#earth 1961

[year2000electronics]

heres my spidey/marvel au earth-1961's version of the lizard and dr connors! inspired by him being from florida i wanted to get a more outdoorsy look for him, and also inspired by rob zombie since rob zombie voiced connors in spider-man TNAS on MTV

[misscouchpotatobew]

I just realized the original Mothra movie and Godzilla vs Mothra 1992 have similar ending scenes. A nice little nod to the original.

[givemewallywestorgivemedeath]

Hmmm

Okay I have a lot of thoughts here....

The costume is great and the time travel is a Flash classic. I think everyone would've preferred if she was adopted given the Garrick's history, although tbf they never explicitly state that she wasn't adopted. They could've adopted her on the day she was born or something.

Otherwise, The Boom is... lmao she's a boomer.

The dates are interesting though. REALLY interesting. Because she's almost exactly one month younger than Wally West. I'm not kidding, Wally was 10 in 1959 and his birthday is Jan 16. So Wally was born Jan 16, 1949 and Judy was born one month later on (Valentine's day) Feb 14, 1949.

And she doesn't elaborate on how she got her powers, huh? Was Wally, as the President of the Blue Valley Fan Club, maybe visiting the Central City chapter of the Flash Fan Club? Did Barry maybe try to impress two kids that night? (Technically three because Ace is retconned as being there now as well)

They've moved Wally's birthday up over the years so they might not acknowledge that but... yo she's the same age as him.

[pixiedeadbeat]

Janet Munro, The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961).

[deep-space-netwerk]

So Venus is my favorite planet in the solar system - everything about it is just so weird.

It has this extraordinarily dense atmosphere that by all accounts shouldn't exist - Venus is close enough to the sun (and therefore hot enough) that the atmosphere should have literally evaporated away, just like Mercury's. We think Earth manages to keep its atmosphere by virtue of our magnetic field, but Venus doesn't even have that going for it. While Venus is probably volcanically active, it definitely doesn't have an internal magnetic dynamo, so whatever form of volcanism it has going on is very different from ours. And, it spins backwards! For some reason!!

But, for as many mysteries as Venus has, the United States really hasn't spent much time investigating it. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, sent no less than 16 probes to Venus between 1961 and 1984 as part of the Venera program - most of them looked like this!

The Soviet Union had a very different approach to space than the United States. NASA missions are typically extremely risk averse, and the spacecraft we launch are generally very expensive one-offs that have only one chance to succeed or fail.

It's lead to some really amazing science, but to put it into perspective, the Mars Opportunity rover only had to survive on Mars for 90 days for the mission to be declared a complete success. That thing lasted 15 years. I love the Opportunity rover as much as any self-respecting NASA engineer, but how much extra time and money did we spend that we didn't technically "need" to for it to last 60x longer than required?

Anyway, all to say, the Soviet Union took a more incremental approach, where failures were far less devastating. The Venera 9 through 14 probes were designed to land on the surface of Venus, and survive long enough to take a picture with two cameras - not an easy task, but a fairly straightforward goal compared to NASA standards. They had…mixed results.

Venera 9 managed to take a picture with one camera, but the other one's lens cap didn't deploy.

Venera 10 also managed to take a picture with one camera, but again the other lens cap didn't deploy.

Venera 11 took no pictures - neither lens cap deployed this time.

Venera 12 also took no pictures - because again, neither lens cap deployed.

Lotta problems with lens caps.

For Venera 13 and 14, in addition to the cameras they sent a device to sample the Venusian "soil". Upon landing, the arm was supposed to swing down and analyze the surface it touched - it was a simple mechanism that couldn't be re-deployed or adjusted after the first go.

This time, both lens caps FINALLY ejected perfectly, and we were treated to these marvelous, eerie pictures of the Venus landscape:

However, when the Venera 14 soil sampler arm deployed, instead of sampling the Venus surface, it managed to swing down and land perfectly on….an ejected lens cap.

[nasa]

Black Scientists and Engineers Past and Present Enable NASA Space Telescope

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is NASA’s next flagship astrophysics mission, set to launch by May 2027. We’re currently integrating parts of the spacecraft in the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center clean room.

Once Roman launches, it will allow astronomers to observe the universe like never before. In celebration of Black History Month, let’s get to know some Black scientists and engineers, past and present, whose contributions will allow Roman to make history.

