(1) NOVEL IDEA: READ THE WORDS. Audible’s new program to run text along side its audiobooks is now in beta testing — “Audible’s Captions Program Stirs Fears, Frustration Among Publishers”. Publishers Weekly posts quotes from those questioning whether Audible has these rights, and if the program violates copyright.
…At least one major publisher, Simon & Schuster, has already deemed the program illegal. In a statement released by a spokesperson, S&S said: “We have informed Audible that we consider its Captions program to be an unauthorized and brazen infringement of the rights of authors and publishers, and a clear violation of our terms of sale. We have therefore insisted that Audible not include in Captions any titles for which Simon & Schuster holds audio or text rights.”
The Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild issued statements that also said Audible’s contracts do not give the company the right to create a text product. “Existing ACX and Audible agreements do not grant Audible the right to create text versions of audiobooks, whether delivered as a full book or in segments,” the Guild statement noted. “The Captions program appears to be outright, willful copyright infringement.”
(2) DOODLE. The July 18 Google Doodle is a 4-minute animation of the Apollo 11 mission narrated by astronaut Michael Collins.
50 years ago, NASA’s Apollo 11 mission changed our world and ideas of what is possible by successfully landing humans on the surface of the moon?—and bringing them home safely?—for the first time in history. Today’s video Doodle celebrates this moment of human achievement by taking us through the journey to the moon and back, narrated by someone with firsthand knowledge of the epic event: former astronaut and Apollo 11 command module pilot Michael Collins.
(3) NOT THE A-TEAM. Too bad Jules Verne isn’t around to cash in on this: “French sci-fi team called on to predict future threats”.
The French army is to create a “red team” of sci-fi writers to imagine possible future threats.
A new report by the Defence Innovation Agency (DIA) said the visionaries will “propose scenarios of disruption” that military strategists may not think of.
The team’s highly confidential work will be important in the fight against “malicious elements”, the report states.
It comes amid efforts by the French to innovate its approaches to defence.
(4) CROWDFUNDING SUCCESS. Paul Winters closed the “Help Gahan Wilson find his way” GoFundMe to further donations, saying they have enough. They raised $63,165.
Thank you to everyone who donated to Gahan’s gofundme. The response was amazing. We have stopped taking donations. We think that we have raised enough to take care of Gahan. Negotiations have begun again with the State and we believe that in a few months time, he could be back on State aid. Gahan is doing well. He retains his sense of humor and he is well cared for with constant support from his family. This is, and continues to be, a hard road. I’m sure there are many of you out there who have gone through this (or, are going through it). Again, Gahan’s family thanks all of you for helping. We will keep the campaign up (without taking more donations) so that we can continue putting up the updates.
(5) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites you to slurp matzoh ball soup with Will Eisner Award-winning writer/editor Mark Evanier as his Eating the Fantastic podcast turns 100.
Evanier started his comic book career way back in 1969, and over the years has written issues of Blackhawk, Groo the Wanderer, DNAgents, and (like me) Welcome Back, Kotter. He worked as Jack Kirby’s production assistant, which eventually resulted in his award-winning book Kirby: King of Comics. He’s won multiple Will Eisner Awards, as well an an Inkpot Award and a Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award.
Our meal took place at Canter’s Delicatessen in Los Angeles, resulting in a sense of terroir greater than any other episode. As you’ll hear, he’s eaten there with both Jack Kirby and Stan Lee over the years — though not together — and he has plenty to say about both of them.
He’s also celebrating this milestone by introducing a new icon, one which better represents what the show’s all about.
By the way, those 100 episodes have featured 165 guests in 173 hours and 19 minutes of ear candy.
(6) OVERCOMING. Mary Robinette Kowal’s space article for the New York Times is now online — “To Make It to the Moon, Women Have to Escape Earth’s Gender Bias”:
If we do not acknowledge the gender bias of the early space program, it becomes difficult to move past it. One of the most compelling things about NASA is its approach to failure. Failure is not penalized in its culture; it is valued for the things that it can teach to save lives or resources in the future. As Bobak Ferdowsi, a systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has said, “our best mistakes are the ones we can learn from.”
What are the lessons to be learned from NASA’s failure to fly women during the Apollo era?
