in print-on-demand in 2020.
