Who knew that Al Pacino would make such a fantastic 16th century money-lender? Shakespeare for me, can be difficult to map into a modern world view, with the result being that I can’t get my mind around the motivation of his characters. However, this excellent rendition, abetted perhaps by its more timeless tale, delivered Shakespeare’s message like an apple falling through four hundred years to hit me squarely on the head.

An interesting portrait of life in rural Japan in the 40s, but I didn’t feel much of an emotional connection to the characters — two twin boys who make a lot of mischief, at times bordering on malice.

I finally dug out and plugged in this Intel Play microscope that I picked up on a lark a while back. At 200x it’s damned near impossible to adjust the cheap plastic platform in increments small enough to get good focus and without decent lighting, it’s hard to get a good image, but it is pretty neat. After looking at the collection of dog hair and honeybee wings they included in the box, I looked around for something else to jam under there.

My cellphone’s LCD screen looked pretty cool.
10x	60x
200x

This nasty looking business is some cork at 60x:

While disassembling a Nintendo cartridge to see if there was anything interesting inside, I got a good close look at one of the screws:

Then I took a peek at some printed text. I figured that at, say, 600 dpi, I might see some actual dots at 200x magnification. However, it was not to be. Probably they print at a higher resolution like 1200 dpi and the resolution of the microscope is far from stellar:

60x	200x

If I catch any small creatures in my apartment in the near future, you’ll be sure to get a good close look at them.