A round-up of a few interesting links I’ve encountered recently…

Here’s a collection of some highly creative Ads from the world over. My favourite is the steaming coffee-cup manhole cover! And there’s one ad from Mumbai too!!

How do you like your food? Not like this, I bet! ;-)

Scientists are one step closer to creating a working Invisibility Cloak. It’s a pity, however, that this attempt is to achieve invisibility from radar, and not in the visible spectrum. But I remember an article about ‘invisibility’ techniques that appeared in ‘Wired’ around three years ago. Do read it… it’s quite fascinating! Here’s the link.

Have you ever seen an 8.6 Gigapixel image? that’s right… 8.6 Gigapixels!! Here it is… ‘probably’ the biggest digital image in the world!! Be patient while the webpage loads up though!

And to round up today’s list of links… here’s George W. Bush admitting on television that he uses “the Google”!!

I haven’t yet had the chance to catch Farhan Akhtar’s indulgent remake of ‘Don’, but the reviews from professional critics as well as the feedback from friends and acquaintances has been anything but enthusiastic.

And the reason for that has been the inevitable comparison with the original, that a remake evokes! Nostalgia invariably plays a huge role in such comparisons and that tilts the balance, fairly or unfairly, in the favour of the original. I am not saying that the original ‘Don’ wasn’t any good. Far from it! I thought the Amitabh-starrer was an awesome entertainer… and a representative of the kind of movies in vogue during those years. However, it was anything but a classic!!… something that this review explains in much better words. Chandra Barot’s ‘Don’ was technically quite shoddy. What kept it from sliding away as ‘just another Amitabh movie’ was Amitabh’s bandwidth as an actor. Based on Shah Rukh Khan’s body of work, I am not convinced he has the same bandwidth!

As I read review after review flaying Farhan Akhtar, almost chastising him for attempting a remake, I can feel a certain fanboy anger on the part of these reviewers who seem to have convinced themselves that the original ‘Don’ was a sacred cow that could not be touched! For God’s sake, comment on the quality of the movie! … not on the way it apes or deviates from the original! I concede that some amount of comparison will be inevitable, but the review should not end up being one huge comparison!!