1967 JPL employment ad, remixed: now with more Mars Curiosity "Mohawk Guy"

Hahah! Boing Boing reader William Jaspers saw the 1967 ad for jobs at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory I posted yesterday, which ran in Scientific American—and with a little help from Photoshop, he updated it to feature the MSL space celeb Bobak "Mohawk Guy" Ferdowsi, who works on the Mars Curiosity team at JPL.

Now all they need is a reversal of those devastating budget cuts so JPL can hire more space-dreamers, instead of laying them off, and the vintage ad will really be true again 45 years later. Larger size here.

* Thanks again to reader fdecomite for scanning and sharing the original.

• [mindysan33]

  Le sigh…. that’s quite nice.  More please.

• [DewiMorgan]

  Funny because JPL is normally so careful to dot the ‘i’s…

  • [william jaspers]

    Hah, I caught that about 3 hours after I posted it to twitter. Doh.

    EDIT: Here’s the corrected image, with a few edge cleanups, too. https://twitter.com/wj4/status/242704564833361920/photo/1

• [Noctilucent Studios]

  Anyone interested in the beginnings of JPL has to check out “Strange Angel: The otherworldly life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons”

  Fascinating book.

• [robcat2075]

  That original ad looked like they were hoping William F. Buckley would join up.  Maybe they were.

  • [abstract_reg]

    There is an alternate universe where William F. Buckley did join the JPL which kept him busy, and everything that ever went wrong in this one didn’t happen.

• [Bloo]

  Just as a matter of curiosity, I wonder what would happen if JPL did a Kickstarter thing?  Could they spend the money without some bureaucrats routing it through various funds-skimming mechanisms?

  • [Jake0748]

     Cool idea, but I’d guess nope.  Somehow the gummint bureaucrats would make it all disappear. 

• [robcat2075]

  Where are the culture police who damned that French opera company in the other thread for misappropriating native American culture?  Surely this merits their very stern indignation. 

  I suspect Bobak Ferdowsi has no more authentic heritage to represent native Americans than the members of that opera company.

  • [ocker3]

     One hairstyle does not a cultural appropriation make

  • [abstract_reg]

    Huh?? I hope your joke is smarter than I think it is.

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    You mean how he stole his hairstyle from the Irish? I mean the Pazyryk? Or perhaps Ukrainian Cossacks.

• [marilove]

  He looks like that Zachary Quinto dude from Star Trek.  

  • [twency]

    You’re right, although I tend to think of him as “that Zachary Quinto dude from Heroes”.  It’s the eyes and the light stubble that make them look particularly similar, I think.

• [toyg]

  He missed one detail though: “Right now openings exist in: [...]“. That sentence really is from another era. These days there are no “openings”: I bet even at JPL they’re all “unpaid internships” or (if you’re lucky)  ”contractor opportunities”.

• [jpgsawyer]

  Hmm and here was I thinking he looked like Peter Andre (Okay one for the UK and Australians to cringe at.)

  • [chris coreline]

     oooo ooee oooo ooee ooo, mysterious world, im going to land a truck on you.

• [silkox]

  Would be much better with a comm headset.

  • [william jaspers]

    I’d agree there … but couldn’t find any photos (at the time) that fit well into the frame and were high enough resolution for it. Maybe something will surface later.

• [chris coreline]

  Mohawk guy makes me proud to be a citizen of the internet.

• [MikeJones1208]

  Bobak changed the stars to “JPL” in Morse Code.

• [Frode Helland]

  Why did he remove the tittles in “fiction”?

  • [william jaspers]

    It was accidental; scroll up and you’ll see a link to a better version.

• [Andreas Schou]

  Slightly pedantic note: Bobak Ferdowsi is Iranian, not Polish. There’s no ‘k’ in his name.

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    Fixed.