Japanese. Robot. Wrestling.

Bow before OmniZero.2!

(Created by Takeshi Maeda. More info at Engadget, The Raw Feed, Glosoli, Robots-Dreams.com and Robot-Fan.net.)

Brak Maquette. On sale!

For well over a year, the limited edition Brak Maquette has taunted me at Austin Books in all its 9" x 7" by 5" cold-cast porcelain glory. But at $59, I couldn't really justify it. So imagine my geek glee when I found it on sale at the Adult Swim online store for a mere $20. (I may have even squealed with delight. Just a tad.)

Anyway, I ordered it Sunday, and promptly received it last night. It is a thing of beauty. And I feel like an ineffable void in my life has been filled.

Other Adult Swim sale items worth noting are the Cowboy Bebop and Venture Brothers messenger bags, the Space Ghost Bust, the Sealab Bizarro action figures - and, of course, the absolutely essential Space Ghost's Musical Bar-B-Que CD and Brak Presents The Brak Album Starring Brak.

The Raisin has ruined the Oatmeal Cookie

Amen, brother. Just like how nuts ruin brownies! Simple is better.

Hello Kitty psychological test

Clicky clicky! (If you dare.)

Troop 1500 premieres on PBS tonight

Troop 1500, a remarkable documentary about a troop of Girl Scouts in Texas whose mothers are incarcerated felons, premieres tonight on the PBS documentary series Independent Lens. It was made by my friends Ellen Spiro and Karen Bernstein, and is highly recommended. (It debuted at SXSW last year to widespread critical acclaim.)

Resuming transmission...

Sorry for the unannounced week-plus hiatus, but on top of SXSW, I also got roped into producing a live (five-camera, HDV) concert video shoot for Angela Peterson at the Backyard this weekend - and Big Things are happening with both Villa Muse Studios and Blue, er..., um... Resolution 13. (Among other things.) Anyway, regular updates should resume this week(-ish), as I try to catch up. Thanks.

Tachiguishi trailer

Clearly, Mamoru Oshii has gone completely mad. Excellent.

Liquid water on Saturn's moon Enceladus

CNN reports: The Cassini spacecraft has found evidence of liquid water spewing from geysers on one of Saturn's icy moons, raising the tantalizing possibility that the celestial object harbors life. (Here's NASA's press release.)

If only we had warp drive!

TiVo Apple Multipass!

So Apple is going to start selling monthly subscriptions to TV shows on iTunes via a new service called "Multi-Pass". They're starting with The Daily Show and The Colbert Report for $9.99/month (16 episodes) - which works out to a tad more than $.62 per episode, compared to $1.99 a la carte. (Reuters reports that Apple has sold more than 8 million videos since they started selling them late last year - and BTW, did you know that Apple ranks #10 in storage sales?)

Meanwhile, TiVo has announced that they will offer a new subscription plan (exclusively via TiVo.com) giving customers the choice of paying a higher monthly fee in exchange for no upfront charge for an 80-hour TiVo DVR - effectively letting customers ammortize the cost of the hardware. Plus, the longer you commit to TiVo, the lower your bundled monthly fee will be (ranging from $20/month for one year to $17/month for three years, compared to the standard $13/month). This is actually a very good deal, but unfortunately they're also quietly eliminating their best deal; starting next week, the $299 product lifetime subscription option will no longer be offered, so grab it quick if you want it! (BTW, AP reports that TiVo now has 4.4 subscribers.)

America's Next Top Model 6(-word review)

Nnenna will win.

Jade must die.






(That is all.)

The Year of Superman

Kneel before Warner Bros.

Oh, yeah. Oscars.

So the Oscars were Sunday, and for the first time since I can remember I didn't bother to watch the show live, but on two-hour TiVo-delay so I could fast-forward through the boring parts (read: Crash musical number). TIME has an astute recap, but I have a few other thoughts. First off, the "Crash upset" really shouldn't have come as a surprise - and certainly didn't to me, since I basically called it in January by pointing out "it won the SAG Award for Best Ensemble, and actors are the largest branch of Academy voters". The rest of the categories didn't really hold any big surprises, either (save of course for "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp"), and it was actually kinda refreshing to see the Academy spread the wealth. (Not only did four films take home three Oscars each, but for the first time in 49 years the top six awards went to six different films.)

