what I have learned today.

[Kim]

Back on the book thing, apparently 20% of people cannot name a single author. It sounds like a made-up statistic, but it was covered on More Or Less last week and the survey was sound.

I bet the number who can't name a TV/film director is higher.

[Jakob W]

About this Japanese safety technique: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling

[Legs]

As for film adaptations of books, only two good ones spring to mind, Day of the Jackal, and The Hunt For Red October

Perhaps worthy of a thread of its own... 

I’d suggest Catch 22 and The taking of Pelham 123. And maybe From here to Eternity.

The Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, and A Time To Kill are all worthy adaptations.

[Beardy]

Dune is NOT a worthy adaptation, nor for that matter is the Hobbit trilogy of films

[Kim]

Dune at least has its place alongside Labyrinth in the collection of silly films featuring 80s pop stars.

Hobbits are terrible, whatever the medium.

I'd like to nominate The Andromeda Strain as an excellent film adaptation.  The source material naturally lends itself to 1970s pacing and cinematography (for which I have something of a soft spot).

[Peter]

Back on the book thing, apparently 20% of people cannot name a single author. It sounds like a made-up statistic, but it was covered on More Or Less last week and the survey was sound.

I bet the number who can't name a TV/film director is higher.

This is all good and shows a sense of what is important!

[Ham]

Get Shorty is one where the film is at least as good as the book, which is good in its own right.

[mrcharly-YHT]

As for film adaptations of books, only two good ones spring to mind, Day of the Jackal, and The Hunt For Red October

Perhaps worthy of a thread of its own... 

I’d suggest Catch 22 and The taking of Pelham 123. And maybe From here to Eternity.

The Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, and A Time To Kill are all worthy adaptations.

My Side of the Mountain is good.

Guns from Navarone messed with the story but got the tone right. So did Where Eagles Dare

[T42]

Dune at least has its place alongside Labyrinth in the collection of silly films featuring 80s pop stars.

Hobbits are terrible, whatever the medium.

I'd like to nominate The Andromeda Strain as an excellent film adaptation.  The source material naturally lends itself to 1970s pacing and cinematography (for which I have something of a soft spot).

I enjoyed the book too, but Michael Crichton did violence to biology when he had every single bacterium of a species mutate at once*. He was never one to let science stand in the way of a cop-out, though, which suited him admirably for becoming Science Advisor to Dubya.

The Admirable Crichton, OTOH, was rather good.

* several other authors used the same wrinkle, one of them being Kit Pedler, who certainly knew better, with his Mutant 59: the Plastic Eater.  Wonderful bloke, foreseeing dodgy ATMs like that.

[Kim]

Dune at least has its place alongside Labyrinth in the collection of silly films featuring 80s pop stars.

Hobbits are terrible, whatever the medium.

I'd like to nominate The Andromeda Strain as an excellent film adaptation.  The source material naturally lends itself to 1970s pacing and cinematography (for which I have something of a soft spot).

I enjoyed the book too, but Michael Crichton did violence to biology when he had every single bacterium of a species mutate at once*.

Andromeda isn't a bacterium though.  That's made abundantly clear.  It's a mysterious crystalline organism that feeds on electromagnetic energy, and lacks the structures of terrestrial organisms.  Once you've suspended that much disbelief, the idea that colonies of Andromeda can somehow communicate at a distance to share effective mutation strategies isn't really a problem, and it's plausible that the rubber-eating mutation was arrived at independently in more than one place.

In the film version, at least^[1], it's not clear whether previous strains are still present after a mutation (the rubber-eating version breached the seal in the lab, but possibly in a way that didn't interfere with the seal containing the previous, deadly, version).  Handwaving the dodgy bits while otherwise sticking faithfully to the novel makes for a good adaptation in my book.

None of this is sufficiently problematic to ruin the story IMHO.

(I have more problems with the idea that someone whose entire job is to sit and wait for teleprinter messages would ignore one arriving simply because a bell didn't go ping.)


_{[1] I read the book many years ago, but consider it unremarkable.  It's the aesthetic of the 1971 film that I really like.}

[ian]

Apparently there's an Andromeda Strain mini-series (2008) – that passed me by. I remember the movie. Climbing ladders is a lot harder when there are laser beams. Ask any window cleaner.

Googling also tells me there's a new series of the X-Files. No one tells me anything.

Further Googling also tells me that apparently that missile false alarm really put a damper on the masturbatory habits of my Hawaiians (leastways, using PornHub traffic as a proxy). You'll be pleased to know that things literally perked up immediately thereafter with a surge of, well, you know. Aloha, boys, aloha.