Dr. Beth Brown

The late Dr. Beth Brown worked at NASA Goddard as an astrophysicist. in 1998, Dr. Brown became the first Black American woman to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy at the University of Michigan. While at Goddard, Dr. Brown used data from two NASA X-ray missions – ROSAT (the ROentgen SATellite) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory – to study elliptical galaxies that she believed contained supermassive black holes.  

With Roman’s wide field of view and fast survey speeds, astronomers will be able to expand the search for black holes that wander the galaxy without anything nearby to clue us into their presence.

Dr. Harvey Washington Banks 

In 1961, Dr. Harvey Washington Banks was the first Black American to graduate with a doctorate in astronomy. His research was on spectroscopy, the study of how light and matter interact, and his research helped advance our knowledge of the field. Roman will use spectroscopy to explore how dark energy is speeding up the universe's expansion.

NOTE - Sensitive technical details have been digitally obscured in this photograph. 

Sheri Thorn 

Aerospace engineer Sheri Thorn is ensuring Roman’s primary mirror will be protected from the Sun so we can capture the best images of deep space. Thorn works on the Deployable Aperture Cover, a large, soft shade known as a space blanket. It will be mounted to the top of the telescope in the stowed position and then deployed after launch. Thorn helped in the design phase and is now working on building the flight hardware before it goes to environmental testing and is integrated to the spacecraft.

Sanetra Bailey 

Roman will be orbiting a million miles away at the second Lagrange point, or L2. Staying updated on the telescope's status and health will be an integral part of keeping the mission running. Electronics engineer Sanetra Bailey is the person who is making sure that will happen. Bailey works on circuits that will act like the brains of the spacecraft, telling it how and where to move and relaying information about its status back down to Earth.  

 Learn more about Sanetra Bailey and her journey to NASA. 

Dr. Gregory Mosby 

Roman’s field of view will be at least 100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope's, even though the primary mirrors are the same size. What gives Roman the larger field of view are its 18 detectors. Dr. Gregory Mosby is one of the detector scientists on the Roman mission who helped select the flight detectors that will be our “eyes” to the universe.

Dr. Beth Brown, Dr. Harvey Washington Banks, Sheri Thorn, Sanetra Bailey, and Dr. Greg Mosby are just some of the many Black scientists and engineers in astrophysics who have and continue to pave the way for others in the field. The Roman Space Telescope team promises to continue to highlight those who came before us and those who are here now to truly appreciate the amazing science to come. 

To stay up to date on the mission, check out our website and follow Roman on X and Facebook.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

"I don't see any god up here. But from here the Earth is beautiful, without borders or divisions."

The first words of a human in space.

Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, April 12, 1961.

Thanks to Clara Statello

[mioritic]

“I Have Not Lingered in European Monasteries”, Leonard Cohen

from The Spice-Box of Earth (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1961)

[theoutcastrogue]

Cartoon depictions of the homeless increasingly reflect the hostility of today’s political leaders toward people on the streets. We’ve gone from images of charming hobos with bindles to zombies taking over cities. If you consume any news at all, you’ve probably noticed that the United States is pathologically cruel to its homeless citizens. This May, the brutal killing of Jordan Neely—who was strangled to death, at the age of 30, simply because he was unhoused and shouting on the Manhattan subway—captured the national spotlight, but it was just one of many such cases of unprovoked violence. In January, two cops reportedly kidnapped a homeless man in Hialeah, Florida, drove him to an “isolated and dark location,” and beat him unconscious. That same month, art dealer Shannon Collier Gwin faced battery charges after he sprayed a homeless woman with a hose outside his San Francisco gallery, barking “Move! Move!” at her. (Predictably, Gwin got a lenient plea deal of just 35 hours of community service.) Elsewhere in the city, homeless San Franciscans have been attacked with chemical bear spray on at least eight occasions. Other assaults have been more impersonal but no less vicious. On July 14, the city of Houston abruptly closed its only public cooling center in the downtown area, potentially condemning anyone without shelter to suffer heatstroke in 90-degree weather. Among the property-owning class, the phenomenon of hostile architecture—sidewalks with spikes that stab anyone who tries to sleep, benches with iron bars, and the like—has become de rigueur. The widespread callousness and lack of compassion are both infuriating and hard to comprehend. How on Earth, we might ask, did things get this bad? [...]

