New pic from Spirit rover

Things are looking better for the troubled Spirit rover on Mars. It sent back it's first picture since it developed problems on 1/22. It's still not out of the woods, but at least it's moving in the right direction. Yay!

It looks like Eisner's blown it again

Talks between Pixar and Disney have been killed after 10 months of trying to strike a deal. Disney is too greedy to stray far from the current deal that gives them over half the profits of Pixar's highly successful films. Pixar does have a long laundry list (only paying for distribution with no sharing in the profits, full ownership of the titles, etc), but considering their stellar track record, they deserve it and more. Pixar is going to continue to do great things wherever they end up...but unfortunately the rights to all of their existing characters stay with the Mouse. So the only way we're ever going to see the version of Toy Story 3 that Pixar has come up with (and I hear it's supposed to be REALLY great) is if the Mouse wises up and realizes that a small piece of the pie is better than none at all.

Oh well. At least this is some really strong ammo for Roy Disney and his attempt to get Eisner out of the company. (for more on that, check out his site at Save Disney.com)

"Destino"?! Oh No!

This one thrills me to no end. The Disney company is now caught in a situation where they're damned if they do and damned if they don't. You see, the animated short "Destino" (a collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali that started 58 years ago) has just received an Oscar nomination. The bad news is that it was all due to the effort of executive producer Roy Disney. If they win, Roy might have the opportunity to bring his anti-Eisner message to 200 million viewers and on Disney's ABC network to boot! If they don't do the standard publicity push to try and win the Oscar, then Roy has some fabulous ammuntion to add to his arguments of Disney's creative bankruptcy.

And the winner is...Big City Dick!

I found out this weekend that Big City Dick: Richard Peterson's First Movie won the Audience Award for Best Feature at the Slamdance Film Festival! Why am I excited about this? Well, I designed the website! Check out BigCityDick.com and watch the trailer. Y'know I really should be updating the site instead of posting about it on my blog. Bad Chris. :P

Moog

Jack sent me a link to this today. It's a documentary being made about Bob Moog, creator of the Moog synthesizer. The soundtrack also looks to be pretty fantastic. Stereolab, Jean-Jacques Perrey, Devo, The Cure, and Dave Gahan...just to name a few. Make sure and download the preview!

NASA - Postcard from a Martian Crater

I've been quite fascinated by the images from the rovers on Mars. The first images from the Opportunity are in and quite different from the terrain Spirit has shown us. Ok, there's not much to see right now because they've landed in a crater. It should make for quite an impressive shot as they roll out of it onto the surface.

Speaking of Spirit, the news seems to be good for getting it back online. The NASA scientists say they should be able to resolve the issues in a couple of weeks and that they've recovered from worse problems on other missions.