The most recent lesson emerged in April, when NASA had scheduled a spacewalk that was, quite by accident, staffed by two female astronauts. The agency had to restaff the spacewalk because it had only one spacesuit that was the correct size for both women.
This is not an indictment of NASA in 2019. But it does demonstrate a causal chain that begins with the Apollo program and leads through to present-day staffing choices.
And The Daily Caller called attention to the Times essay in “Going To The Moon Is Sexist, Claims NYT Article: Spacesuits Accommodate Male Sweat, Ladder Rungs Spaced For Men”, which also includes some other writers’ tweeted responses —
(7) MOON SUITS. The Washington Post’s feature about astronaut wear,“How To Dress For Space”, is a little less woke:
Explore five iconic spacesuits in 3-D and more than 50 years of spaceflight in a dialogue between The Washington Post’s space industry reporter Christian Davenport and fashion critic Robin Givhan.
…Christian: Unlike mission patches for other flights, the Apollo 11 patch did not have the names of the crew members. Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins felt their names should be left out because the flight represented all of humankind and the 400,000 people involved in the Apollo program.
…Robin: I love that there was so much attention paid to the idea that we are doing this for peace, for exploration and for scientific discovery. Despite how big and potentially intimidating this suit could be, it is not, it looks like a happy uniform. And the patches are so Boy Scout.
(8) TODAY IN HISTORY.
- July 19, 1972 — The Thing With Two Heads starring Rosie Greer and Ray Milland stalked into theaters.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born July 19, 1883 — Max Fleischer. Animator, film director and producer. He brought such animated characters as Betty Boop, Popeye and Superman to the screen and was responsible for a number of technological innovations including the Rotoscope and Stereoptical Processes. (Died 1972.)
- Born July 19, 1927 — Richard E. Geis. I’m reasonably sure I met him at least once when I was living out there. Interesting person. He won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer twice; and whose science fiction fanzine Science Fiction Review won Hugo Awards for Best Fanzine four times. His The Alien Critic won the Best Fanzine Hugo once in a tie with Algol), and once in sole first place. And yes, I enjoyed reading the Science Fiction Review. I’ve not any of his handful of genre novels, and certainly haven’t encountered his soft core porn of which there’s a lot. (Died 2013.)
- Born July 19, 1937 — Richard Jordan. Actor who was in Dune as Duncan Idaho, Logan’s Run as Francis, and the Queen of Air and Darkness help him, Solarbabies as Grock. He also the lead in Raise the Titanic as Dirk Pitt, a perfectly awful film as well. Not to mention he was Col. Taylor In Timebomb, a film that got a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 33%. (Died 1993.)
- Born July 19, 1947 — Colin Duriez, 72. Yes, an academic, this time devoted to Lewis and Tolkien. Author of such works as J. R. R. Tolkien: The Making of a Legend, The C. S. Lewis Chronicles: The Indispensable Biography of the Creator of Narnia Full of Little-Known Facts, Events and Miscellany and, errr, Field Guide to Harry Potter. Well money is nice, isn’t it?
- Born July 19, 1950 — Richard Pini, 69. Husband of husband-and-wife team responsible for creating the well-known Elfquest series. I’d say more but there’s nought information to be had on him.
- Born July 19, 1957 — John Pelan, 62. Committed (more or less) the act of opening serial small publishing houses in succession with the first being Axolotl Press in the mid-Eighties where he published the likes of de Lint and Powers (before selling it to Pulphouse Publishing) followed by Darkside Press, Silver Salamander Press and finally co-founding Midnight House. All have been inactive for quite awhile now and he’s been editing such anthologies as Tales of Terror and Torment: Stories from the Pulps, Volume 1 for other presses though even that has happened for some years.
- Born July 19, 1963 — Garth Richard Nix, 56. Writer of children’s and young adult fantasy novels, to wit the Keys to the Kingdom, Old Kingdom, and Seventh Tower series. The Ragwitch which I read quite some time ago is quite excellent and being a one-off can give you a good taste of him without committing to a series.
- Born July 19, 1969 — Kelly Link, 50. First, let me note that along with Ellen Datlow, she and her husband Gavin Grant were responsible for the last five volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. They all did a magnificent job. All of collections, Pretty Monsters, Magic for Beginners and Get in Trouble are astonishingly good. And she’s much honoured having won a Hugo Award, three Nebula Awards, a World Fantasy Award and received a MacArthur Genius Grant.