Looking back at older cartoons, one of the things that stands out immediately is the absence of negative attitudes toward the homeless. In fact, during the Golden Age of animation, creators seemed to have had a real affinity for the poor and unhoused, often placing their most iconic characters in that role. There’s a wonderful 1948 Warner Bros. short called “Riff Raffy Daffy,” in which Daffy Duck is looking for a place to sleep—first on a park bench, then a trash can, and finally a furniture display in a shop window—and has to dodge the harassment of the police, as represented by Porky Pig in a little blue uniform. (Literally, the cop is a pig!) Or, in the 1950 cartoon “Homeless Hare,” Bugs Bunny’s rabbit hole is destroyed by a new construction project, leading him to unleash his usual slapstick mayhem against the developers until they put it back. In these cartoons, homelessness is something inflicted on people by outside forces—gentrification and the real estate business, in Bugs’ case—and something which can be successfully resisted. Even Disney cast a homeless dog as a romantic lead in 1955’s Lady and the Tramp, contrasting Lady’s sheltered naivety with Tramp’s superior knowledge of the world. The title invokes the memory of Charlie Chaplin’s “Tramp” films, which similarly brought dignity and humanity to the role of a homeless man. (Bugs Bunny, too, takes inspiration from Chaplin, and multiple Warner animators have drawn him as the Tramp.) In 1961, Hanna-Barbera’s profoundly underrated Top Cat followed the adventures of a gang of wisecracking Manhattan alley cats, who, like Daffy, are always outwitting a meddling policeman. At worst, classic cartoons may trivialize the suffering and danger associated with homelessness—there’s a certain recurring image of the carefree hobo carrying a bindle, which paints the whole subject in a romanticized light—but the homeless themselves are rarely disparaged or made the butt of the joke. Quite the opposite. 

It took a few years, but cartoons caught up to the Reaganite turn. In episodes from the ’90s and early 2000s, there’s a palpable shift in the way homeless characters appear compared to earlier decades. The perspective is different: we’re now seeing them through the eyes of comfortably housed characters, rather than their own. Often they don’t even get proper names. [...] This trajectory leads us, perhaps inevitably, to SpongeBob SquarePants. [..] Squidward gets accused of stealing a dime by his comically greedy boss, Mr. Krabs, and quits his job in a fit of outrage. We then flash forward to see Squidward, now bedraggled and unshaven, living in a cardboard box on the street and begging for change. [...] Mercifully, the ever-cheerful SpongeBob gives Squidward a place to stay—but the moment he’s safely off the street, Squidward turns from a sympathetic victim of circumstance into a lazy, entitled freeloader, straight out of a Reagan speech. He makes no effort to find work and loafs around SpongeBob’s house for ages. [...] Eventually, an exasperated SpongeBob writes “GET A JOB” in his alphabet soup, before shoving him (bed and all) back to work at the Krusty Krab. [...] Worst of all, though, the episode suggests that homelessness can be solved on an individual basis if the people in question simply stop being lazy and “GET A JOB.” This is the biggest myth of all. In 2021, a statistical analysis by the University of Chicago found that 53 percent of people in homeless shelters, and 40.4 percent of unsheltered people, do have jobs. The problem is that their wages are too low, and rents are too high. According to statistics from the same year, it’s impossible for someone working a full-time, minimum-wage job to afford a single-bedroom apartment in 93 percent of U.S. counties, and there are no states in which someone can rent a two-bedroom space on the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. In other words, homelessness has little or nothing to do with personal responsibility, or lack thereof. It’s a consequence of large-scale economic decisions made by landlords and bosses. [...]

— Alex Skopic

[charlesoberonn]

Superhero comics have been doing multiverse stuff for decades before the current trend

The Flash #123 (1961) AKA "Flash of Two Worlds"

They've been doing massive multiverse events for decades as well

Crisis on Infinite Earths #1 (1985)

[hero-israel]

sorry if this is a dumb question and i understand if you don't want to answer but do you have links to posts explaining why israel isn't an apartheid state? i swear i read posts like that on your blog before but i don't know how to refind them

Israeli Arabs have legal equality with Jews. Same restaurants, same pools, same seats on the bus, same voting rights. I would favorably compare the treatment of Israeli Arabs with that of any minority group in any country on Earth.

