A morning pause: Apropos of my essay earlier this week on the need for more good will between everyone, here’s a Christmas cartoon from 1955, made by a generation still close to World War II and trapped in the Cold War.
An evening pause: I think every leader in the world needs to watch this, as I think our modern rulers don’t seem to know what these weapons can do.
Hat tip Alton Blevins.
An evening pause: This pause is my apology for forgetting to schedule something tonight. Pauses shall resume as normal tomorrow.
An evening pause: From the animated film Beauty and the Beast (1991), a truly great movie made when Disney Studios was still sane.
An evening pause: A short “what if?” that gives the solar system a nice sense of scale.
Hat tip Alton Blevins.
An evening pause: The animation is by Steve Cutts. It seems perfect for today, income tax day. Note that I post it as someone who does not own a smart phone and empathizes entirely with the film’s main character.
Hat tip Mike Nelson.
An evening pause: The scale of the universe is far larger than we can imagine.
Hat tip Dan Morris.
An evening pause: I honestly don’t understand how this works, and the video doesn’t really explain it. It is quite amazing nonetheless. More information here if you want to dig about to figure it out.
Hat tip Cotour.
An evening pause: For those who grew up in the 1960s. Everyone else is sadly deprived.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
An evening pause: Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
An evening pause: This was the first of a World War II cartoon series directed by Chuck Jones, voiced by Mel Blanc, and written by Theodor Geisel aka Dr. Seuss and designed to with humor raise the work ethic of soldiers and officers.
Hat tip Lazurus Long, who adds that “it was a bit racy and [thus] popular with the servicemen.”
Today our military authorities probably consider our servicemen and women to be too fragile for such stuff. And hopefully this evening pause will air before Google’s YouTube decides it must be banned.
An evening pause: An animation that actually is real and useful, showing the full rebuild of a dirt bike engine.
What struck me is the number of parts and pieces and their complexity. Pause and consider the engineering thought that went into creating this and all such engines.
Hat tip David Eastman.
An evening pause: A cute little animated film about what we may find in our search of the heavens.
Hat tip Gary McDaniel.
An evening pause: Even death needs a break once and awhile.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
An evening pause: About two years ago I said to Diane that I’d never seen any of The Simpsons animated TV show. Neither had she. Since then we have watched all the available episodes on DVD, covering most of the first twenty seasons.
What first impressed us about the show was how actually normal and family-oriented it was, in the beginning. It was not the “edgy” ugly portrayal of America its reputation had implied.
Over time that theme was more and more lost, though whenever the writers went back to those roots the show shined. Even so, what was most impressive was how the show managed somehow to remain fresh, for most of that time period. Except for a period around season nine, the satire and jokes remained solid for almost all of the first twenty years.
Since the last ten years have not been put on DVD, we won’t likely see them. No matter. Twenty years of The Simpsons was great, but it was more than enough.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman, who used numerous musical quotes from the series to find many great evening pauses.
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.
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.
An evening pause: The future appears it will become a very lonely and isolated place, very divorced from reality.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
An evening pause: This is hard to explain, other than to say that sometimes style and beauty is hidden in plain sight.
Hat tip Jeff Poplin.
An evening pause: Even in death there can be humor.
Hat tip Martin Kaselis.