- Born July 19, 1976 — Benedict Cumberbatch, 43. Confession time: I really didn’t care for him in the Sherlock Holmes series, nor did I think his Khan In Star Trek Into Darkness was all that interesting but his Stephen Strange In Doctor Strange was excellent. He did do an superb job of voicing Smaug inThe Hobbit and his Grinch voicing in that film was also superb. I understand he’s the voice of Satan in Good Omens…
(10) COMICS SECTION.
- Free Range reveals the head of the alien invasion force.
(11) ONE SMALL STAMP FOR… First publicized in March — “U.S. Postal Service Unveils 1969: First Moon Landing Forever Stamps” – the stamps are on sale today.
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing on July 20, 1969, the U.S. Postal Service is pleased to reveal two stamp designs commemorating that historic milestone. Additional details are coming about the date, time and location for the first-day-of issue ceremony.
One stamp features a photograph of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin in his spacesuit on the surface of the moon. The image was taken by astronaut Neil Armstrong. The other stamp, a photograph of the moon taken in 2010 by Gregory H. Revera of Huntsville, AL, shows the landing site of the lunar module in the Sea of Tranquility. The site is indicated on the stamp by a dot. The selvage includes an image of the lunar module.
(12) ROBOTECH REBOOT. Titan Comics announced at SDCC 2019 plans to publish Robotech Remix #1 – a radical reimagining of the sf mecha anime classic.
A new Robotech saga starts now! Robotech is reborn from the ashes of Event Horizon! New writer Brenden Fletcher (Motorcrush, Isola) and artist Elmer Damaso (Robotech/Voltron, Marvel Mangaverse) boot up Robotech: Remix, an all-new series that will take beloved characters and iconic mecha to places fans have never seen before
First airing in the USA in 1985, Robotech was the gateway to anime for many fans – capturing their imagination with its epic generational storyline involving war, romance, and, of course, the transforming Veritech fighters that defend the Earth against extra-terrestrial attacks.
Produced by Harmony Gold USA, the original 85-episode series delved into humanity’s struggle against a series of alien invasions, from the gigantic Zentraedi to the mysterious Invid, battling for control of advanced alien technology that crash-landed on Earth.
Robotech Remix #1 hits stores on October 9, 2019.
(13) SLIM PICKINGS. Galactic Journey reviews all the sff books published in June/July 1964 – which apparently is a grand total of four? “[July 18, 1964] Dog Day Crop (July’s Galactoscope)”
Thank you for joining this month’s edition of Galactoscope, where we plow through all the books that came out this most recent month of June/July 1964! Don’t thank us; it’s all part of the job…
Times Two
Time Travel has been a staple of the genre since before the genre had been formalized. H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine is still a classic, and it was written last century. In the Journey’s short tenure, we have encountered at least a dozen tales involving chronological trips, with notable books including John Brunner’s Times without Number and Wallace West’s River of Time, not to mention the stand-out tales, All you Zombies!, by Robert Heinlein (and his less stand-out tale, By His Bootstraps) and The Deaths of Ben Baxter, by Robert Sheckley.
This month, we have two variations on the theme, both invoking time in their title:
Time Tunnel, by Murray Leinster
(14) BIRD IS THE WORD. Once upon a time there was a sweet-tempered goose – no wonder the rest of them are so ornery. Atlas Obscura revisits “The Goose Who Wore Nikes, and the Mystery of Who Murdered Him” (a 2016 post).
… A few days before that fateful day in 1988, he had been visiting his sister-in-law’s farm when he saw something that got his heartstrings tugging and his wheels turning: a two-year-old goose who had been born with no feet, struggling to follow his fellow geese across a gravel road.
“Because I’m a Shriner,” Gene later told People magazine, “my natural instinct was to help him.” First, he tried making a fowl-sized skateboard, figuring the goose the could push along with one stump while balancing on the other, but no dice. The goose was patient, though, and Gene soon hit on a solution: a pair of patent leather baby shoes, size 0 and stuffed with foam rubber. By the time Jessica got home from school, the goose was running pell-mell around the yard, tugging at the other end of the leash. Soon, they were calling him Andy.
