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Readers!

 

It is now July, time once again to celebrate the start of this webpage in 2010 with my annual July fund-raising campaign.

 

This year I celebrate the fifteenth anniversary since I began Behind the Black. During that time I have done more than 33,000 posts, mostly covering the global space industry and the related planetary and astronomical science that comes from it. Along the way I have also felt compelled as a free American citizen to regularly post my thoughts on the politics and culture of the time, partly because I think it is important for free Americans to do so, and partly because those politics and that culture have a direct impact on the future of our civilization and its on-going efforts to explore and eventually colonize the solar system.

 

You can’t understand one without understanding the other.

 

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Chuck Jones on Getting Started

An evening pause: “It costs money to die poor.”

For those who don’t know, Chuck Jones directed some of the best Bugs Bunny cartoons that Warner Brothers ever produced.

Hat tip Wayne DeVette.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

5 comments

  • Mark

    You might also be interested in his interview on the Archive of American Television. Three hours of the life and times of Chuck Jones. (Note: I haven’t watched this particular interview yet, but I have no doubt it will be excellent. Everything else I’ve watched on there has been just that.)

    http://emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/chuck-jones

    And here is a link to the last comic that Chuck Jones created, “Thomas Timberwolf”. This was a Warner Brothers Online creation that had the unfortunate luck of being released right after the first Dot Com bubble popped. That led to the series’ cancellation. Sad, since these are excellent cartoons. Highly recommended you give them a view.

    http://frededison.free.fr

  • LocalFluff

    Non-electric automatons as rovers on Venus’ surface, since electronics can’t stand the heat. NASA sponsors a NIAC investigation of the concept. I think readers here will find it entertaining this recent lecture at KISSCaltech by the two young mechatronics and mechanics researchers Dr. Sauder and Hilgemann. They make a little review of the history of the automaton concept. Like calculators and clocks still during most of the last century and the beginning of the space age.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU51JY6DWlE

    NIAC is normally futuristic, but this is retro! An intelligent civilization in a sea planet might have difficulties making use of fire and electricity. But there are mechanic possibilities. And if one works on it for millions of years one might achieve many things with it.

  • wayne

    Mark–
    Good stuff!
    [A modest man, Jones neglects to say he was advanced 3 grades in junior high school.]
    Have not seen the TVlegends interview, but they generally do a good job.

    One of the nicer, longer-form, informal-esque interviews, of Chuck Jones. Lots of drawing, talking, and animation clips. (From a Dayton PBS station)

    World Of Cartooning 1985
    Mike Peters & Chuck Jones (Part 1 of 2)
    https://youtu.be/oLra7kJun1k
    22:52

    One of the Warner brothers, is noted by Jones to have remarked to him, “The only thing I know about our animation division is, we draw the Mouse.”

  • wayne

    not a yuge Disney fan myself, but Iwerks was as well, an “Acme super-genius,” in the realm of sequential visual story telling.

    “The Hand Behind The Mouse:
    The Ub Iwerks Story” (Trailer)
    https://youtu.be/M3MFIa71y_8
    2:00

  • wayne

    LocalFluff-
    interesting video, I will watch the whole thing.

    Q: you guys have any beloved, indigenous, National cartoon character’s, in your homeland?

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