Where is my super-suit?
Watched The Incredibles last night--missed this in the theater for some reason but that is OK. This way we didn't have to listen to young kids screaming, "I don't like this!" like we did for A Bug's Life. What, a giant menacing grasshopper voiced by Kevin Spacey isn't pleasant? Dude!
The DVD is well worth getting. The short film "Jack Jack Attack", sort of a Letitia Lerner: Superman's Babysitter on acid, is worth the purchase price alone. Add in a video diary with Sarah Vowell, and well, they've dialed my number. I hear good things about the Clutch Cargo-inspired short film, but I've not watched it yet. On the down side, the Boundin short didn't do that much for me. Nowhere near as good as For the Birds. That short still cracks me up. The Cars trailer also does nothing for me--for the first time I am totally disinterested in a Pixar film. Not a single giant robot to be found.
There's a subtle hint of base sadness on the Incredibles Web site. Disney's pimping everything they can for the film--mobile phone wallpapers, ringtones, soundtracks, etc.1 Losing Pixar may be the final nail in Disney's coffin, assuming Eisner doesn't demand to be pushed out to sea on a flaming EPCOT Center or something. But they have only themselves to blame--shutting down their animation studio, focusing on protecting the Mickey Mouse copyright beyond all reason, releasing "limited edition" DVDs of stuff instead of keeping material in print. There's a note on BoingBoing that somebody built a filter to elimate posts by Xeni--I am sorely tempted see if it can be modified to remove all the wanking about Disneyland on that site.
Damn. It appears that Andre Norton has died. I loved her work as a kid. She, along with Heinlein, Asimov, and Alan E. Nourse, were the chief reasons I got into the genre in the first place.
Norton requested before her death that she not have a funeral service, but instead asked to be cremated along with a copy of her first and last novels.
Born Alice Mary Norton on February 17, 1912, in Cleveland, she wrote more than 130 books in many genres during her career of nearly 70 years. She used a pen name -- which she made her legal name in 1934 -- because she expected to be writing mostly for young boys and thought a male name would help sales.
Damn. That's a classy request, though. I guess to emulate it I'd have to publish more than one novel. Seems possible.
1 -- On a side note, I long for the day when I have as much control over my cell phone as I do over my computer--imagine paying Microsoft or Apple or RedHat a dollar every time you wanted to change your desktop pattern. I should be able to turn the shutter noise on the camera phone off. Every function is either locked down or requires a payment to some phone company. Stupid. Sorta like region encoding on DVDs. Why we allowed companies to do this to us is a mystery to me.