… Twelve-year-old Jessica may have been over Andy, but Gene’s friend at the Hastings Tribune, Gary Johansson, saw the goose’s potential. He wrote up a few lines, and almost overnight, Andy went 1980s-viral. “We had newspapers from all over the world contacting us and wanting to do stories,” says Jessica. He got on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where he shared billing with Isabella Rossellini and Martin Short. Reader’s Digest did a profile, and People splurged on a photo spread. When Nike learned that Andy preferred their brand of baby shoes, they sent him a crate, making him almost certainly the first goose to get a major sponsorship deal.
…But it couldn’t last. On October 19, 1991, Gene and Nadine got the kind of phone call every goose owner dreads. “Is Andy OK?” asked an anxious voice on the other end. A couple of Hastings residents had been out metal detecting in a local park, and had found a dead goose sporting telltale sneakers. The Flemings rushed out to the hutch. There were fresh footprints in the dirt, much bigger than size 0. Andy and his mate Paulie were nowhere to be found…
(15) THEY’RE EVERYWHERE. Let us pause in celebrating the moon landing to consider: “Flat Earth: How did YouTube help spread a conspiracy theory?” Video — and not a piece of tinfoil in sight!
All around the world, there are conspiracy theorists who believe the Earth is flat. And their community seems to be growing, judging by attendance at flat Earth conferences and events.
Flat Earthers say YouTube was key in helping them spread their message. One researcher found that of attendees at a flat Earth conference, nearly all said they first came to the idea through the video-sharing platform.
The Google-owned company says it’s taking action to prevent conspiracy videos from reaching large numbers of people.
So how – and why – did YouTube enable the flat Earth community to grow?
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Hampus Eckerman, Daniel Dern, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Terry Hunt, Scott Edelman, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Robert Whitaker Sirignano.]
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Apollo-Stalk
6) MRK has been delightfful with a few bon mots of responses to the (sadly) sexist comments on the NY Times article. She is indeed a treasure.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. The entire content of the comment I had not quite finished and posted disappeared while I was scrolling to check something.
(1) Don’t do things you don’t have the rights for shouldn’t be that hard a concept to grasp.
(4) Crowfunding success? Crow-funding? CROWfunding? They needed funding for crows? (Silliness about a typo, now seasoned, possibly over-seasoned, with grumpy snark.)
(6) So, the Daily Caller lied about what Kowal said? No surprise.
(2) DOODLE.
That was beautiful.
@9: the Cumberbatch Sherlock series started out vaguely interesting, then IMO ran off the rails, getting further and further into what can be charitably called the supernatural. I’m not enough of a Sherlockian to argue with the nature of his portrayal; ISTM it was plausible in itself, but the offered cause was less than convincing.
edit: Fifth!
Several Species of Small Furry Pixels Gathered Together in a File and Scrolling With a Churl
@Cat —
::GASP!!!!::
And here I thought you were a NICE person……….
(Okay, the ending of the series was kinda crap — but Benedict was wonderful, and I won’t hear a word said against him… 😉 )
Speaking of Benedict, if you haven’t seen him and Jonny Lee Miller doing Frankenstein onstage, you’ve really missed something special. Mom and I went to see both versions when there were HD broadcasts at a local theater, and they were wonderful. We both agreed that the version with Cumberbatch as the monster and Miller as the doctor was better than the other way around.
In other news, I just watched A Quiet Place. It was well made, but did these people never hear of soundproofing??
Nobody knows the pixels I’ve screened…
(2) So…were the subtitles in Dutch for everyone or just for me?
Every time I’ve scene one of the “do you remember watching the moon landing” threads on social media, I’ve been wracking my brains trying to remember whether I did remember. Or whether I only figured I should remember. After all, I was eleven years old and it was quite a momentous event. It wasn’t until I pulled up my mother’s memoir of our family’s adventures in ’68-’69 that I tracked down exactly why I couldn’t pull up a memory. We didn’t watch it. We were in a campground somewhere just outside Munich, having our final month-long “If it’s Tuesday this must be Belgium” experience after a year spent living in Prague. There were a lot of very memorable sights and experiences that year(*), but the moon landing was not one of them.
