Printouts of every Unfogged post and comment thread.
Which reminds me, every Survivor contestant that shows up not knowing how to make a fucking fire deserves a kick to the groin.
Kucinich is really short but his wife is all super-tall, right? He's thinking practically; I'd bet there's a lot of relatively clean meat on a tall vegan.
Also, the words "not knowing how to make a fucking fire" are superfluous in 5.
Sunscreen. Never forget your sunscreen.
Hell, if it's a desert island, there won't be any potable water or substantial plant life to survivie on, so taking a big bottle of, say, Oxycontin, would probably be the best idea. No sense prolonging the pain of death-by-dehydration.
6: really. It's excusable on the first Survivor, maybe, but on the innumerable sequels? Is there any reason you wouldn't attend at least a couple Boy Scout meeting so you could Be Prepared?
Richardson's answer makes me suspect that he's running as the Manly-Man Democrat.
Nobody said a gun? And nobody but Kucinich said Kucinich's wife? What a pack of complete fucking sissies.
Richardson's answer makes me suspect that he's running as the Manly-Man Democrat.
After reading this I went to see if his answer was "Your mom".
I'd have to go with a DVD box set of Man vs. Wild. Might as well leave an ironic corpse.
Huckabee's "laptop with satellite reception" seems more practical than "boat."
I think the correct answer is "Whoever thought up this dumb ass hypothetical so they can die of dehydration, too."
Unless he spends all his time printing out the Unfogged archives.
17: Someone on the Drum site suggested one of those radio distress beacons with the GPS built in so that it can broadcast your location. Better to leave the sailing to the professionals.
To take the question seriously, while "Boat" is a good sarcastic answer, isn't the obvious practical answer a machete? For an all around necessary tool, you could hardly do better.
21: Actually, tarp is better. It can be used to rig up a ghetto still even in the desert. Of course, you'll also need a pan of some sort to collect/cleanse/distill the water, and if there are any plants around then a machete will be almost a necessity for getting around and collecting food and vine water...
So Mr. or Ms. One Item is screwed no matter what, though I would give Brownback the best odds excluding the joke answers.
I didn't see anything about Tutsis on the island.
If it's a pitcher's-mound-with-palm-tree desert island, as in old-time one-panel cartoons, a tarp, to protect against exposure—I'm very pale—or capture any rain you might get is actually about the most practical thing I can think of. Tancredo is one of those loons who makes sense within his absurd little world.
A several-acre wooded island, or several square mile one as in Treasure Island, a cutting edge capable of heavy and light use, and doubling as a weapon. Sounds like a machete.
What you really want is not only a tarp and a pan to collect the water, but a long rubber tube that you can have sitting in the pan and leading out from which you can drink the water. If you have to remove the tarp every time you need access to the water, the amount of water you can collect in a day decreases markedly. Better only to remove the tarp to toss in fresh plant matter.
A Real Doll. You don't have to share any of the food and water, and no backtalk.
But perhaps not the best answer if you're running for president.
22: Right. With a machete you can make stuff out of big leaves, open coconuts, chop firewood, use it as a lever to move rocks, clean fish, open shellfish, sharpen sticks to use as spears... assuming desert means deserted rather than waterless, a machete's going to do you a lot more good than a tarp.
(These thoughts come to you courtesy of a combination of Peace Corps experience, and recently watching Cast Away at my inlaws. Man, did Tom Hanks not survive that movie. I couldn't watch it without muttering "He just died" every five minutes.)
A nuclear weapon and note-taking supplies.
Wait, that's two things.
The cast of Lost, because they'd know what to do.
34 - That only works if you're stuck on a Chinese desert island.
You could at least make it to Canada.
I'm afraid the other side of the world for almost all of North America is water.
A hatchet and a smaller knife. Maybe a magnesium firestarter if permitted.
39: You just need the right island.
28: Ok, assuming you're stuck on a forested tropical island such as the Samoan islands, a machete is certainly the right answer. You won't lack too much for clean water, shelter or building materials, so your main priorities will be collecting food and creating vessels to collect water.
In other environments, you're mostly trying to secure water and shelter. The machete won't be a huge help in that without the enormous leaves or thinner branches of tropical trees and palms (you'd be better off with a hatchet).
Admittedly I've never been stuck in these situations yet, but this book has been a good companion in most of my rural travels.
47: Yeah, I was kind of assuming the island was selected to give you a shot at survival. Anyplace much less hospitable than the Samoan archipelago you're going to die regardless of what you bring with you.
Would you, for sure? If you could catch some fish, you could live for a while--that would be food and probably just enough liquid to keep you going--until the scurvy got ya.
I think you don't die of scurvy from a mostly-fish diet.
Is there no low-tech way to desalinate water? If you have water in something with a top, don't you get evaporated/reconstituted water at the top? Is that still salty?
However, if you're relying on the fish to keep you hydrated, I think you're probably in trouble.
I think you don't die of scurvy from a mostly-fish diet.
There you go. Natural lifespan, baby.
With fish and water you can last quite a while.
Is there no low-tech way to desalinate water?
I'm pretty sure that the answer to that is no, and if there were, the world needs to know about it right now.
For low volumes (like, for one person) you can do things like make a dew-catcher.
53: A low-tech still will get rid of almost all of the salt, enough to make it drinkable. That's actually how the majority of desalinized water in the world is processed.
saran-wrap pyramid will do it. so you'd want saran-wrap.
58: It's low-tech, it just requires one hell of a lot of energy for a large-scale process.
Dang thought I could get away with half-assed googling. Give me a second, I only barely remember it from "Voyage of the Mimi."
They do something similar in the NYorker article I linked.
Interesting that DK considers his wife an item.
