After a fruitful telephone call with my (genius) art director Ben yesterday, I am now in possession of the Space Race To Do List and a PDF of the book as it stands. Phew! The new ground is cut, so we are entering the final stages.

This is the first time I’ve seen the novel in its entirety with illustrations and text together. Ben and I are very excited, and it certainly looks different.

Although I’ve never been chased by a tiger or any other large wild animal, the feeling I have now is, I imagine, like that first risky glance back after a spectacular sprint through the jungle to see if you’re safe or not. A lot of the physical symptoms are similar – exhaustion, some stiffness in the legs and a not inconsiderable dose of adrenaline still running through m’ veins – but who said this would be easy?

It’s funny, but seldom does anyone ever say what a very lonely and fearful business being a writer can be. Lots of uncharted jungle. Lots of tigers. So next time you’re in a bookshop, remember all those poor authors who have run blindly through the undergrowth to bring you… well… robot monkey armies in this instance.

I have completed all of the really difficult illustrations and much of what is left is polishing, adjusting and tidying up. The list is 4 sides of A4, but I know it is just a matter of getting up early and sticking at it.

For those who want a bit more detail about The List, the complex technical bit is that all the text must be black, or shades of black, so that foreign publishers can remove it at the printing stage and replace it with their own translations. This sounds simple enough, but this occupies a fair chunk of what I have to do. It’s my own fault because I got carried away in places.

Running too fast to escape those tigers. Growl, growl.

Taylor Lautner, Kristen Stewart, & Robert Pattison are on the cover of the December 4 issue of Entertainment Weekly. Each star has their own collectible cover.Will you be getting your collectible copy? We know we are.

quiet moon above …
casting shadows on the bed
gentle, soothing voice

live a simple life …
like the pink moon of springtime -
waxes, wanes and gone

Inspired by a haiku by Issa

on the porch I stand …
the bright moon shines above me -
see its rabbit ears?

month of the cold moon -
approach of winter, waiting…
birds are not waiting

a beautiful moon -
a beautiful melody -
tapped at the window…

Most dorks would agree that the cliché vision of year 2000 (i.e., personal jet packs, flying cars, living like the Jetsons, etc.), is a worn out joke. For the most part we can still dream but I think we have now found more comfort in the vision of our comics and favorite sci-fi movie/TV. While we are settling in with the boring world, it appears that the researchers at the Toyota R&D center in Japan are not as compliant. From personal transporters to truly autonomous robots, they keep pushing technology and with it the vision of the future. Now it appears, Toyota wants to look at placing their Partner Robots on the Moon to begin building infrastructure…

Got your attention…follow the jump for more information.

According to several blogs (Engadget, Otsuka-san, GetRobo) Toyota has continued their complete disclosure of their intentions for developing and investing in Partner Robots. In a recent presentation “Realization of Moon Exploration Using Advanced Robots by 2020”, Toyota researchers released some of the following art to show their vision. This type of research always reeked of super secret organizations and world domination (SPECTRE, Umbrella Corp to name a few), buy you can’t get much more honest disclosure with a presentation title like that! I love big business that is willing to invest that in weird and future concepts.

I realize we need to invest our money here on Earth to sustain our own infrastructure, but movies like 2012 offer up an interesting scenario that can’t be denied. What if the Earth encounters some form of catastrophic disaster that leaves it inhabitable. What is our option…extinction?? Not this dork, I will go down fighting, but I would rather have some options. This type of development exploration is truly testing the limits. By having robots help to build and maintain infrastructure for potential colonization on the moon…or another world, that option at least has a chance to become reality.

So here are a couple more of the inspiring visions provided by Toyota…

Ever Wonder What Song Or Show Kid Cudi Sampled To Make The Great Song Simple As..? Well….Here It Is

Kid Cudi Sampled This Song/Show (Above) To Make This Great Song (Below)

by Dave Cosnette [Excerpted]

I believe that the Apollo footage that has been released by NASA seems to be a hoax. I have uncovered various pictures and transcripts of astronaut conversations from the Apollo missions that relate to encounters with UFOs, and perhaps this is one reason why NASA would release fake footage to the general public.

Excerpts of conversations from Apollo Astronauts on the Moon to Mission Control show that the Astronauts came across some strange and hard-to-explain structures and unusual sightings of unidentified craft whilst on the surface of the Moon. LINK.