() 1968 in Prague was a year for *very memorable sights and experiences. Look it up. Though we arrived a little after most of the excitement.
I don’t think momentous is a big enough word for how important the Moon landing was to me and my dad. My mom, too, to a lesser but still considerable extent.
But it was my dad and I who were comparing notes on how the suits and equipment did or didn’t match up with the stories my mom didn’t read, and the movies she rolled her eyes at when we watched them.
Admittedly, even we wouldn’t have claimed that most of those movies were any good. Really, how bad they were was half the fun.
But the spacesuits–the biggest visible difference from what sf predicted was the size of the life support packs on the backs of those suits.
@HRJ: The subtitles were in English for me.
When I watched the Google doodle earlier today, the subtitles were in English. When I played it this evening for my roommate, they were in Dutch.
Many Americans, who often fail to understand British pronunciation guidelines, mistakenly think the Benedict Cumberbatch’s last name has more than one syllable.
[whistles innocently]
Birthdays: not genre, but Richard Jordan was wonderful in “Gettysburg” as Gen. Lewis Armistead (last role before his death, IIRC) and Cumberbatch was an excellent William Pitt in “Amazing Grace” (I remember thinking, how is this funny-looking kid going to get more work?).
Not normally a Sherlock fan, but I very much enjoyed the Cumberbatch version. And Moriarty was fantastic!
Happy Moon Landing Day, everyone.
It was a thrill to watch, to feel, to experience. Ranks up there as one of the best experiences if my life.
https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/ is streaming the mission in real time. Listening to it is almost like getting to experience the whole thing all over again. And for those who might not have seen the original, this is an excellent sequel.
The landing takes place at 4:17 EDT today.
In other news, Amazing Stories gets a face lift….
Happy Moon Day, everyone!
As long as we’re sharing memories of the Apollo landing, I was 10, and had been following all the space launches since I was 5 or so. I was “that kid” who would fearlessly correct adults about details of the mission. Our whole family sat in the den watching the TV together–even my siblings, who really didn’t want to be there.
For the landing, there was no live TV coverage, owing to the lack of a camera on the LEM itself, but the TV played the audio from Mission Control and displayed a model of the LEM being lowered on marionette wires to a fake lunar surface.
But the audio was hard to hear and hard to understand, and the model reached the surface without the audio having given a clear signal of a landing (the altitude numbers quit going down). My father asked me, “Did they land yet?” and I was embarrassed at having to say “I’m not sure.” When Armstrong finally came across (loud and clear) with “Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed” we all cheered.
Only later did I learn that the reason for the landing delay was boulders on the original landing site causing Armstrong to take manual control and fly horizontally to find a clear spot.
And then we had to wait over 6 hours before they stepped onto the moon. When they delayed it past my 10 PM bedtime, I had to fight with my father to stay up. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure he was just teasing me, but I remember it made the first moonwalk a lot more stressful.
And when he said, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” we all said, “What did that mean?” Once I learned what he’d really meant to say (months later), I realised he’d probably said, “That’s one small step fr’a man . . .” but I’ve always felt a little cheated that he essentially blew the line.
And the next morning I went to summer camp for a week and didn’t get to see anything else they did on that mission.
It’s Keith Moon’s birthday?
My memory (which I can’t really validate) of the moon landing is being woken up to watch it on a black and white Zenith TV. Plus it was a hot July as it always was and is.
I think my favorite part of it at the time was all the Peanuts moon landing paraphernalia that came out. I had a Snoopy doll that was in a space suit and various Snoopy sweatshirts saying things like the moon was made from American cheese.
Beautiful scroll. Magnificent pixelation.
I can’t remember where I was when I watched the Lunar landing. Probably home—this very apartment in Brooklyn Heights, where I still am, 50 years later—though it might have been at a fan gathering here in NYC.
Does anyone know what happened to the Special Hugo the St.LouisCon committee gave out, for “The Best Moon Landing Ever!”?
2
They were in Dutch (or maybe Afrikaans) for me – but I found the way to change the language to auto-generated English. (It’s in Settings; you have to scroll all the way down to get to “English”.)
We were at home, so we watched on our ancient Zenith b/w TV. (It was a 1954 model, replaced in 1973.)
Happy Moon Landing Day!