Anyway, I never got around to doing a Top Ten list for last year (I'm still behind on movies, including Capote and many others I won't admit), but the only Best Picture nominee I really agreed with / cared about was Good Night and Good Luck. My other four would've been a tough choice between The New World, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Pride & Prejudice, The Constant Gardener and A History of Violence - with honorable mentions to 2046, Broken Flowers, Syriana, Match Point and Millions. (And yes, I also dearly loved Serenity, King Kong, Batman Begins, Wallace & Gromit and Howl's Moving Castle.)

And while I got a kick out of Mel Gibson speaking Mayan, crave the gift bag and was glad they didn't hand out any Oscars in the aisles like last year (which was a travesty), I was confounded by the decision to have the orchestra play through each and every acceptance speech (which was as distracting as it was often completely incongruous in tone). Even worse were the utterly pointless (and time-sucking) "genre montages" with no identification of the individual clips, making them a test 95% of the viewing audience probably failed. In other words: "Ooo, look at all these clips of great classic movies that you should see on the big screen - except you can't - and we won't even tell you what movies the clips are from, so you can't even go buy/rent them on DVD." Brilliant, Academy. Meanwhile, after beating us over the head with the wholly impractical "movies should be seen on the big screen, not DVD" mantra (yeah, and people should also only eat out at nice restaurants), the Academy made themselves look both stupid and hypocritical, since a.) DVDs are the film industry's primary revenue stream, and b.) most Academy voters saw most of the nominated films they did on DVD screeners.

Then again, few awards shows seem to really know what they're doing. This year for the first time I won't be attending the Texas Film Hall of Fame, because once again it inexplicably conflicts with the SXSW Opening Night Premiere - and this year it's Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion. And, to be frank, I'm a little annoyed that they're honoring someone who hasn't made any significant impact on the Texas Film industry while there are so many worthy people they could and should be honoring (like, say, former Texas Film Commission director Tom Copeland and two-time Oscar-nominated sound mixer John Pritchett). Meanwhile, it apparently still hasn't occurred to the powers-that-be that if you're going to do an big celebrity-driven annual awards show called the Texas Film Hall of Fame, you might want to a.) not squander it by failing to enlist a broadcast partner like IFC, AMC, Sundance, Bravo, etc., and b.) have a plan to build an actual hall someday.

Joss Whedon shares his love of Brigadoon

Today's Daily Telegraph offers yet another installment of their Film-makers on Film series, as musical buff Joss Whedon discusses Vincente Minnelli's 1954 film adaptation of Lerner and Loewe's Brigadoon, starring Gene Kelly, Van Johnson and Cyd Charisse. Here's an excerpt:

"I would say that the most important part of Brigadoon is Van Johnson's character," Whedon says. "This is a movie that, while completely venerating the classic Hollywood romantic love story, completely deconstructs it at the same time. Johnson is constantly telling you there's no such thing as a musical, that people don't really break into song.

"That basic idea of having something that is hiding its intelligence in song and dance and hiding its romanticism in cynicism is to me very difficult but very dazzling. If the movie was all sunshine and roses and heather on the hill, even I would be like, OK, forget it. But in fact there's an unrelenting darkness about it."

Whedon has a theory that every movie aspires to the state of the musical. "You can take any genre and say these horror bits, these action bits, these are the musical numbers - these are the moments where we are uplifted. The shoot-out in The Wild Bunch, the Neo and Agent Smith fight in The Matrix - those are the big closing numbers. The way a musical can make us feel is unlike anything else, in song and particularly in dance. I think people fly through plate-glass windows when they get shot because movies don't have dance scenes any more. This is what we do instead."

(Brigadoon is currently on sale at Amazon - and also airs this Wednesday morning at 6am/5am CST on Turner Classic Movies.)

The Mexican Rocketeer

Excerpted from the March issue of Popular Science: Juan Manuel Lozano’s dream began when he was seven years old. “I don’t remember what I did last week,” Lozano tells me in his workshop, as he distills the hydrogen peroxide fuel that powers his homebuilt machine. “But I will never forget the first time I saw that rocket belt.”

It was February 1963, and NASA had brought its American space expo to the Campo Marte polo grounds in Mexico City. The star feature was the Bell Rocket Belt, also known as a jetpack (because the devices are rocket-powered, people who work on them prefer the term “rocket belt”). Strapped to the backs of two fearless fliers, the belt made the impossible possible for 21 dynamite seconds, four times a day, fueling the fantasies of sci-fi fans young and old. Juan sure had never seen anything like it. And he wanted to see it again and again and again.