Why is it that relatively few people have been allowed total access to the massive NASA archives (photographs which are supposedly in the public domain). Instead we have to make do with the two or three dozen ‘reproductions’ that appear in the ‘official’ textbooks, despite literally millions of photographic images obtained by NASA. Something is seriously amiss. Also the original photographs are huge (32″ x 24″) so by the time they have been reduced to fit the pages of a regular book the clarity and quality reduced by the copying process make most of the images pretty meaningless. In many cases, researchers are left with little more than ’smudges’ and ‘blurs’.

Even so, despite all these obstacles, there is still hard evidence when these photographs are scrutinized under the proverbial – and literal – microscope, that points to the fact that virtually everything NASA has told us about the moon is a lie.

The real NASA Moon photos, for example show all kinds of structures, seemingly both old and new, such as domes, pipelines, and even pyramids. So why aren’t these photos in the public domain? You can see in several of NASA’s film footage, the American flag ‘flapping in the wind’ and yet the Moon according to NASA has no atmosphere, because it is a vacuum! One film clearly shows a desperate astronaut trying his level best to hold the flag still!

We are also told that the famous Neil Armstrong ‘footprints’ will remain etched on the Moon’s surface forever. We are told this precisely because the Moon’s ‘atmosphere’ is a vacuum. The laws of physics demand that dust becomes hardened and will compress in a ‘vacuum’ therefore ensuring the ‘footprints’ remain undisturbed. And yet great plumes of dust can be seen spewing forth from underneath the ‘Moon Buggy’ as it travels across the lunar surface. Is this ‘vacuum theory’ some kind of wild hoax by NASA?

Another NASA cover-up are the small cloud formations that have been photographed above the Moon, again in a vacuum?. And while were on the subject of clouds what about the ONE HUNDRED MILE WIDE CLOUD OF VAPOUR that was detected by NASA’s own instruments. This embarrassing ‘anomaly’ was promptly dismissed by NASA scientists as being the result of the considerable volume of urine ejected by the Apollo Mission astronauts! What were they drinking?!

For decades strange ‘lights’ and artificial seeming structures have been observed and recorded on the Moon by amateur astronomers. Science writer Joseph Goodavage observed that over two hundred white ‘dome shaped’ structures had been seen and catalogued, only for them often to vanish and reappear somewhere else?. There are even colour photos from the Apollo 8 missions that clearly show evidence of green vegetation on the lunar hills.

These unusual findings, when added together with the anomalies which Richard Hoagland has shown to exist on Apollo Moon photographs, provide compelling evidence for an ongoing NASA cover-up of what the Apollo Astronauts really discovered on the Moon from 1969 to 1972. LINK.

Become a member, and get an elaboration of this article.

[This is a revised extract from my book, Performing Illusions, mixed with fragments and notes not included in the book. The broader context of this section, which looks at Destination Moon, is a discussion of science fiction cinema in the 1950s, drawing a distinction between the subversive excesses of low-budget exploitation, which treated the military-industrial agenda of "big science" with some disdain, and the big budget tales of space exploration that aligned science with spectacular imagery and limitless potential for human gain in the form of national pride and military advantage.]

While tales of alien invasion were finding their place as a staple of the science fiction B-movie circuit, a few major productions were entertaining the possibility of a future lunar mission, and in the process espousing the value of the technologies denigrated by their low-budget imitators. In the 1950s, inspired by genuine rocket research and concerted efforts to reach and explore outer space, a few films offered predictions of what the space race might achieve, sometimes smuggling in militaristic propaganda. This visualisation of capital-intensive science stands in sharp contrast to the half-hearted attempts at astronautical engineering shown in the B-movies of the time, and show up even more starkly the divisions between the high and low budget cinema of the time, the one aggrandising the military and scientific establishment with meticulously constructed effects held up for spectatorial contemplation, and the other besmirching the worth of multi-billion dollar space program with depictions of the cosmos as a site of plastic toys wobbling through a worthless void.