How I got from the Andromeda Strain to the masturbatory habits of terrified Hawaiians via the X-Files I leave as an exercise for the reader.

[Kim]

Apparently there's an Andromeda Strain mini-series (2008) – that passed me by.

File under "best not bother".

Overall story is the same, but they meddled with the plot to modernise it.  And not in a good way.  There may have been a competent actor in there somewhere, I can't really remember.

[Mr Larrington]

Further Googling also tells me that apparently that missile false alarm really put a damper on the masturbatory habits of my Hawaiians (leastways, using PornHub traffic as a proxy). You'll be pleased to know that things literally perked up immediately thereafter with a surge of, well, you know. Aloha, boys, aloha.

Blue Hawaii?

[T42]

Dune at least has its place alongside Labyrinth in the collection of silly films featuring 80s pop stars.

Hobbits are terrible, whatever the medium.

I'd like to nominate The Andromeda Strain as an excellent film adaptation.  The source material naturally lends itself to 1970s pacing and cinematography (for which I have something of a soft spot).

I enjoyed the book too, but Michael Crichton did violence to biology when he had every single bacterium of a species mutate at once*.

Andromeda isn't a bacterium though.  That's made abundantly clear.  It's a mysterious crystalline organism that feeds on electromagnetic energy, and lacks the structures of terrestrial organisms.  Once you've suspended that much disbelief, the idea that colonies of Andromeda can somehow communicate at a distance to share effective mutation strategies isn't really a problem, and it's plausible that the rubber-eating mutation was arrived at independently in more than one place.

In the film version, at least^[1], it's not clear whether previous strains are still present after a mutation (the rubber-eating version breached the seal in the lab, but possibly in a way that didn't interfere with the seal containing the previous, deadly, version).  Handwaving the dodgy bits while otherwise sticking faithfully to the novel makes for a good adaptation in my book.

None of this is sufficiently problematic to ruin the story IMHO.

(I have more problems with the idea that someone whose entire job is to sit and wait for teleprinter messages would ignore one arriving simply because a bell didn't go ping.)


_{[1] I read the book many years ago, but consider it unremarkable.  It's the aesthetic of the 1971 film that I really like.}

I read it when it came out in paperback. I still jibbed at everything mutating at once.  I remember getting interested enough in the dynamics of wind-borne infections to start writing a game based on it, but the available computer - a Philips Electrologica P353 that used mag. stripe cards for storage, had to be programmed in machine code on punched cards and whose only means of output was a 22 char/sec typewriter-basket printer  - wasn't the best instrument, so I ground to a halt.

Shortly before I left Philips (and the P350 series failed miserably) they brought out a "line printer", consisting of two typewriter baskets on the same carriage, yielding a stunning 44 char/sec.

[ian]

Further Googling also tells me that apparently that missile false alarm really put a damper on the masturbatory habits of my Hawaiians (leastways, using PornHub traffic as a proxy). You'll be pleased to know that things literally perked up immediately thereafter with a surge of, well, you know. Aloha, boys, aloha.

Blue Hawaii?

It certainly is (nothing to do with my wife, she came back from Honolulu weeks ago). But I found my perfect Tidy Haired™ Thought Leadership position, one I fear went unmentioned during my school careers day, but one I can't help but feel I'd be particularly suited to. PornHub Insights (it is, surprisingly, SFW). I kid you not, someone does exactly what I do, but instead of something boring about publishing, they get to mine porn site traffic. I hesitate to say visualize. I also have a feeling that in their world 'open access' means something entirely different to mine.

[Cudzoziemiec]

What about books from films? Star Wars comes to mind (never read it but remember my geeky cousin reading it v soon after the film, I only recall the spellings "Artoo Detoo" and "See Threepiyo").

[Kim]

What about books from films? Star Wars comes to mind (never read it but remember my geeky cousin reading it v soon after the film, I only recall the spellings "Artoo Detoo" and "See Threepiyo").

In my (admittedly limited) experience, novelisations are very hard to do well.  A film isn't long enough to make a good book without serious changes, and in more recent years, marketing deadlines mean that they tend to be rushed and/or based on an early version of the film that doesn't necessarily hold with the final product.

My brother had some of the TNG-era Star Trek ones, which I ended up reading on holiday at one point.  They were dire.
 See also: The Jurassic Park sequels.  But the films were rubbish too, so low expectations.  I suppose it's the nature of films that get novelised tending to be popular blockbusters, where good stories are optional, and authors are chosen according to their ability to work to deadlines.

Never cared enough about Star Wars to read them, but my understanding is that they primarily function as a stepping stone to the Expanded Universe.  I believe there's something similar going on with Doctor Who.  No doubt there are some cracking stories in among those universes of fanwank.

