Thursday, March 27, 2008

Welcome to the new site of the Nuclear Cafe

We hit a few bumps along the way here (sorry about that; those of you with missing relatives in Cincinnati or in Novosobirsk, please check with the men in bright yellow slickers over to the side). Somehow I managed to create an entirely new radioactive blog with the url "koolaidforall.blogspot.com" but can't figure out either how to get it on my dashboard or to disappear it. But "kooladeforall" will do pretty nicely, and soon I hope everything on the old "coldwarbaby" blog will be transferred here.

For those of you arriving from Live Journal, thanks for coming. It's a testament to your loyalty that, despite months of radioactive biscuits, you still come to the nuclear soda fountain seeking company and new treats. Or maybe it's a testament to your IQ, but we'll let that rest for now.

For those of you new to the place, you may wonder how the Nuclear Cafe got started. It had its beginnings in my 8 or 9 or 10 year old head when I began to become aware of the fact that there was a Cold War, and that there were 8, 9, and 10-year-olds living in the other party to that conflict, and was unable, despite my best efforts of asking my mother "Why" questions and turning the television dial, to determine whether or not they had access to the same luxuries we had. The same fine dessines animes, such as "Road Runner" and "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show"; the same fine cuisine (Burger Chef greasy fries and cheeseburgers); and above all, the same thirst-busting elixir that adorned every birthday party table: Kool-Aid.

I didn't worry very much about this, because I forgot about it after a few days until I had a chance to ask someone from the Soviet Union if they had Kool-Aid there, some twenty years later (answer: no, as far as he knew). But that and other informal formal exchanges proved so educating and interesting that I thought I'd make a whole project out of finding out about the cultural life of kids in the Soviet Union....while allowing a space for those of us who grew up in the states in the 70s to talk about our own experiences, especially when it came to how we dealt with the whole Cold War thing.

I drank a lot of Kool Aid.

Red was my favorite.

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