Underpinning both discussions of the future of space exploration was the knowledge that, as rocket science progressed, one consequence would be the parallel development of missile systems, so that space exploration was tied technologically and iconographically to military power. Crucial to creditable renderings of spacecraft are the miniature models used to represent them, and the compositing techniques used to create the impression of flight. The skills required for such effects would have been honed at studio facilities with particular interest in war films during the 1940s, such as Ships with Wings (Sergei Nolbandov, 1941), Mrs. Miniver (William Wyler, 1942), Air Force (Howard Hawks, 1943) and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (Mervyn LeRoy, 1944), all of which rely on miniature models to represent ships and aircraft. In this way, depictions of spacecraft can be seen as connotatively linked to depictions of military machines, and the appropriate attention to detail in respecting the integrity of such vehicles can be read as either subversion or sustenance of their iconic power as a physical threat and a patriotic symbol.

Destination Moon (Irving Pichel, 1950) was based loosely on Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Rocketship Galileo (1947), and Heinlein, along with Transylvanian rocket expert Hermann Oberth, acted as technical adviser on the film. Oberth (1894-1989) had, along with Willy Ley (1906-1969), acted in a similar capacity on Fritz Lang’s Die Frau im Mond/The Woman in the Moon (1929, released in the U.S. in 1931 as By Rocket to the Moon). Lang wanted the film to have a kind of documentary realism to support the story of an industrially-sponsored lunar mission. The film was famously withdrawn from distribution by the Nazis, who feared that it might reveal secrets about the ongoing development of the V1 and V2 rockets. The spaceship model used in the film was also destroyed by the Gestapo.

Willy Ley had been a friend of Lang and his wife, Thea von Harbou, and was the respected author of Möglichkeit der Weltraumfahrt/The Possibility of Space Travel (1928) and founding member of the Society for Space Travel in Germany. Ley introduced Lang to Oberth, who had been a designer of rocket artillery for the Austrian army in WWI and was author of the highly influential Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen/By Rocket to Interplanetary Space (1923).  He would later perform scientific research for the Nazis, while Willy Ley fled to the U.S.A. One of the film’s many accurate predictions was the countdown as part of launch protocol, something which is communicated by title cards (the film was silent), and which Lang invented for dramatic effect in the film. Mechanical effects were provided by Lee Zavitz (who won an Academy Award for his contribution) with background scenery and sets created by Chesley Bonestell (credited as ‘technical adviser of astronomical art’: see some of his work here, and a superb picture series from Coronet magazine in 1950 here) and Ernst Fegté. Another film, Rocketship X-M (Kurt Neumann, 1950) was actually the first Hollywood movie centred on a lunar expedition to be released theatrically, rushed into production to capitalise on the pre-publicity for Destination Moon. While Destination Moon cost $586,000, Rocketship X-M was budgeted at just $94,000.  As such, it lacks the benefit of extended scientific research, and is more closely associated with space opera stories such as Flash Gordon. In Neumann’s film, the moon rocket is diverted from its course and eventually lands on Mars (the change in atmosphere signalled by Neumann’s decision to tint the film red for all sequences set on the surface of Mars, which were actually shot in Red Rock Canyon, Nevada), where the crew discover a race of beings who have survived an atomic holocaust which once decimated the planet’s super-intelligent inhabitants.

Destination Moon is intended as an educational rallying cry for the importance of lunar missions, at a time when they might have seemed a distant fantasy, and barely a constructive geo-political strategy in the aftermath of WWII. In seeking to assert the plausibility, as well as the military advantage, of space travel, the film aims at a realistic approach. It does this via appeals to scientific realism which are encoded in its diligent approach to design and special effects; the esteemed scientists named in the credits offer validation of its accuracy. Aside from a few inserts visible on a monitor inside the rocket, we never see the ship launched from Earth in Destination Moon – instead the camera focuses on the contorted faces of the astronauts, who become nauseous and disorientated by the first sensations of weightlessness. An attempt is being made at heightened realism by showing the unpleasant realities to be expected in the future of space flight – I don’t recall Flash Gordon ever suffering the after-effects of G-force or motion sickness. The illusion of weightlessness is created by suspending the actors from wires or positioning them on moving platforms with their feet out of shot. The design of the control room of the rocketship ‘Luna’ is a compromise between the requirements of authenticity and the necessity of photographic and aesthetic conditions; the panels in the consoles could be removed to allow the insertion of a camera or lighting rig (Heinlein quoted in Johnson 1972: 52-65).