2001: A Space Odyssey is good, in as much that it expands on the film in a constructive and compelling way.  It's not really a novelisation, though, as AIUI it was written as a sort of first draft of the screenplay.

One that I stumbled upon by accident was Orson Scott Card's novelisation of The Abyss.  I grew up on James Cameron action movies, and I've always had a soft spot for that one as a triumph of the fuckit-let's-just-build-a-real-one school of special effects.  It's faithful to the (extended cut) screenplay, with a few extra chapters added on at the start to provide back-story to the main characters, a decent epilogue, and some explanation to make the technology portrayed in the film make sense.  It's surprisingly good.

[Ham]

Further Googling also tells me that apparently that missile false alarm really put a damper on the masturbatory habits of my Hawaiians (leastways, using PornHub traffic as a proxy). You'll be pleased to know that things literally perked up immediately thereafter with a surge of, well, you know. Aloha, boys, aloha.

Blue Hawaii?

It certainly is (nothing to do with my wife, she came back from Honolulu weeks ago). But I found my perfect Tidy Haired™ Thought Leadership position, one I fear went unmentioned during my school careers day, but one I can't help but feel I'd be particularly suited to. PornHub Insights (it is, surprisingly, SFW). I kid you not, someone does exactly what I do, but instead of something boring about publishing, they get to mine porn site traffic. I hesitate to say visualize. I also have a feeling that in their world 'open access' means something entirely different to mine.

Ian, what can I say? Thank you for that, I was particularly amused by https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2017-state-of-the-union

and a splorful moment with:

Mississippi, however, took their time in 2017 and spent 11 minutes and 33 seconds each time they visited the site. This must have rubbed off on their neighbors

Which has a feel of the other entendre not being intentional

[ian]

It's all very wry and entendre replete and in many places very, very funny. My favourite is the analysis of porn search typos, not for the typos themselves, but for the fact that people on a site called PornHub (and it doesn't exactly hide its content under a plain cover) type the word 'porn' in the search box (or in this case 'porm'). That's like going to the library, walking by all the full bookshelves, to ask the librarian where the books are.

[Ham]

That the French invented the Clacks during the French Revolution http://ethw.org/w/images/1/17/Dilhac.pdf

[T42]

^^^Dumas had the Count of Monte Cristo interfering with the telegraph so as to bankrupt Villefort.

I was surprised to learn of the existence of a hydraulic telegraph, cribbed by 19th century Brits from the ancient Greeks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_telegraph

[citoyen]

In my (admittedly limited) experience, novelisations are very hard to do well.  A film isn't long enough to make a good book without serious changes, and in more recent years, marketing deadlines mean that they tend to be rushed and/or based on an early version of the film that doesn't necessarily hold with the final product.

My brother had some of the TNG-era Star Trek ones, which I ended up reading on holiday at one point.  They were dire.
 See also: The Jurassic Park sequels.  But the films were rubbish too, so low expectations.  I suppose it's the nature of films that get novelised tending to be popular blockbusters, where good stories are optional, and authors are chosen according to their ability to work to deadlines.

Never cared enough about Star Wars to read them, but my understanding is that they primarily function as a stepping stone to the Expanded Universe.  I believe there's something similar going on with Doctor Who.  No doubt there are some cracking stories in among those universes of fanwank.

I read a lot of the Target novelisations of Doctor Who when I was a kid. I think they benefited from being mostly written by Terrance Dicks, who was script editor of the TV series (although Google tells me that the one I recall as my favourite, Full Circle, was written by Andrew Smith, who according to wiki was just 17 when he wrote it).

I don't remember them well enough to be able to comment on their literary merits, but I used to churn through them, usually finishing them in a single sitting. And several of them I read many times over - of course, that was before the days of digital TV when you didn't have whole channels devoted to showing repeats, so the books were the only way to relive your favourite episodes.

[Ham]

And, thinking about it, short stories often turn into good films - Brokeback Mountain is a good example

[Nutbeem]

The Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, and A Time To Kill are all worthy adaptations.
[/quote]

I'd agree with Shawshank Redemption & Stand by Me being good adaptations. But the Stories; Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, and The Body, are, in my opinion, even better.

In the same book, Different Seasons, there is also another excellent story, Apt Pupil. As is common with Stephen King there is a character link with Shawshank.

Don't bother with the film adaptation of Apt Pupil. That was 90 minutes of my life I'll never see again & should have been a straight to landfill DVD

[T42]

The Proxxon router base is more robust than the Dremel equivalent, costs much the same and fits the Dremel too.

Having just acquired the Dremel base, maybe I should CC this to the "fecking div" thread.