Apollo 11 at fifty: as it happened

 awesomeness, history, rockets, science, spacecraft, youtube  No Responses »
Jul 202019
 

CBS new is again running a live stream of their historical footage, this time covering the landing of Apollo 11.

Back in ’69, they didn’t have the tech to run live TV from the actual landing. So CBS filled in the lack of footage with cel (cartoon) animation. They timed the animation to match the *planned* landing, but as is well known Armstrong had to divert to avoid landing in a field of boulders. so the animation depicts the LM on the surface well ahead of the actual event. Also of note: listening to the small sounds from the CBS news studio when it becomes clear that the LM is actually down. They (Walter Cronkite and Wally Schirra)  maintain professionalism, but only just.  Another minor note: I can think of two times when Cronkite took off his glasses on camera: announcing the death of JFK and just after the Eagle landed.

For real entertainment value, watch it with closed captioning on.  I assume a computer is transcribing the speech into text… but it’s not doing a great job of it.

It looks like CBS didn’t include the vintage commercials this time. Additionally, there’s a time jump; it was more than six hours between landing and stepping out of the LM onto the surface, but the two broadcasts are welded together here. Until Aldrin turns on the TV camera showing Armstrong on the ladder, CBS filled in the lack of video with actors in fake space suits going through the planned motions. Also interesting: Cronkite jumped the gun on when he thought Armstrong was actually standing on the lunar surface, and missed the second half of “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

This was the most amazing event in TV history, and likely in *all* of history. What makes it more remarkable is how in such short order the same public that was so entranced  by this became uttering apathetic to following missions. One might argue that Apollo 11 was the first, and the first time is inherently far more interesting. And yet… turn on the TV, and chances are fair that one or more channels will be broadcasting yet again another interminable baseball, football, soccer or basketball game. There’ve been *millions* of ’em, yet billions of people still gladly pay vast sums of money, time and attention to such objectively pointless activities.

Sigh.

 Posted by at 5:19 pm

WTF did I just watch

 AARRRGH, art, cats, Crazy, Gah., youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 192019
 

This may come as a shock, but Broadway musicals (or any musical) are not my thing. So when I started seeing references to a trailer for “Cats” being released, I paid no attention. Until I began to notice that the references kept referring to the horrifying CGI *things.” This spurred my curiosity, and I’ve added the trailer below. You’re welcome.

I assume that “Cats” isn’t *supposed* to be a Cronenbergian body-horror fever dream, but here we are.

 

 Posted by at 6:05 am

The Crazy Years

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., I'm from the government, news, politics, THIS is why Trump won, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 182019
 

For all America’s troubles, there’s one bright spot: unlike Canada, we don’t have a “Human Rights Tribunal.”

Accusations fly at human rights hearing into transgender woman’s Brazilian wax complaint

Short form: a transgender woman went to a home-based business to receive a “Brazilian wax.” But the business owner did not want to carry out the procedure since the customer was equipped with male junk and felt uncomfortable with that (and her husband didn’t want her fondling another dudes tackle). So the customer took the business to the human rights kangaroo court in Vancouver, British Columbia,  in order to ruin them, going so far as to compare the business owner to a Nazi. Which makes one wonder what kind of person wants a Nazi apply liquid-hot magmawax to their nads.

There’s just a whole lot of weird here. There’s also a lot of sad. Remember the story from a few days ago of the kid in Utah with a road-side “beer” stand, making money hand over fist with the jovial approval of the cops? Here we have a story of a woman who had carried out a cosmetic, errr… procedure on friends and family, apparently successfully, decided to make a business of it, and her very first customer put her out of business and has tied her up in an Orwellian thought-crime court.

Canada? Not even once.

Heinlein saw America devolving into chaos. But I don’t think he saw *this* sort of thing.

 Posted by at 9:40 pm

Top Gun

 aircraft, art, history, Hmm..., youtube  No Responses »
Jul 182019
 

It took thirty years to crank out this sequel. And I was all ready to dump on it, until I saw the aerial footage.