I remember the moon landing and the first moon walk. Or perhaps I remember remembering it. I was 4-1/2 years old, and it’s one of my earliest memories. We were on the couch in the living room, it was after my bedtime, and my older sister Martha, whose tenth birthday it was (Happy birthday, Martha!) was saying very intently to my twin and me, “REMEMBER this! This is IMPORTANT!”
@Xtifr So… “Cunch”?
June 19 is also the birthday of Brian May, astrophysicist who had a side gig as a guitarist with Queen. Gave us “39” for which we should all be grateful.
It was also the birthday of Daniel Fry who claimed to have been given a trip in an alien piloted spaceship back in 1949. Published Understanding a newsletter for alien contact.
And Arthur Rankin Jr. of Rankin/Bass Productions. Everyone remembers their holiday shows, but they also did The Hobbit, The Return of the King, The Last Unicorn, King Kong Escapes and The Mad Monster Party? (There’s that question mark again.)
But he can’t be a fan because he don’t scroll the same pixel as me.
(1) While this is obviously inappropriate for an audio book, I wonder what the position is regarding original audio dramas, such as those produced by Big Finish, where no text version exists?
(9) Also worth noting that Cumberbatch is the voice of Shere Khan in Mowgli and was in the radio version of Neverwhere. He has also done a few scientists: Stephen Hawking, Alan Turing and Thomas Edison on screen and Werner Heisenberg on radio.
Oooooo, speaking of Brian May —
It’s worthwhile to read his wikipedia article. I had forgotten just how much he’s accomplished, if I ever knew it. Talk about overachievers!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_May
I assume that I was propped up in front of the TV for the lunar landing, but have no actual memory of it.
My own space program memories are much more Shuttle-based — somehow persuading my parents to let me stay home for the first launch (which was, of course, then postponed), etc.
And, of course, Challenger, although that was much later in high school.
The Rankin-Bass Hobbit was my first introduction to Tolkien and to this day I’m still occasionally earwormed by some of the songs. I really wish it would get a decent home video release. The DVD is OK, but has some audio issues (the specifics of which I’d need to look up).
I was 2 and have no memory of the moon landing. My parents bought a new (black and white) tv for the occasion.
We still had the tv 20+ years later.
Who said something like, “I was alive for the first man on the moon. I didn’t realize I’d be there for the last” or words to that effect? Writing up my Moon-landing-day thoughts.
Jerry Pournelle said that.
Andrew:
Aha, that chimes with my vague memory. Where can I find the exact quote, do you know? Searching Chaos Manor is daunting when I don’t know the exact words I’m looking for.
“I always knew I would live to see the first man on the moon. I never thought I would outlive the last one.” shows up in Chaos Manor on January 17, 2017, but I don’t know if it’s the origin of the quote. He makes it in reference to the death of Gene Cernan.
ETA: The link is kinda off. You’ll have to scroll down a bit to get to the article.
I can’t find an authoritative cute from this phone, but I’ll look further tomorrow: the wording is: “I always knew I’d live to see the first man on the moon, but never imagined I’d live to see the last” or something quite close to that.
Thank you, Jack Lint! With your info I’ve found the original quote, from Oct. 2000:
I always knew I would live to see the first man on the moon. I never thought I would live to see the last one.
I cant remember the moon landing, because I was born 5 years later…
The new Picard trailer dropped and it look promising. It has Seven of Nine and (Im not sure) maybe Hugh? A cool combo if you as me.
If you believe they put a scroll on the moon (scroll on the moon)
If you believe, theres nothing in this genre, then nothing is cool
@Heather Rose Jones: nailed it in one! 🙂
We got the whole family together at my grandmother’s house to watch the moon landing. I was old enough to know what was going on, but young enough to have trouble actually staying glued to the tv, unlike most of the grups. But I did catch the two big moments: landing and footstep.
I was dug out of bed age 10 to watch the first steps on the moon. 12 years later I was working for the BBC in the VT department at TV Centre and got volunteered (” ‘Ere, you’re a bit of a space cadet. Fancy working on this? There’ll be a day or two of overtime involved”) to work on the coverage of the much delayed first shuttle launch.
The moon landing is my first coherent memory. I was age 4, and I remember sitting in the living room, watching it on TV with my family. Even at that age, I was aware of how important the fuzzy black and white picture of the man going down the ladder and walking on the moon was.