The West Bank has a military occupation, with (pretty fast) checkpoints and no right to vote about the government running that military. Military occupations are bad and some of us have been against this particular one for decades. The anti-occupation movement hasn't gotten anywhere, they've just been stuck. Being stuck in a military occupation for X more years doesn't make it apartheid, just like being stuck in a bad marriage for X more years doesn't make you divorced. Meanwhile, the 2020 Abraham Accords showed that multiple Arab states were willing to accept this unchanging status quo and deal with Israel as it is. Those two factors - the stagnant, unchanging nature of the occupation, and the clear loss of interest in the Palestinian cause - combined to have the latest crop of awareness-raising college interns at some shifty NGOs try to force change by abracadabra'ing together a new concept of "apartheid" that exists solely for Israel. And it is working, just like "Christ-killer" and "stabbed Germany in the back" worked.

In 2010, Human Rights Watch published an extremely critical report on Israel's occupation of the West Bank. Dragged them up one wall and down the other. Yet there was no accusation of "apartheid" there. In the report, page 33, they cited a lawsuit by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel that had said it was apartheid for the West Bank military occupation authorities to ban Palestinians from driving on Highway 443 after repeated firebombings / shootings against Israelis. The Israeli High Court ruled that it was inappropriate to ban Palestinians from the road, and it re-established their equal driving access - they have had it ever since. The court also said that the accusation of apartheid behind that now-ended ban was dishonest, because the security concerns were not based on race; there were and are no "Jewish-only" roads anywhere, even when WB Palestinians were denied road access, Israeli Arabs could and did drive there. The HRW 2010 report included a long summary of that finding, without challenge. As bad as they saw Israel, they agreed it wasn't apartheid.

Then in 2020 came the Abraham Accords, so while nothing at all had changed in the administration of the West Bank, in 2021 HRW said it actually was apartheid. It really is that simple. The most famous legal convention banning apartheid specifies that it is race-based. HRW instead went with a different legal convention on apartheid, one that says it could be based on national origin if it involves discrimination among citizens of the same country.... and then they up and added their own twist to that, saying they will consider it apartheid if there is discrimination based on national origin AMONG PEOPLE WHO AREN'T CITIZENS OF THE SAME COUNTRY. In a very real sense, HRW declared Mexico is an apartheid state because Americans can't vote in its elections.

In 2022, Amnesty International followed with their own report, saying that not only was the military occupation now "apartheid," but that Israel itself had been an apartheid state ever since it was established in 1948. This moral perversion had the effect of saying Israel literally INVENTED apartheid since in May 1948 it didn't even exist in South Africa yet. It also said that Amnesty International - founded 1961 - had been looking at an apartheid the whole time but never recognized it. To make things even more dishonest, Amnesty said they "are not claiming Israeli conditions are analogous to South Africa," meaning anything that shows how Israel is different from South Africa doesn't count. They're using the South African word for the South African policy but it's actually not like South Africa at all so be quiet, neener neener no backsies.

I shouldn't have to take that seriously. Neither should anyone. Palestinians and their advocates should be ashamed to have to lean on such an obvious bad-faith lie.

Nelson Mandela, who died in 2013, never once accused Israel of apartheid, and instead repeatedly said he supported Zionism and a 2-state solution. Mandela's lawyer, still alive, says the accusation is a lie. Mansour Abbas, leader of the Arab Islamist party that joined Israel's governing coalition in 2021, says the accusation is a lie. And if people want to bandy around NGO business cards, here is the International Committee of the Red Cross in 2017:

“The Red Cross was very familiar with the regime that prevailed in South Africa during the apartheid period, and we are responding to all those who raise their claim of apartheid against Israel: No, there is no apartheid here, no regime of superiority of race, of denial of basic human rights to a group of people because of their alleged racial inferiority. There is a bloody national conflict, whose most prominent and tragic characteristic is its continuation over the years, decades-long, and there is a state of occupation. Not apartheid.”

There's a lot more you can see about the shifty terminology, unreliable sourcing, and longstanding culture of antisemitism and racism within Amnesty International. People who can cite chapter and verse of why the Salvation Army, Autism Speaks, Chik-Fil-A and Harry Potter are problematic should not be shocked.

[year2000electronics]

i am OBSESSED w this cover so i redrew it in my spidey au

[youryurigoddess]

“The farthing… has vanished”

Remember that line from the Nazi Zombie Flesheaters minisode? Sick and twisted. And we need to talk about the reason why, even though the magic trick in question is nowhere near as spectacular as the Bullet Catch. Let’s start with a quick recap:

The farthing was a British coin worth one quarter of a penny, discontinued in 1961 due to its plummeting worth. The reverse featured the image of a wren, one of Britain’s smallest songbirds with plumage in rather drab shades of beige and brown. Reminding you of someone?