Unconventionally for a major Hollywood movie trailer, this one gives away almost nothing of the plot. What it does is show some *gorgeous* imagery that I wanna see on the big screen. Most of it even looks real, not CGI. A few details:

1) A couple shots of an F-14. The Navy retired those *years* ago. So… flashbacks?

2) One shot of Tom Cruise wearing a high-altitude helmet, another with him wearing a flight suit with the circular ring that such a helmet would attach to. I’m unaware of any such aircraft in the current US Navy; AFAIK, the U-2/TR-1 is the only plane left like that in US service. So… perhaps a bit of sci-fi element to the film, the Navy getting some new extreme-performance aircraft that Maverick test flies, perhaps?  Go ahead and set the nerd-world alight and make it an F-37 talon.

 

 Posted by at 4:37 pm

Ad Astra trailer 2: I remain unenlightened

 art, rockets, science fiction, spacecraft, youtube  No Responses »
Jul 182019
 

The second trailer for the Brad Pitt movie “Ad Astra” has come out, and it remains confusing. Specifically, the timeline. Because it certainly *looks* like Tommy Lee Jones’s character, the father of Brad Pitt’s character, seems to have been an Apollo astronaut, but now in his sons day – which would therefore seem to be *approximately* *now,* involves cities on the moon, Mars bases and tether-suspended low-altitude stations, along with 3D holographic projection technology. So… alt-history? Apollo wasn’t strangled, but instead NASA funding stayed at 4% of the Fed budget?

 Posted by at 10:35 am

Ladies and gentlemen, your 2019 Democratic Party spokespeople

 Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., humor, politics, THIS is why Trump won, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 182019
 

We have us a new Trigglypuff, being backed up by several people who are *straight* out of Clownworld central casting. Note: the language is NSFW, the intelligence is lacking, the humor is fall-down.

Whenever you see one of “the squad,” just keep in mind that *these* are their voters. Feel free to send this to your politically apathetic friends.

 Posted by at 2:11 am

This is why newspapers are going away

 dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., history, Hmm..., Meh., news, politics, THIS is why Trump won, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 172019
 

Fifty years ago, Apollo 11 was on the way to the moon. This was undoubtedly the greatest achevment in all human history. You would expect that it would be universally celebrated as such, especially in the country that made it happen. Prepare to be surprised.

 

Now, the newspapers are not incorrect when they point out that Apollo was largely the result of a “white and male” culture. That is, after all, an incontrovertible fact, just as the defeat of Nazism and Imperial Japan and Communism and slavery were the result of “white and male” cultures, as was the development of modern agricultural methods that have permitted humanity to go from a few hundred million on the edge of starvation to many billions of well-fed people, to the extermination of smallpox and the defeat of diseases like plague and cholera and typhus, to the creation of nuclear power and global positioning systems to the spread of democratic ideals and the whole concept of universal human rights. Where they fall down is in deciding that “white and male” is a bad thing that needs to be replaced.

On the one hand… keep it up. The more the whackadoodles in the media spout patently ridiculous nonsense, the more they turn off voters who would otherwise be apathetic, thus *perhaps* ensuring success for the other side. But on the other hand, the more this dribble is repeated, the more it sinks in and helps rot the culture. It would of course be nice if Bubbles Cortez and her gaggle of racist scumbag compatriots gets themselves voted out of office due to backlash against this sort of thing… but she and her intellectually vacant ilk never should have gotten voted in in the first place.

 

 Posted by at 1:12 pm

Socialism can suck it

 awesomeness, news, Utah  No Responses »
Jul 162019
 

This, my friends, is Utah capitalism at its finest:

Brigham City boy raises eyebrows with streetside beer sales

There are, of course, people getting all twitchy about this. The Brigham City Police have checked him out and given him and his business model the all-clear.

This young man, in the area of 600 South 200 East, has a twist on a lemonade stand. Yep, he’s selling beer … ROOT…

Posted by Brigham City Police Department on Tuesday, July 16, 2019

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 4:36 pm
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