I’ve tried to ignore Pixar’s gender problem because their movies are so damn good, but this post makes that pretty much impossible. It’s not about any one movie, but about the body of work as a whole. Consider Finding Nemo:

Father/son bonding film featuring a male clownfish (Marlin) and his son (Nemo). I’m all for movies about fathers and sons and, in fact, this is my favorite of all Pixar movies. Still, Nemo doesn’t put female characters front and center, and it probably shouldn’t, considering the subject matter. If it were only one male-dominated movie in a well-balanced oeuvre, I wouldn’t have a problem. Female characters: Nemo’s dead mom (Coral), Dory, Peach, Deb, Darla.

Ally score: 2/10. Points for having an important female character. Not too many, though, since she is squarely in the selfless helper/moral center role. Should I give points for making 2 of the 8 fish in Nemo’s tank female? Should I just be happy that any are female and not quibble on the 25% issue? Also, the elementary school teacher fish is male. Maybe because he’s a science teacher.

I’m still going to see Up in theaters, and will take my daughters, dammit.

“Great, now I have guilt!”

(via kottke)

Washington DC now has far and away the coolest quarter.

Radiohead donated one of their tracks, “Videotape”, for use in a commercial by Leo Burnett designed to raise awareness of the fragile UK housing situation. Samantha Morton, who was homeless for a time before becoming famous, does the voiceover (also donated).

According to Luerzer, this is the first-ever commercial Radiohead has allowed their music to be used for, but a quick search turned up this Steve Nash/Jason Kidd commercial for the NBA (there are a bunch of those There Can Only Be One spots; I like the Shaq/Kobe one). Maybe this is the first one they’ve donated rather than sold. Doesn’t matter, great commercial.

What if the expression is really “time heals awl wounds”? The common interpretation outscores it on Google 132,000 to one (really, just one?), but I think my version has the significant advantage of not being blatantly wrong. So the next time somebody tries to console you with the cliché, gently remind them that you are suffering from more than a mere puncture wound.

Congrats to Kate Winslet on the long overdue win, and more importantly for making this Extras clip even greater in the process.

If you are a fan Jarratt Moody’s typographic Pulp Fiction mashup, now you can buy the t-shirt version. (via josh spear)

A $150, 4-minute short film directed by Miguel Arteta, written by Miranda July, and starring John C. Reilly: Are You The Favorite Person of Anybody? (via tmn)

Interesting profile in The New Yorker on Jerry Baber, an Appalachian gunsmith who wants the military to adopt his robotic soldiers. The technology is made possible by his recoil-less automatic shotgun, which allows the robots to fire without having their aim disrupted:

Until recently, Baber’s reputation as a firearms craftsman was known only to a few dozen gun-trade insiders. Then, a few years ago, he started producing, from start to finish, his own weapon: a fully automatic shotgun called the AA-12. The AA-12 has the power of a twelve-gauge shotgun but none of its bruising recoil. Recoil is a problem with any shotgun; a typical single-shot twelve-gauge will, as Baber puts it, “just rattle your damn teeth when it goes off.” A gun’s kick occurs when gas from ignited gunpowder propels the shell out of a gun barrel, creating an equal and opposite force that pushes the gun’s firing bolt backward. That force eventually gets transferred to the shooters shoulder, and the pop of the recoil also sends the barrel upward. Trying to fire an automatic version of a twelve-gauge shotgun would be like holding a fire hose with one hand.

By contrast, you can fire an AA-12—which shoots five shotgun shells per second—with one hand and hold a mug of coffee in the other without spilling it. Made almost entirely of aircraft-grade stainless steel, the gun can fire thousands of rounds without cleaning. Baber spent a dozen years, and upward of a million and a half dollars of his own money, perfecting the gun. He believes that the AA-12 is the most deadly close-range weapon ever created.

Here’s a YouTube demo reel. I thought the one-hand claim might be an exaggeration, but I guess not.

John McPhee’s article on on fact checkers is fascinating. For one thing, I had no idea Japan launched paper incendiary balloons that were carried all the way to the US on the jet stream:

The Japanese called the balloons fusen bakudan. Thirty-three feet in diameter, they were made of paper and were equipped with incendiary devices or high explosives. In less than a year, nine thousand were launched from a beach on Honshu. They killed six people in Oregon, five of them children, and they started forest fires, and they landed from Alaska to Mexico and as far east as fifteen miles from the center of Detroit. Completing the original manuscrip of “The Curve of Binding Energy,” which was otherwise not about Hanford, I wrote half a dozen sentences on the balloon that shut down the reactor, and I turned the piece in. If Wheeler’s story was true, it would make it into print. If unverifiable, it would be deleted. I hoped it was true. The rest was up to Sara.

Every time I hear something about Shaquille O’Neal he just sounds like a fun guy. And as of today, he is responsible for the best Twitter story to date.

The Orbitwheel skates look like a ton of fun. Kinda like a cross between a skateboard and rollerblades. Best of both worlds, almost. Your feet are independent like rollerblades, but you can just step into them without lacing or buckling, like a skateboard. And could they be more portable? Just chuck ‘em in your backpack.

Heavy (and welcome) dose of Far Side influence in a couple cartoons in the 2/23 issue of The New Yorker:

and…