GROUND ZERO: Helping to plan your escape from the apocolypse. by DARK SIDE

In the spirit of trying to keep a slow news week from making the site boring, here’s one for all you fans of nuclear disaster movies. It’s also a bonus because “Watchmen” (which premiere’s on Friday) has an apocalyptic element to its story. See? I made it relevant.

Powered by Google Maps, Ground Zero (not to be confused with the Ground Zero Blues Club located in Clarksdale, Mississippi, owned by Morgan Freeman and Bill Luckett… or GZ, New York) is a computer application that shows you the extent of nuclear devastation your area would suffer if someone dropped “The Big One.”

Go to the site, type in your address and it will calculate how far you need to drive to minimum safe distance. You can choose from a variety of bombs ranging from the “Fat Man” and “Little Boy,” all the way up to Russia’s dreaded “Tzar Bomba” which produced the largest, man made nuclear explosion this planet has ever seen.

Now this is clearly for entertainment purposes as most explosive data about nuclear bombs is classified, plus unless the application’s creators (Carlos Labs) have a nuclear physicist on their team, I doubt you can trust this data as entirely accurate.

It’s still a blast to play around with. Pun intended. Don’t forget, Coop’s “Watchmen” review will be up Friday morning!

Here’s an artist’s rendition of me failing to escape Tzar Bomba.

-DARK SIDE