Oddly, the next major memory I have of my young childhood is of watching Star Trek at the dinner table and getting freaked out that the Horta was going to eat Kirk and Spock until my dad threatened to turn the TV off.
Joe H. says The Rankin-Bass Hobbit was my first introduction to Tolkien and to this day I’m still occasionally earwormed by some of the songs. I really wish it would get a decent home video release. The DVD is OK, but has some audio issues (the specifics of which I’d need to look up).
The newest DVD, 2014 release date, does nothing to fix the sound problems. It also removes, oddly enough, some of the sound effects. Some one with far more knowledge than me can explain why the sound problem seems to be unfixable.
I remember waking on 21 July 1969 to the news that Eagle had made a successful landing. We were famously dismissed from school at lunchtime and allowed to go home and watch Armstrong and Aldrin walk on the moon. We’d have watched around our Black and White TV, close to the briquette fire because it was winter in Melbourne.
I’d been allowed to stay up days earlier to watch the live launch of Apollo 11, and had followed the mission closely, keeping newspaper cuttings and souvenirs of the event.
I also remember watching the Apollo 12 moonwalk, only to find that the TV camera had malfunctioned. The general public, now that the novelty had worn off, was once more able to watch reruns of I Love Lucy.
I was in a village in semi-upstate New York (far enough south that Albany stations didn’t come in well but too far north to pick up NYC stations). We were east of the Hudson, but ISTM that Woodstock a few weeks later caused more local fuss — it was a very mundane place. I was distracted for reasons that took years to sort out, but I did see the step onto the surface.
@Heather Rose Jones — I can see being distracted by being in Czechoslovakia then. Being in a campground didn’t always mean missing TV — I remember seeing the “Can’t Buy Me Love” section of A Hard Day’s Night during reporting of Cannes, at a tiny place well north of Stockholm — but I can see it not being common in Europe back then.
I have very vague memories of Apollo 11, since I was not yet 5, but Mom confirms that she woke me up for the footsteps, so perhaps my memories are not confabulations (as I thought they must have been when I realized that the steps had been way after my bedtime). Thanks Mom!
Watching Hidden Figures while I wait for the Apollo real time stream to reach the first moonwalk.
This is a good way to spend the evening.
@Contrarius: The last thing mentioned in the “Stereophotography” section of that article, Queen in 3-D, is quite an artifact and May’s photos really are very cool. I’m not a big enough fan to have acquired such a pricey book, but it was a perfect birthday present for my wife (who sometimes plays a much shorter Brian May in drag).
Wasn’t born at the time of the moon landing, but I remember when I was 10 or so and found that my father had saved all the newspapers from that day. Sitting there and reading them, understanding how big a thing it was. He had them in a special folder together with a book about the science behind it all. Sorry to say, the book was in english, so I had to stick to the pictures.
Oh, and as a kid he took me to a exhibition about the moon landing and I got a small pin to remember it by and it was the best pin EVER and I lost it somewhere while moving and I still miss it.
I was alive but not processing language well for the Moon landing. I did enjoy the recent Apollo 11 documentary on Saturday afternoon, in a 1920’s theatre with a starscape ceiling even!
In NZ, we didn’t have those fancy satellite communications, so the tape was flown from Sydney in a jet bomber in time for the evening news.
http://rnzaf.proboards.com/post/277884/thread
@Eli —
Eli on July 20, 2019 at 9:47 pm said:
I keep thinking that he would fit right into a romance novel. His character would be a perfect Gary Stu!
I missed the moon landing by not being born for just shy of 7 more years… it was a big deal for my mom, though, and no doubt for dad.
I wasn’t yet born for the first moon landing, but my parents remember watching it on TV. My Mom also remembers trying to catch a glimpse of Sputnik through a telescope years earlier.
I do remember watching the first shuttle start and later also the fatal Challenger start on TV. I was very excited about the shuttle start, because my parents had taken me to the space museum in Huntsville, Alabama, a few years before and there we’d not ony seen rockets, moon rockets, a replica of the Eagle and the moon rover, etc.., but also a full size space shuttle (not sure which one – according to Wikipedia Huntville only has a mock-up these days) behind glass.