Great Expectations: Pixar anoints its first female protoganist in “Brave”

Dear Pixar: You had me at her hair…

With a resplendent mane of fiery red curls, Merinda, the hero of Pixar’s latest animated feature “Brave” is truly the hallmark of a princess whose time has come. And not just because the animation of her volume of hair required a technological breakthrough, which it did.

Six years in the making, Merinda is the first female protagonist to join Pixar’s all-male cast of leading heroes, breaking the mold of the damsel-in-distress princess archetype that punctuates virtually all films produced by Pixar’s predecessor, Disney.

Associate producer Mary Alice Drumm describes “Brave” as a movie about redefining expectations for female protagonists:

“I think when people think about a girl as a hero, they think less strong, less brave. But Merida is brave like her father and brave like her mother. She’s a very relatable person, and I think people are going to have some interesting things to talk about after they see the movie.” ~SFGate

Producer Katherine Sarafian adds:

“There’s the bravery of adventure, with sword fights and chases and all that,” she says. “Then there’s the bravery of being seen for who you are. If you see yourself in a certain way and the rest of the world sees you in another way, that’s a struggle. It’s brave to look at who you are and speak your truth and find your way in the world.” ~SFGate

Brave opens June 22, and although its leading lass is garnering attention for her gender, Sarafian says the film is still a Pixar movie, with “big action, big heart, big humor, big adventure.”

If you had the chance to change your fate, would you?

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Where are you on global pay scale?

Do you earn more or less than the world’s average wage?

World average monthly wage: $1,480

  • Luxembourg – $4,089
  • United States – $3,263
  • Canada – $2,724
  • Germany – $2,720
  • China – $656

The average wage, calculated by the International Labour Organization, is published here for the first time. It’s a rough figure based on data from 72 countries, omitting some of the world’s poorest nations. All figures are adjusted to reflect variations in the cost of living from one country to another, and as Ruth Alexander of BBC radio’s More or Less programme underlines, it’s all about wage earners, not the self-employed or people on benefits.

 

Click to view the interactive version (shows wage of each country).

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Beautiful and interesting game – The Unfinished Swan (trailer)

The Unfinished Swan is a game about exploring the unknown.

The player is a young boy chasing after a swan who has wandered off into a surreal, unfinished kingdom. The game begins in a completely white space where players can throw paint to splatter their surroundings and reveal the world around them.

It’s being developed exclusively for the PlayStation 3 and will be available for download sometime in 2012. You can follow the game’s development on our blog.

 

// Thx – Anna the Red

HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’ begins selling – $30,000 Iron Throne

The second season of “Game of Thrones” is over and the long wait for Season 3 has begun. The only question now is: Are you going to sit and wait on your couch or on your made-to-order $30,000 life-size replica of the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms?

HBO is now selling replicas of the Iron Throne through its online HBO Shop with the $30,000 price tag and a shipping fee of $1,800. It’s the kind of collectible only a Lannister could afford.

via L.A. Times – Show Tracker

 

This custom chair is designed to mimic the seat of kings in the Seven Kingdoms. On the show, the Iron Throne was constructed by Aegon I Targaryen, the first king of the Seven Kingdoms. He made it from the swords surrendered by his enemies. Legend has it, it’s made of a thousand swords that took 59 days to hammer out into a throne. Spikes and jagged edges in every direction make this one very intimidating lounge.

 

Additional Details

  • Dimensions: Height: 7’2″, Depth: 5’11”, Width: 5’5″
  • Made Of: Hand finished, hand painted fiberglass throne.
  • Weight: 350 pounds

 

HBO Shop

Barnes opens in Philadelphia – with more Renoirs, Cézannes than all of France

Philadelphia, the city that gave us Poor Richard, cheese-steak sandwiches and the American Constitution, just opened a new treasure: the Barnes Foundation, one of the premier privately assembled collections of painting in the U.S. with more dreamy Renoirs and searching Cézannes than in the whole of France.

Its arrival in May halfway between the landmark City Hall and Museum of Art on Benjamin Franklin Parkway — Philly’s Champs Élysées — gives visitors a chance to see what was once an almost secret stash of great art.

The catalog is astounding, even apart from Renoirs and Cézannes.

…all previously hard to access, thanks in part to the collection’s former home in Merion, PA, a 45-minute bus ride from downtown. The foundation rarely lent works to other museums, prohibited reproductions and restricted visitation.

Curmudgeonly founder Albert C. Barnes, a medical doctor, chemist and self-made millionaire with a boulder-size chip on his shoulder, once called Philadelphia “a depressing intellectual slum.” He started buying art in the early part of the 20th century and conceived of his collection as an educational institution, not a gathering place for high-society “Sunday” dabblers in art.

