A basement of curiosities

I never realized how bulky plasma televisions were until I tried to move one. They're even heavier than the old tube televisions.  I had to get my son to help me move it out of his grandfather's house so that the handyman could finish painting the living room.  No wonder plasma TVs didn't make the cut.  They were discontinued in 2014.  Hard to believe it was more than ten years ago when Daina and I bought this television for her father and mother.

At the time, these massive sets were considered the best of the best with a much higher picture quality than LED televisions.  However, things change.  LED sets have improved tremendously and Plasmas have been relegated to appliance recycle centers.  Although I'm tempted to hang onto this one and put it in our basement.  It still works just fine.  

It's funny how technology has this period of experimentation with different prototypes before one dominates the market and pushes all the other prototypes to the fringes.  It was the same with Betamax tapes and Laser discs in the 80s.  Both pretty good technology but couldn't compete with VHS and compact discs which quickly overtook the market.  Now you can stream most movies and television shows, so VHS and DVDs have also been made anachronistic.  However, I still have a huge library in the basement.

I signed up with Netflix when it was first made available in Lithuania.  For the most part I have been satisfied but there is a lot I miss on the other streaming services.  For instance, I badly wanted to watch Slow Horses after hearing so much about it.  Doubtful Apple would be relinquishing its hold on the television series anytime soon so I found a way to watch the first two seasons and we enjoyed every minute.  Half tempted to buy it on DVD should it ever come available.

I bought a Blu-Ray player not so long ago but it wasn't universal and I returned it.  I never understood why DVD and Blu-Ray discs had to be region specific.  It used to be relatively easy to buy a universal DVD player but not Blu-Ray player, or atleast change the settings on a DVD player.  I will keep hunting because I see that they are out there.  Blu-Ray definitely offers much better quality viewing.

The thing with discs and other hard copies is that they are permanent archival records.  If an apocalypse were to happen as depicted in Leave the World Behind, it would be nice be able to watch old movies in the basement, provided I still have a source of electricity.  Solar panels are becoming increasingly more affordable and we plan to fit a few on the roof to heat water and have an emergency power source.  Our rooftop is not aligned with the sun very well to go completely solar as our neighbors have done.

I would love nothing more than to go off grid, moreso to no longer be held hostage to "energy" companies than an apocalypse.  Our heating bills have soared through the roof again this winter for no reason that we can understand.  Gas is readily available yet we are paying premium prices.  The local energy companies offer all sorts of lame excuses for the rate hikes.  It is pretty clear they are simply price gouging, as they take advantage of the current global uncertainty.

This war in Israel has turned everything on its ear.  The siege on Gaza has entered its fourth month and taken virtually all the attention away from Ukraine.  That's all I hear about when I flip through the English-speaking news channels.  At least Lithuanian television still reports on Ukraine, usually in the most dire of terms with the added worry that Russia will soon invade the Baltics.  We are a bit paranoid over here I'm afraid, but then history has not been very kind to these small countries.  

Sausio 13 is fast approaching, a date that lives in infamy.  The Soviet Union rolled into Vilnius with a long caravan of tanks to stifle its independence on a brutally cold January night in 1991.  For five long days Gorbachev held Lithuania hostage.  Eventually he backed down, as he couldn't very well afford to lose the humanitarian image he had cultivated in the West.  The Soviet Union collapsed a few months later.

Many were hoping that would be the case with Russia after failing to overtake Ukraine, but Putin has clung on and now seems to be in a better position than he was in the Fall of 2022 when it looked like the Russian forces were on the edge of retreat.  Unfortunately, Elon Musk decided to pull the plug on Starlink.  Communication was lost and the Ukrainian military was forced to regroup on the Western side of the Dnipro River.  Since then, Vlad has secured a land bridge to Crimea and can bide his time until Western resolve crumples, leaving Ukraine easy pickings.  That's the pessimistic view so often reported on Lithuanian news.  