When a Woody Woodpecker cartoon is shown to potential investors to persuade them of the viability of space travel, it fills the screen, addressing you, the viewer, as well as the bankers, thus nearly drawing a comparison between the two audiences who need to be educated and primed for a future space mission. It also handily explains how a rocket mission works so that the film’s later spectacular sequences can be measured against the scientific facts. It’s not all that rare to have these didactic set-ups in a spectacular cinema: see for example the explanatory film that plays early in a Jurassic Park, with some cartoon DNA telling you how it all works, or the rudimentary CG simulation that pre-visualises the ship sinking near the start of Titanic (1997). Le Voyage dans la Lune (I was trying to get through a whole blog post without mentioning it) begins with a scene of the planning of a moon mission, sketching a diagram on a blackboard – come to think of it, Destination Moon follows Georges Melies’ film quite closely, going through the same stages of planning, building, launching, exploration, danger, escape and return to Earth. Science fiction films are not averse to having a boffin step in and give a quick presentation to point how the physics works, and thus manage expectations and build anticipation. I like to call it the “flowchart” scene. Maybe you, dear reader, can think of some other examples. (Rocketship X-M’s equivalent expository scene can only muster some chalkboard sketches) The Woody Woodpecker scene doubles as a promotional short for one of the studio’s other entertainment franchises while making a sharp comment on the need to popularise scientific innovation to maintain uncritical public support and comprehension. When one private investor questions why the mission is necessary, General Feyer delivers the following speech:

We are not the only ones who know the moon can be reached. We are not the only ones who are planning to go there. The race is on, and we’d better win it, because there is absolutely no way to stop an attack from outer space. The first country that can use the moon for the launching of missiles will control the Earth.

Thus is forged a bond between big business and big (military) science, resulting in the reactionary, paranoid representation of technology that has traditionally been attributed to the alien invasion film, and all of it mediated by a chuckling cartoon bird. There’s another point of access for spectators who might be baffled by the science, in the form of Joe Sweeney, a blue-collar techie played by mini-Bogart Dick Wesson. Ignorant of how stuff works, and disbelieving of the possibilities, he provides an excuse for the scientists to explain what’s happening as they go along.

The space exploration film shows technology as a way of claiming territories outside the Earth in order to present a display of might to other nations, and by inviting the contemplation of expertly rendered sequences of space travel, it tacitly accepts the value of militarily-enforced scientific research. While planning to test a nuclear engine for the rocket, the mission team receive a letter from their governing body, declining the proposal to test on American soil, since: ‘While it is admitted that no real danger of atomic explosion exists, belief in such danger does exist in the public mind.’ This is probably the film’s most insidious act – to blame public scepticism about the value and safety of rocket research for hindering its unchecked development. Such stubborn faith in the nuclear project stands in stark contradistinction to the torrent of irradiated mutant mayhem that was to be unleashed in low-budget exploitation films such as Bride of the Atom (Ed Wood, 1955), The Amazing Colossal Man (Burt I. Gordon, 1957), Attack of the Crab Monsters (Roger Corman, 1957), The Creature With the Atom Brain (Edward L. Cahn, 1955), and The Cyclops (Burt I. Gordon, 1957).

Conquest of Space (Byron Haskin, 1954), inspired by the speculatively scientific 1949 book of the same name written by German émigré rocket scientist Willy Ley and illustrated by Chesley Bonestell, is a self-professed ‘story of tomorrow’, and a pseudo-sequel to Destination Moon, set in a future where space travel is more commonplace and straightforward. Rather than being a story of heroic pioneers, more drama is gleaned from details of the emotional effects of such excursions on the temperaments of the men who do so (there are still no women in space at this point). A planned Moon mission is revealed to be an expedition to Mars in search of natural resources to solve Earth’s energy needs. An attempt to sabotage the mission is made by its leader, General Merritt (Walter Brooke, an amazingly hard-working film and TV actor, perhaps best remembered as the family friend who only has one word, “Plastics” for Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate), ranting that exploring worlds beyond those provided by God must be a blasphemous transgression of some Edenic pact. In other words, the film’s only stated objections to the destructive, colonialist thrust of the military industrial complex are put into the mouth of an unhinged fanatic, safeguarding the patriotic ideals of the expedition as admirable goals.

