I need to just turn off the television whenever the world nuclear is mentioned. I spent 15+ years in the nuclear industry, and all these shows make me want to leap up on a soapbox and annoy everyone.

I really will stop ranting now.

Well, that's the joy of shows like Buffy and Firefly. I'm not experienced in vampires or horses in zero-g.

I wince whenever the word "firewall" is used in TV or movies... Generally it follows with somebody HACKING THE INTERNET using a POINT AND CLICK program. Haxor!

Yeah, I'm willing to believe that demons can do anything, and I'm okay with warp drive, transporters and having the entire universe speak 20th century English.

I'm not sure how, or if, you could translate the amounts in commercial iodine into a useful dose.

You can't, because elemental iodine doesn't have the same effect, and more importantly because iodine is toxic. So even if it worked, drinking that much iodine would kill you a lot faster than radiation would.

Thus, my rage.

I love Jericho - it's family drama meets nuclear apocalypse. So much to love. If you want a really depressing nuclear war tv series, watch the UK 80s drama 'Threads'. Stunning television.

Ginger, don't stop ranting. I'm always enthralled by how much knowledge you have packed in your skull. Actually, the same is true for Strega.

I seem to like Jericho, despite myself. I liked it before the hiatus. I like it now, although it does seem way better since the hiatus, and we already know more from it, than we've learned from Lost in three freaking seasons. Sometimes, what I like about it is mocking it, but it's an enjoyable mock, as opposed to the mock evoked by Studio Aaron Sorkin on the Aaron Sorkin Strip.

Finally, I'm glad the Jericho characters are not bald and covered in sores and whatnot, because then they wouldn't be pretty. I hate that sort of realism visual realism in any extended showcase. I also hate movies about the dark ages or middle ages when everyone all dirty, and yes I know everyone was all dirty, but I don't want to look at it for hours.

The town I used to live and work in was the proud home to three nuclear reactors in the local power plant. Soon after moving in, the town mailed me a happy little packet of potassium iodide pills. It was very apocalyptic-welcome-wagon of them.

If they'd had that kind of exposure, without modern medical care, many of them wouldn't have lived longer than a miniseries. I like Jericho, mostly because I'm a sucker for post-apocalypse fiction, and it really has gotten better. I got a little dizzy being beaten with the exposition anvils in the first couple of episodes. Let's face it. I'm still watching 24. Clearly massive errors of fact are not going to deter me from watching. I've watched as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Jericho reminds me of Alas Babylon, making me all nostalgic for that type of scifi and almost completely removing fact-checking from the circuits that are active when I watch it.

Alas Babylon is one of my favorite books, and I thought of it also in connection with Jericho.