And, wow, jealous of him:
The one-time Democratic presidential candidate married 27-year-old Elizabeth Harper on Sunday in a park alongside Cleveland City Hall. It was the third marriage for the twice-divorced Kucinich, who is 58.
The marriage license says the bride was born in Upminster, England. Her English home is located in a rural area near a tenth-century church about 25 miles east of London.
The bride is a consultant for a monetary-policy think tank in Chicago.
If you're on a desert island, you're not worried about the cleanliness of any fresh water available, so you don't need the solar still to make clean water. This is a guess, but I'd say that if you're relying on a solar still to make fresh water -- evaporating sea water because there's no fresh water available -- that you're going to die: you're in a low-enough humidity environment that the amount of water you're going to get out of the still won't make up for the sweating you do managing it.
Who needs a grocery store? Amazon delivers groceries now. I'm with the guy who said a laptop and a wireless connection.
39: Botswana, baby! Whether that's an improvement on someplace in the middle of the ocean I do not know.
Satellite phone'd be nice, for sure.
Re: fish and salt water diet: the late Dr. Alain Bombard (cool name!) proved fairly decisively that you can live a long time on a diet of fish, plankton and small amounts of sea-water. See Wikipedia.
Re: cutting tools: Either a machete or a hatchet would probably be just as useful. Or you could bring a Woodsman's Pal, those are pretty cool.
Re: Castaway (Robert Zemeckis, 2000): The whole point of the movie is that the most important survival tool is good morale/creative problem-solving skills. But failing that, the contents of the one package that Tom Hanks' character doesn't open -- a fully charged, prepaid satellite phone -- runs a close second.
I'm not sure of the veracity of this statistic, but Cody Lundin, author of 98.6: The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive claims that most survival situations last just 72 hours before rescuers arrive to find either a survivor or a corpse. So the morale part can be just as important as the water.
Semi-pwnage upon preview.
Whaddya mean? A bunch of it was original.
It summed up the entire conversation, including the points you hadn't made yet.
There are reasons why we do this "culture" thing.
78: Hmph. I'm not against pushing your limits, but that whole thing sounds like a needless exercise in machismo and groupthink. If you want to know how long you can go without water, just stop drinking water. You can do it in the comfort of your own home. Doing it out in the desert where you could die is a lot crazier and stupider than any of the body modification stuff we were discussing the other day.
But the real question is whether one can make decent fondant with only a machete and a solar still.
That is terrible. The Times just did a puff piece about Bernstein, the camp's owner, a week or two ago.
Of course, if you really want to survive, it helps not to be an immigrant in LA.
Something is fucked up when people have to work that hard at making difficulties for themselves. After thousands of years of war and pestilence and early death, we're lucky enough to live in a time and place where we can get clean water from a tap in the kitchen whenever we want it. And do we appreciate that? No, we we have to go try to prove we'd have been kick-ass Apaches.
Don't you guys watch movies? The most essential things you need to survive on a desert island are Scarlett Johannson and a skimpy outfit for her to wear during the early part of the ordeal.
78. Darwin award winner or also ran, you be the judge.
85. Helpful urban survival skill- do not throw rocks at riot cops. They won't think it is as funny as you do.
The book "deep survival" is pretty good:
http://www.amazon.com/Deep-Survival-Who-Lives-Dies/dp/0393326152/ref=ed_oe_p/102-7040267-9588112
Interestingly, page 170 says that kids 6 and under have pretty good wilderness survival rates--- better than kids 7-12. Kids 6 and under tend to just focus on getting comfortable. Staying warm and the like.
"Desert" v. "tropical" - these are politicians - do you want to give them a fighting chance??
89: Yes, yes TLL, I'm sure those grandmothers and small children who got beat up really had it coming to them.
I am disturbed that Huckabee made the answer that seemed the most realistic to me.
91: Doesn't the "desert" in "desert island" mean wild and uninhabited (or at least uncivilized; cannibals may be allowed) rather than waterless? I kind of think of your prototypical desert island as being some remote volcanic thing somewhere in the tropical Pacific.
92. I'm surprised it hasn't made a bigger splash. It wasn't even the lead story here in L.A. But it is my understanding that when the cops started shooting the rubber bullets, people beat feet and some kids and grandmas got hurt, not that Darrel Gates waded into the peaceful crowd with his truncheon flailing. I did see some news crews caught in the middle, so I wonder what they were saying to the cops.
I'm now accepting applicants for my wilderness survival school. It's been a few years, but I still got it.
Tip of the day: if there isn't any liquid water around, and you have something like a trash bag, you can put the bag over the end of a leafy branch in the sun. This will produce a surprisingly large amount of water.
So there it is: I would bring a trash bag.
Bonus if you lose hope and want to asphyxiate yourself.
Perhaps that's the impetus behind "Tarp."
95: Of course, they might not have "said" anything. It's not exactly uncommon for cops to have cowboy attitudes and be inculcated with notions of how the protesters are "terrorists" and therefore go off half-cocked. Believe it or not, the marchers aren't always asking for it.
I'm befuddled at the general approach to the question.
If you're stranded on a desert isle, what you really want to have is a reservation at a decent resort on the island. That way, you can just knock back rum drinks and go swimming.
This stuff isn't all that complicated.
The Professor, obvs. He knows how to cook.
Isn't this whole topic just a complicated way of asking Maryanne or Ginger?
I'm now accepting applicants for my wilderness survival school. It's been a few years, but I still got it.
So you'll bring plenty of water with you, Matt F?
I would like 300 or so electoral college votes so than my
stay on the island will not be in vain.
Also I would like my desert island to be Sagaponack
dunes on Long Island.
fools. nevermind the laptop-- if neither my spouse nor Kucinich's is available the answer is obviously: vibrator with very long lasting battery. Hell, at least I'd be smiling when I died.
