No child should touch a gun or pistol, or on any account present one at another person. We behold a little boy shooting his sister dead!

And:

Here we see the danger of playing with lighted candles. One little girl has set the bed-curtains on fire, and the other her hair; and both are in great danger of being burnt to death, unless someone grants them speedy assistance.

From The Book of Accidents (1831), with excellent woodcut illustrations.

(via Ectoplasmosis)

…or are they?

This is terrifying, but in a comical sense.

(via BoingBoing Gadgets)

I’d always assumed the criteria were loose (at best), but I didn’t realize that the only necessary condition of stating that a movie is “Based On” the book is a cursory glance at the book’s cover and a $150 million budget.

No, really; that’s it.

And I know “the book” is traditionally supposed to be better than the movie — but Darwin’s On The Origin of the Species has more in common with AVPR than Will Smith’s (and Francis Lawrence’s, or whoever’s responsible) “I Am Legend” does with Matheson’s.

The result is so unrecognizable, and so irredeemably awful, that–well, there’s nothing to say. The only tension in the movie was the hope, the slightest glimmer of possibility, that the filmmakers were bright enough to use the book’s best elements in a good way, or even a bad way.

Instead, they didn’t use them at all. They used a name, and a title, and a scary thing in the darkness.

It was an old phone booth, decrepit. Grass grown up all around, and weeds. There may have been a door at one point, but that was no longer true. Spidery cracks filled the existing windows. I lived there. You might think this is unusual, and you’d be right – but for all the wrong reasons.

The phone booth was enormous.

(Untrue.)

There is not now, nor I suspect will there ever be, a le Carré novel with ninjas in it. Most serious novelists are wary of including ninjas in their writing. That’s a shame, because many much-admired works of modern fiction could benefit from a few.

(via Telegraph: “Nick Harkaway: Le Carré with ninjas” [28-June-08])