I'm more optimistic.  I think Biden will be able to secure some sort of military aid package in this next House spending bill even if he has to relent on more funding for border control.  Unfortunately, Israel remains a thorn in his side by carrying on this nonsensical war in Gaza long after the horrendous actions by Hamas last October.  It makes me wonder if Netanyahu is actually working with the Russians, much like the Republican party in the US.

I know one thing, I will not listen to any news in our bunker should the whole world come unhinged.  I've pretty much cancelled it out as it is.  There is nothing I can do to alter events and I'm tired of listening to this endless stream of woes and petty conceits that define politics today.  It just makes me angry.  However, I hold out hope that clearer heads will prevail at some point and I won't be forced to go underground.

It's not like our basement will offer that much protection.  It's a pretty big, about 70 square meters.  There is a large central room with a long bookcase on one wall.  Two futon couches and a carpet sit in the middle of the room.  I had it all cleaned up at one point but since then more clutter has accumulated. A laundry room and storage are situated to one side, and a sauna, shower and bathroom to the other side. Small clerestory windows in the laundry and kettle rooms.  Ceiling is low.  The fluorescent canned lights don't provide ample illumination and we will replace them with LED lights.  Our son is good at this sort of thing.  

When Adakras was a teenager, he liked to hang out in the basement with his friends and formed a Southern rock band but his friends were more into Goth metal.  For the longest time one of his friend's drums sat in the basement.  I thought about learning to play them myself as he said Emilijus wasn't very good, but eventually he came and took them.  Adakras lost interest as well, becoming more obsessed with cars and electronic equipment.  His old acoustic guitars sit in the basement as well.

Ever since Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, we have thought about what we would do in the event of an attack.  We have stocked the basement at various times for emergency situations.  There are two large water tanks that Daina bought not so long ago that sit in the corners.  The storeroom is filled with emergency supplies and rations, which we pilfer whenever we run out of flour, salt, sugar or toilet paper upstairs.

It would just be a temporary solution in case of attack.  It is reinforced with concrete so it should handle an initial air strike.  Despite all its paranoia, Lithuania has done little to prepare itself in case of attack. There are no bunkers or any form of emergency shelter beyond school basements, and we have seen what little good they have done in Ukraine.  Lithuania is not like Finland, which has built bomb shelters to house its entire population.  Finland has almost twice as many people than Lithuania.

Of course, you can't live your entire life underground.  You have to come up for air and more food supplies, unless you plan to eat grubs.  No telling what the world will be like on the outside.  One assumes not very hospitable judging by all the movies we have had to prime us for the event.

The other night, we were watching the original The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price.  While he had been able to survive the plague, thanks to a bat bite he had taken many years before, he wasn't able to survive the people that inhabited this brave new world.  The ending was overly melodramatic with the special forces trapping him in a church and throwing a spear through him on the altar.  However, we had enjoyed the movie to that point, as much as you can a post-apocalyptic movie anyway.  Daina is a sucker for survivalist movies and television shows.  We had watched The Last of Us not so long ago, which was essentially an updated version of this classic movie.

The Last Man on Earth (1964) was based on a 1950s sci-fi book, I am Legend, written by Richard Matheson during a time of uncertainty.  The book has influenced everyone from Stephen King to George Romero in creating their post-apocalyptic fiction.  I also have a lot of books in the basement should I fail to secure a power source in a time of crisis, including a number of science fiction books.  One of my favorites is Neville Shute's On the Beach.  It's not really science fiction but rather an Australian melodrama set on the eve of nuclear destruction, not much unlike Leave the World Behind.  I often thought about writing a post-apocalyptic story myself but then I figured what's the point?  There are already so many books and movies in this vein.  Should the world end, I would want something more pleasant to read before the zombies or whatever miscreants invaded my bunker.

In the meantime, we have a basement of anachronistic curiosities including an old Victrola I bought at an antique shop when I first came to Vilnius.  I even have a few 78s that I can play on it, although it needs a bit of work as the wood base is slightly warped from the dampness.  The plasma television will make a nice addition, although it is probably better to have things that don't require electricity should everything come undone.