Category: The Evening Pause

A nightly pause from the news to give the reader/viewer a bit of classic entertainment.

The view from the cockpit

6:01 pm

An evening pause: This short video shows us what it is like for the pilot and co-pilot as they prepare for departure from Frankfurt, Germany, on a cargo flight to Africa and beyond. Note that even though the crew is German and the airport is German, all communications with the control tower are in English. Note also that their altitude is recorded in feet, not meters. The American big lead in the commercial airline industry in the first half of the 20th century allowed it to set the standards, including the use of feet and English in these matters.

Hat tip Tom Biggar.

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Ivashka and Baba-Yaga

6:01 pm

A evening pause: An entertaining animated cartoon from Soviet Russia, 1938. It subconsciously reveals much about Russia’s rough society of that time between the world wars. Even in the 1930s Russia was still largely an illiterate peasant culture, less than three generations since the freeing of the serfs and now ruled by Stalin and the communists with an iron hand.

Hat tip Jim Mallamace.

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Blind Willie Johnson – Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground)

6:01 pm

An evening pause: This cover of Johnson’s song is by someone who for some reason doesn’t give his name on his youtube page. Blind Willie Johnson was a gospel singer from the 1920s who had been blinded as a child. If you want to hear him performing his magnificent guitar piece go here. There are no visuals, sadly, which is why I choose this cover, as it is I think important to see the playing to understand how brilliant the piece is.

Hat tip Mike Nelson, who in noting that Johnson’s recorded performance was one of the pieces of music included on the Voyager spacecraft the U.S. sent beyond the solar system, asks, “Is this the behavior of a “systemically” racist society?”

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Robots

6:01 pm

An evening pause: This sequence from the animated film Robots (2005) is a very typical scene from almost every modern Hollywood film, whether real or animated (though the difference is getting harder to see as they put more and more CGI in every film). Regardless, it is fun, and takes the idea of a Rube Goldberg device to a very strange extreme.

Hat tip Bob Robert.

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MeTrónomoS – One Small Step

6:01 pm

An evening pause: For this anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s first step on the Moon, a short musical piece, with images, that nicely encapsulates that 1960s space effort. If you are passionate about the human effort to become a space-faring civilization and you don’t know who and what mission each clip portrays, you need to find out.

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