A popular design of a sixpence, the bigger coin in this set, minted in the 1920s and 30s depicted oak branches with acorns. Which means that seen from close quarters, so basically Crowley’s perspective, Aziraphale’s vanishing coin trick leaves empty branches with no bird in sight.

As if that image wasn’t traumatizing enough for almost everyone in the Good Omens fandom post S02E06, the etymology of wren’s name in most European languages refers to royalty in some way. Like a literal king or otherwise supreme bird. That’s why killing a wren or harassing its nest is traditionally associated with bad luck. In certain parts of France it’s still believed that the robbing of a wren’s nest will render the culprit liable to be struck by lightning.

In Irish the wren is called a trickster, which connects to the ancient (as in: mentioned by Aristotle, Aesop, and Pliny) fable on how wren became crowned in the first place — by proving that intellect beats strength:

On one occasion a general assembly of birds resolved to chose for their king that bird which could mount highest into the air. This the eagle apparently did, and all were ready to accept his rule when a loud burst of song was heard, and perched upon the eagle’s back was seen an exultant wren that, a stowaway under its wing, had been carried aloft by the kingly candidate. The trickiness angered the eagle so much, says one tradition, that he struck the wren with his wing, which, since then, has been able to fly no higher than a hawthorn-bush. (Ernest Ingersoll)

In art and folklore this little bird symbolizes rebirth, immortality, protection, and the promise of spring. As a luckbringer it was supposedly present at the stable in Bethlehem when Christ was born; and and Irish proverb runs: “The robin and the wren are God’s two holy men.”

But there’s also a catch. According to legends, it was the flapping of the wings or the song of the wren that betrayed the first Christian martyr, Saint Stephen, while hiding from the mob, and led to his stoning by the Sanhedrin — the highest tribunal consisting of the Head Priest and the Jewish elders.

That’s why December 26, his remembrance day, is celebrated in the UK and Ireland as Wren Day. Its highlight was a traditional bird hunt, where the wren as king of the birds was hunted and subsequently paraded through the town and rural areas on top of a pole or holly branch, decorated with ribbons and colored paper, as a substitute of the ancient human sacrifice of the Year King for winter solstice. The wren boys still travel from door to door singing, dancing, and playing music, demanding money to “bury the wren”, but fortunately no more animals are harmed in the process.

With Aziraphale being chosen as the new Supreme Archangel and literally disappearing from the face of the earth in the season finale, his becoming a scapegoat or a sacrifice to a greater, communal goal might be a real possibility when something goes wrong with the Second Coming. The good news is that this level of danger should be enough to get the Ineffable Husbands back on speaking terms.

[leonardcohenofficial]

i know leonard cohen’s poem “travel” is not about joni mitchell because it was first published in the spice-box of earth which came out in 1961 well before they got together but idk how this man was literally able to write a poem about a relationship he hadn’t even had yet down to the watching her sleep (and wondering who in the world she could be, implied)

[theroyalsandi]

Diana, Princess of Wales (01 July 1961 - 31 August 1997)

On this day, 26 years ago, No wars ended or began that day. Nor did any natural disasters strike. There were no earth-shaking discoveries made, no records shattered, no feats accomplished. Yet it was a day that both stunned and united the world like few others in history. It was the day Diana died.”

[radiofreederry]

Happy birthday, Frantz Fanon! (July 20, 1925)

One of the most enduring and influential anti-colonial theorists of all time, Frantz Fanon became acquainted with racist colonial violence growing up on the French Caribbean colony of Martinique. During World War II, Fanon enlisted with the Free French forces, and experienced further racism from Europeans during his time fighting fascists on the continent. After the war, he studied psychiatry as his political consciousness continued to grow, and in 1952 he published Black Skin, White Masks, which discussed the psychological impact of colonialism on Black people. He worked as a psychiatrist in Algeria for a time before deciding that he could no longer support the French colonial project in Africa and defected to join Algeria's National Liberation Front in its struggle for freedom. He continued to put out a number of influential texts, including his last and most famous, The Wretched of the Earth. In poor health, Fanon died in 1961 at the tragically young age of 36, but his legacy is outsized for his age, having influenced a bevy of revolutionary figures, including Che Guevara, Malcom X, Kwame Ture, and Huey P. Newton.

“To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people.”