More than any other film of the period about space exploration, Destination Moon is encoded with a sub-narrative about the connections between a lunar mission, national pride, commerce and the military-industrial complex. Less interested in the romance of space and more busily focused on its pragmatics, it even plays down human heroics in order to emphasise the spectacle of engineering. It’s too earnest in its intention to incorporate proper rocket science to be real thrill ride, but it’s a real timepiece, and some beautiful moments where the diligent design and adventurous spirit come together to produce a beautiful shot. It may just be me, but I love the bits where actors are substituted with little stop-motion puppets by George Pal. Nothing emphasises the vulnerability of the astronauts like their reduction to miniature models, a visual index of their subordination to the adventures of engineering and the loitering interest of military giants.

[See more of my frame grabs from Destination Moon in the slideshow below, or visit my Flickr page to view them full size and download them:]

Após Bella se recuperar do ataque de um vampiro que quase tirou a sua vida, ela pensa em comemorar seu aniversário com Edward e sua família. Porém, após um incidente durante a festa, quando Bella derrama uma gota de seu sange, Edward decide deixar a cidade de Forks para o bem de sua amada. Inconsolável, Bella estreita seus laços de amizade com Jacob Black, sem imaginar que um perigo ainda maior a aguarda. Continuação da saga Crepúsculo, baseada no livro homônimo de Stephenie Meyer.

Knights Templar win heresy reprieve after 700 years

 By Philip PullellaFri

“The Knights Templar, the medieval Christian military order accused of heresy and sexual misconduct, will soon be partly rehabilitated when the Vatican publishes trial documents it had closely guarded for 700 years.

 A reproduction of the minutes of trials against the Templars, “‘Processus Contra Templarios — Papal Inquiry into the Trial of the Templars”‘ is a massive work and much more than a book — with a 5,900 euros ($8,333) price tag.

 ”This is a milestone because it is the first time that these documents are being released by the Vatican, which gives a stamp of authority to the entire project,” said Professor Barbara Frale, a medievalist at the Vatican’s Secret Archives.

“Nothing before this offered scholars original documents of the trials of the Templars,” she told Reuters in a telephone interview ahead of the official presentation of the work on October 25.

The epic comes in a soft leather case that includes a large-format book including scholarly commentary, reproductions of original parchments in Latin, and — to tantalize Templar buffs — replicas of the wax seals used by 14th-century inquisitors.

Reuters was given an advance preview of the work, of which only 799 numbered copies have been made.

 One parchment measuring about half a meter wide by some two meters long is so detailed that it includes reproductions of stains and imperfections seen on the originals.

Pope Benedict will be given the first set of the work, published by the Vatican Secret Archives in collaboration with Italy’s Scrinium cultural foundation, which acted as curator and will have exclusive world distribution rights.

The Templars, whose full name was “Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon,” were founded in 1119 by knights sworn to protecting Christian pilgrims visiting the Holy Land after the Crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099.

 They amassed enormous wealth and helped finance wars of some European monarchs. Legends of their hidden treasures, secret rituals and power have figured over the years in films and bestsellers such as “The Da Vinci Code.”

The Knights have also been portrayed as guardians of the legendary Holy Grail, the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper before his crucifixion.

The Vatican expects most copies of the work to be bought up by specialized libraries at top universities and by leading medieval scholars.

BURNED AT THE STAKE

The Templars went into decline after Muslims re-conquered the Holy Land at the end of the 13th century and were accused of heresy by King Philip IV of France, their foremost persecutor. Their alleged offences included denying Christ and secretly worshipping idols.

The most titillating part of the documents is the so-called Chinon Parchment, which contains phrases in which Pope Clement V absolves the Templars of charges of heresy, which had been the backbone of King Philip’s attempts to eliminate them.

Templars were burned at the stake for heresy by King Philip’s agents after they made confessions that most historians believe were given under duress.

The parchment, also known as the Chinon Chart, was “misplaced” in the Vatican archives until 2001, when Frale stumbled across it.

 ”The parchment was catalogued incorrectly at some point in history. At first I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was incredulous,” she said.

 ”This was the document that a lot of historians were looking for,” the 37-year-old scholar said.

