'Help us mutiny': Johnny Depp pays surprise visit to London primary school dressed as Jack Sparrow after letter from girl, 9

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Update: There is now video taken by someone of just a few minutes of Depp's visit to the school.

Johnny Depp is awesome:

It's not every day a Hollywood heart-throb pitches up in your classroom.

But these Greenwich schoolgoers left the rest of Britain's children - if not parents - green with envy when they had a surprise visit from Johnny Depp yesterday.

The star is currently in south-east London filming the fourth Pirates Of The Caribbean movie On Stranger Tides and arrived at the Meridian Primary School dressed in full character as Captain Jack Sparrow.

He made the one-off trip after nine-year-old pupil Beatrice Delap wrote to the star asking for help staging a 'mutiny' against the teachers, as he was filming at the nearby 18th century Old Naval College.


xkcd: Online Communities 2

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xkcd has updated their map of online communities

Caption: Best trivia I learned while working on this: 'Man, Farmville is so huge! Do you realize it's the second-biggest browser-based social-networking-centered farming game in the WORLD?' Then you wait for the listener to do a double-take.

The Impeccable Timing Of The Verizon iPhone Rumors

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MG Siegler, for AOL/Techcrunch:

This past July, rumors were swirling that Apple would have to recall the iPhone 4 due to its antenna. When Apple called a surprise press conference, these rumors only intensified. But one day before the event, there was the WSJ again with the story that Apple would not be recalling the device. Again, this seemed to be all about setting expectations. The next day, did Apple recall the device? Nope. But no one panicked because everyone knew they weren’t going to.

If you go back to last year, on June 19, Apple had their most successful product launch ever (at the time) with the iPhone 3GS. That night, after the stock market had closed, WSJ broke the news that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had undergone a liver transplant months earlier while on his medical leave of absence. The timing of such a scoop was curious at best — and there’s no denying that the timing was advantageous to Apple. Jobs was said to be fine, and returning to work shortly.

What did all of those stories have in common? Each was authored or co-authored by WSJ reporter Yukari Iwatani Kane. And guess who co-authored today’s Verizon iPhone story as well? Yep.