Six young Americans to spend week in bunker

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http://www.smh.com.au/news/9912/27/world/world6.html

Six young Americans to spend week in bunker

New York: If the world comes crashing down at the threshold of the new millennium, six young Americans chosen by the music channel MTV for a special project may be the lucky survivors.

If, on the other hand, the world decides to hang on, the channel may have pulled off a big publicity stunt.

Obviously banking on the latter scenario, MTV has put three men and three women in a makeshift bunker in the basement of the New York Times Building from yesterday for a seven-day monitored survival experiment.

Their new digs will offer bare-bones accommodation with no windows to the outside world.

But every minute of their stay, except for private moments in the bathroom, will be broadcast to the channel's website, MTV.com.

"Of course, this is absolutely not bomb-proof. It is entertainment first," said Kim Morgan, producer of the program. "But people can learn a lot from the Bunker Project."

The new survivalists will feast on the army's MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) and listen to instructions proffered by real military experts in survival techniques.

The instructors will, in turn, write performance reports about their trainees' ability to survive Doomsday, which will be immediately posted on the Internet.

A psychiatrist will be on hand to regularly assess the survivalists' mental health. And a 100-strong MTV crew will forgo the holidays in a bid to make the project a success.

"The Project Bunker combines voyeurism with reality television and online audience participation to create an entirely new form of entertainment," argued Allie Eberhardt, artistic director for MTV.com.

The bunker extravaganza will end on January 1, when the six will emerge to see daylight after seven days' cyberspace publicity.

They will still have a chance to catch the end of a big New Year's bash on New York's Times Square, according to Morgan.

"I mean, if the world is still around," she added.

-- Uncle Bob (UNCLB0B@AOL.COM), December 27, 1999

Answers

Fer all the....damn...whatta waste...I'm not even going to start...

-- Billy Boy (Rakkasan101st@Aol.com), December 27, 1999.

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