Philip was heavily indebted to the Templars, who had helped him finance his wars, and getting rid of them was a convenient way of cancelling his debts, some historians say.

Frale said Pope Clement was convinced that while the Templars had committed some grave sins, they were not heretics.

SPITTING ON THE CROSS

Their initiation ceremony is believed to have included spitting on the cross, but Frale said they justified this as a ritual of obedience in preparation for possible capture by Muslims. They were also said to have practiced sodomy.

 ”Simply put, the pope recognized that they were not heretics but guilty of many other minor crimes — such as abuses, violence and sinful acts within the order,” she said. “But that is not the same as heresy.”

Despite his conviction that the Templars were not guilty of heresy, in 1312 Pope Clement ordered the Templars disbanded for what Frale called “the good of the Church” following his repeated clashes with the French king.

Frale depicted the trials against the Templars between 1307 and 1312 as a battle of political wills between Clement and Philip, and said the document means Clement’s position has to be reappraised by historians.

“This will allow anyone to see what is actually in documents like these and deflate legends that are in vogue these days,” she said.

Rosi Fontana, who has helped the Vatican coordinate the project, said: “The most incredible thing is that 700 years have passed and people are still fascinated by all of this.”

“The precise reproduction of the parchments will allow scholars to study them, touch them, admire them as if they were dealing with the real thing,” Fontana said.

 ”But even better, it means the originals will not deteriorate as fast as they would if they were constantly being viewed,” she said.”

NASA recently announced the discovery of water on the moon. The moon appears in dozens of Bruce’s poems and, coincidentally, I recently rediscovered a cache of paintings that he had done featuring space travel.

It is an unusual group. Ordinarily, Bruce draws or paints whatever comes to mind at the time he picks up a pen or brush. Although his subject matter recurs over the course of many years (still lifes, figures, etc.), very rarely has he rendered a single motif in a single style in consecutive works. In the 1980s, he did a series of highly varnished, candy-colored paintings of astronauts and rocketships likely inspired by the space shuttle missions that were so active during that decade, including Columbia, Challenger, Discovery and Atlantis. These paintings are sheer fun. At the same time, if you look at them long enough, you might detect enough pathos to make you wonder, what is really happening there? What is s/he thinking? If they were comics, they would have thought bubbles that would reveal their mysteries.

These space travel paintings will be photographed professionally later this month. They’re so glossy (as you can see below) that it’s hard for me to get good pictures of them myself. Also below is Bruce’s poem “SPACE,” describing, as his poems about the moon often do, our intimate connection to it, rather than distance from it.

.

Spacegirl
Acrylic and pencil on canvas, 10″ x 10″

.

SPACE

Wide Sweep . . .
Of the horizon line

—

EXpanding into self-completeness . . .

—

Leading to

—

Anagogic revelation

—

……….The ultimate

—

……….Made intimate

—

……….The
Huge

—

Dealt as a
Stack
Of
CardS . . . .

—

To
Be
Played . . . . .

—

AS

—

One
Wishes.

—

The
Dishes in
The
Sink

—

Elevated

—

To
Whirling planets!

—

To
Pass quite

—

Beyond
The
Moon — .

—

To yet another
Planet

—

And Another moon.

—————

———

—

Artwork and poetry copyright 2009 Bruce MacGibeny. All rights reserved.

Digamos que la película de Luna Nueva no ha conseguido “Eclipsar” a los libros de Stephenie Meyer.

Después de haber ido a ver El Señor De Los Anillos, salí bastante contenta, puesto que la adaptación era muy similar a los libros, a esa saga…

Esperaba que la mayoría de las sagas fueran igual (no puedo hablar de Harry Potter, ya que sólo leí el séptimo libro)

¿Qué fallos encontré para poder hablar así de una película que no estuvo nada mal? Es decir: “¿por qué te quejas?”

La exageración gusta en el cine, lo morboso, la americanización de los relatos, los finales felices, los dramas… todo eso VENDE! Sí señor, rendirse al dinero en vez de mostrar el libro como es.

¿Fallos que he encontrado?