It took more than 50 years to give the collection a new home that is open to the public. Not everyone loves it.

 

Keep reading – New Barnes Foundation offers up its treasures in Philadelphia

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Click and Clack to retire – NPR’s Car Talk – final show this Fall

They were a couple of auto mechanics with a pronounced Boston brogue and, improbably, degrees from MIT. They hadn’t a clue how to perform on radio, much less public radio.

So Tom and Ray Magliozzi just decided to have a good time. The result was “Car Talk,” which shattered the perception that public radio is inaccessible to the masses and became National Public Radio’s top-rated weekend show.

After 35 years on the air, the brothers announced Friday that the run was ending. No longer would they be dishing on cars so old that their odometers switched to scientific notation or delivering gift advice to VW Bus lovers. The show informally known as “Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers” will tape its final original show this fall.

Declaring that “even one hour a week is too much” work, the comedian-mechanics said it was time to “stop and smell the cappuccino” instead of inhaling exhaust. The call-in show is syndicated on 660 radio stations and is heard by 3.3 million listeners weekly.

more on this story – Hosts put the brakes on NPR’s ‘Car Talk’

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10 more Netflix Instant Streaming recommendations from Roger Ebert


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The heartening resurgence of the American play

Had you polled theater pundits in recent years about which they thought would be in better shape today, the Broadway musical or the Broadway play, it’s hard to imagine any of them choosing the drama.

Yet one of the unexpected developments of the past season is the robust showing of what used to be called “the straight play” — a designation that sounds vaguely apologetic for not featuring high-kicking chorus girls and 11 o’clock numbers.

Apparently, those mythological hordes of tourists with their insatiable appetite for franchise spectacles aren’t having the final say. Playwrights and the producers who love them have been putting up a sneaky defense against the theme-park takeover of Broadway.

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…but just when you were ready to concede Times Square as part of the United Kingdom, lo and behold, the four nominees for best play are all written by Yanks: Bruce Norris (“Clybourne Park”), Jon Robin Baitz (“Other Desert Cities”), David Ives (“Venus in Fur”) and Rick Elice (“Peter and the Starcatcher”).

 

keep reading – L.A. Times Critics Notebook, Charles McNulty

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The illustration process for children’s books

It seems pretty straightforward right? Draft a story and get an illustrator to come up with some imagery to coincide with the storyline and you’re off to the presses. Not quite! Here’s a quick overview of the illustration process Where Albatross Soar has gone through.

 

A fascinating process, here are just a few steps:

Step 4 – Color Explorations: Colors set the mood for the story and are an important part of establishing the visual direction. As consumers, we have an unconscious emotional response to certain colors – again a science in and of itself. Sherwin paints some of the sketches to explore different color combinations and we discuss the intended change in mood & flow from page to page. Color explorations below:

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MESSENGER sends first data back to Earth – uncovers ice on Mercury

For several years scientists have been begging to test their theories about Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun. You see, the radar signals come back showing ice exists on the planet, but how could ice exist on a planet so incredibly hot?

NASA sent the spacecraft MESSENGER to orbit the planet and figure the mystery out (among other things). It turns out that ice exists at the planet north and south poles and possibly underneath some “dirt-shielding”.

All of this was uncovered by Professor David Paige, who has previous experience with Mars and the Moon, as he explains in his own words:

 

“I was able to use the Mercury laser altimeter in conjunction with a three-dimensional ray-tracing thermal model that I built to study ice on the moon, Paige said. “Using these models, I calculated the average temperature on the surface of the planet and concluded that the surface temperatures were too warm to permit the long-term stability of ice. The only possibility was some sort of thin layer of cover that allowed the ice to survive.”

This thin, dark layer is called a regolith and is probably made of organic substances like the Earth’s soil, rich in hydrocarbon compounds that may have come from the comets and meteorites that struck the planet over time. The comets and meteorites may have also contributed the water that seeped under the soil cover to form the icy patches.

***

MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging) is the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury. Its goal is to collect better data about the composition and atmosphere of the planet, and it just completed its first year of information gathering.

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While the mix of water and organic compounds on another planet may raise the possibility of extraterrestrial life for some scientists, this is not what excites Paige. For him, the discovery of ice on Mercury is the triumph of science.

“We’re getting a good agreement between models and observations,” Paige said. “What we thought was true is true. The most exciting part of this? We may not know lot of things, but on Mercury we have things under control.”

via UCLA Today

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