Few, if any, of the 620,000 observers at the NASA expo would ever again see the likes of what they saw that February. Despite the great optimism of the early ’60s, in the rocket belt’s brief history, only 12 souls have flown one. More people have walked on the moon. But Juan Manuel Lozano didn’t want to go to the moon.

Read this amazing and inspiring story in its entirety in the March issue of Popular Science or at PopSci.com - and visit Lozano's website here.

A tale of two asteroids

PhysOrg.com reports that a 500-meter asteroid dubbed 2004 VD17 has a 1 in 1,000 chance of hitting Earth in less than century - the highest of any known asteroid. Were it to hit us (on May 4, 2102, to be precise) it'd deliver 10,000 megatons of energy, roughly equivalent to all the nuclear weapons on Earth going off at the same time, in the same place. Needless to say that would be Very Bad. (BTW, the previous leading deliverer of doom, Apophis, has only a tenth the mass and a 1 in 5,000 chance of hitting us on April 13, 2029.)

But not all asteroids are hurtling harbingers of global destruction - oh, no! Take the 2 km 3554 Amun, for instance, which Business 2.0 reports (in an interesting article about the burgeoning business of space) contains $8 trillion worth of iron and nickel, $6 trillion of cobalt, and $6 trillion of platinum-like metals. It next crosses Earth's orbit in 2020, when it'll be easier to reach than the Moon - providing an enterprising entrepeneur an opportunity at wealth 450 times that of Bill Gates.

INTERVIEWS: Park, Portman, Whedon, Clooney

Salon.com interviews Nick Park : "One of the most fun things to do in animation, actually, [is] to think up these inventions. The story is all to do with the comic nature of the invention. So you think of an idea, "Wallace needs to invent a machine that brainwashes bunny rabbits," and then you start to draw it, and then you have to think of how you shoot it and how it fits in with the overall story, so you keep changing it and swapping things around and building mock-ups. It's a lovely thing about model animation, that you can build these things - and they can actually work - without any technical knowledge. [Laughs] You can be an inventor."

The Times interviews Natalie Portman about V for Vendetta: “It was just an exciting thing for me to see a movie on this scale,” says Portman, “a big studio movie that was about something really interesting and had ideas in it, and strong character relationships — and a great story and complicated characters, too.” Nobody is ever going to get Queen Padmé Naberrie Amidala to say in as many words that the Star Wars [prequel] trilogy had none of the above. Yet, clearly, she knows.

Empire interviews Joss Whedon : "I am still writing Wonder Woman. It is very awesome but incredibly unfinished, but I can tell you that the film will be about introducing you to Wonder Woman. She'll be wearing the outfit and there will be the bracelets, the golden lasso and Greek gods. She comes from a civilization where she's rather perfect, so she's the opposite to Buffy in many ways, but she's going through an adolescent rite of passage because she's new to the world." (Joss also recently traded banter with Warren Ellis, which is geeky fun.)

The Guardian interviews George Clooney : "I was at a party the other night and it was all these hardcore Republicans and these guys are like, 'Why do you hate your country?' I said, 'I love my country.' They said, 'Why, at a time of war, would you criticise it then?' And I said, 'My country right or wrong means women don't vote, black people sit in the back of buses and we're still in Vietnam. My country right or wrong means we don't have the New Deal.' I mean, what, are you crazy? My country, right or wrong? It is not merely your right but your duty to question your government."

You too can dress like Steve Jobs

So yesterday while my lungs descended deeper into hell, Apple introduced Intel Core Duo-based Mac minis and the iPod Hi-Fi boombox. That's all well and good, but the really exciting news is that you too can now dress like Steve Jobs.

P.S.: You can also preorder the iPod Hi-Fi with free shipping from Amazon.

Pneumonia, bronchitis and laryngitis. Crap.

FYI, for those of you who don't already know, the illness I've been fighting on and off for the last several weeks turns out to have blossomed into full-blown pneumonia, bronchitis and laryngitis (because apparently just one or two of those just wouldn't have been misearble enough). Luckily I (hopefully) won't have to be hospitalized, but I'm forced to take an admittedly long-overdue break from work to recuperate (I hope in time for SXSW).

So please don't be offended if I don't take or return your calls, but feel free to send cute nurses. And Girl Scout Cookies.