¡¡¡Spoiler!!! (PD: Si no viste la película, no sigas leyendo)

- Para empezar, el trailer está mal hecho, puesto que (obviamente) se ve que en el claro Bella está con una ropa cuando le ataca Laurent y cuando (supuestamente) va Jacob a salvarle, está con otra, lo cual ya te hace dudar de si… en el libro le salvaba así de Laurent (cosa que no)

- Cuando Bella se corta, no sale corriendo hacia ella Jasper, al menos no de la manera “pasiva” y a la vez exagerada que sucede en la película. Después de esto, Edward “acude” a su casa (pero no cuando está ella) para quitar las fotos de su álbum y el equipo de sonido que le regaló Emmet (todo esto para que parezca que Edward no ha existido). Pero todo esto no sucede antes de que hable con ella, sino mientras ella (supuestamente) se pierde en el bosque y se queda llorando, puesto que al llegar… no queda nada de él.

- Una cosa a destacar en positivo son los lobos, que están muy bien hechos (aunque los personajes no encajen mucho y, con perdón, parezcan más débiles de lo que en el libro parecen)

- Se habla de la fiebre de Jacob en el cine, pero él no se pone violento en el libro, como pasa en la película. En ningún momento (en el cine) le dice Bella que está ardiendo. Y por último, ella no se monta en la moto con ese chico para sentir la adrenalina.

Creo que nada más, porque si sigo sacando fallos con respecto al libro… Por el resto, la adaptación está bien, y es entretenida, sólo que yo “apenas” la disfruté porque soy una maniática de buscar los fallos jajaja

Realmente, la película es buena y mereció la espera, pero destacar sólo esos fallos.

Un saludo!

Two nights ago at five o’clock at night, I was standing outside looking up into the nearly dark sky. A faint line of light trailed along the horizon. Hazy lavender touched the earth and a line of pink topped it off. That mix of colors and mist slipped upward into the dark night sky.

As I faced the west, the waxing crescent moon was to my right with planet Jupiter sitting brightly on its left.

The air was cooler, close to freezing cold. My hands and nose were cold. I could see my breath as I stood in the deepening darkness. I looked up into the trees; the branches took on a silvery cast.

I called to Uriah. His hackles were raised and he was barking towards the path. I called him back, time to head into the house.

 Two hours later, I was back outside. I had to keep telling the dog to stay close. I could hear the coyotes they sounded like they were to the east and south of us. They were coming closer.

Why is it, when you want a dog to do his business instead he decides to sniff around and waste time.  I was getting nervous.   Different sounds were coming out of the darkness. Sticks snapping, a faint growl, the dried grass was rustling as if something were walking through.

I did not want an altercation between a younger animal and Uriah. He is eleven and a half, just because he thinks he’s big stuff, doesn’t make it true.  

Uriah watched me, and then turned to the trees. I had him walk with me towards the front of the house. I kept talking, he continued to growl, and mutter. He sounded a lot like my grandfather; complaining about noise, kids, and pigeons.

It was dark, and a foggy haze settled in around the trees. The air felt electrically charged. I’ve lived out here long enough to pay attention to my inner warning system. We headed to the house.  Uriah came inside,… reluctantly.

I had just enough time to wash my hands and sit down at the computer. When my old cat PJ, sat up from a sound sleep and hid in the hall closet.

When I first moved out here, fourteen years ago, PJ was chased by a coyote.  PJ outran the coyote. My closest neighbor at that time said, “They never saw a cat run so fast.”  I hadn’t realized that a coyote can reach speeds up to 43 mph. That had happened in the middle of a day with bright sunshine.

I cracked open the window and shut it right away. There was a pack of coyotes in my yard. No more than twenty feet from the window I opened. The high pitch ‘yapping’ and ‘yipping’ flowed into the room. One of the animals howled, his was a deeper sound. Not the high pitch ‘yip’ I normally heard.

I wasn’t afraid of them. I respect them enough to say out of their way. But I did open a window upstairs and tell them to leave. Of course they didn’t listen. My voice is too shrill, I had to deepen it, and then tell them to leave. Finally they stopped making noise and left.  That silence lasted until ten o’clock, after that they returned every hour – all- night- long.

Last night was quiet. The rain and fog moved in blocking the moon, Jupiter should be on the right side of the first quarter moon tonight.

So far nothing is moving out there tonight.

That not true!  I can hear that irritating rat, shuffling around the dog kennel…

Picture from Hubble site.org

http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/entire/pr2006019c/