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In the wake of Hurricane Sandy and last week’s tragic shooting, unsurprisingly, I have found myself online. More than would be considered healthy. Through some weird roundabout search I ended up on a whole host of sites “promoting” (this is a gentle word for the methods they employ) the purchase of long term food survival kits. The kits provide nutritional needs for as short as a few days, or for as long as a year or more. The buyer can choose enough provisions for a single person, and up to a family of 6. The food itself has a guaranteed shelf life of 25 years, but doesn’t come cheap. In addition to meals, there are other dimensions to these sites: there are survival kits that include shelter, water and weaponry. And there are medical supplies and navigation equipment to boot. In a more paranoid and despairing moment, I can easily see how one could succumb to the marketing of such preparedness. And then I consider the lives of those affected by disaster, and how, in hindsight, an investment in one of these packages might not have been such a horrible idea. If you really want to see more, go here, here and here.

Chalkboard paint started it all. I think Martha Stewart popularized it. And then Dana Tanamachi took it to new and exciting heights. I speak of chalkboard lettering. An earlier post about Dana here. The nicely packaged Chalk is available here.

Always a good idea to have some emergency first aid knowledge in one’s back pocket. From, of course, the NYPL archive.

Would you accept the charges? Seen on a traffic light pole in Narrowsburg, NY.