Links for 2011-05-21

"Practice using an SLR camera...

Experiment with the lighting, ISO, aperture, shutter, and distance settings while observing the readings in the camera viewfinder
Click the "Snap photo!" button
Review your photo!"

"Jacobsen's addition (asserted with a completely straight face and demanding to be taken seriously) is that this craft contained "genetically/surgically altered" teenagers engineered by Josef Mengele at the command of that other monstrous Joseph, Stalin. The modifications had produced uniform results of "abnormally large heads and eyes" etc. The goal was to scare the US and weaken its defenses by a repetition of the panic created by Orson Welles' War of the Worlds 1938 broadcast.

Got that? I can safely bet that Hollywood agents are bidding frantically for the rights to the screenplay even as we speak. And so they should -- it's a guaranteed blockbuster. It has everything: UFOs, Nazis, Frankenstein monsters, government conspiracies... It ties so many loose ends together so neatly that it's irresistible."

"The end-titles tell us that the film was 'suggested' by Richard Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides; a polite fiction, this, since patently the film was 'suggested' by the fact that the previous three films earned $2.6 billion. And the relationship between book and film is far-fetched even by Hollywood standards. The book's pirate, Jack Shandy, is very unlike Depp's Sparrow, much more reluctant, introspective and moody. Blackbeard is in the book, though he has no daughter. The whole father-daughter dynamic, something that makes little sense in the movie, is a rather remote distillation of the relationship between an English gentleman called Benjamin Hurwood (driven insane by the death of his wife) and his daughter Beth. Zombies have a rather larger role in the book; they have an afterthought flavour in the movie adapted. "