Damn straight.

A really good article about that open letter to Pixar about writing a movie about a girl who's not a princess, and the response on one animation forum.

My favorite line in the whole damn thing: Why is it that when women -- who make up over half of the species, by the way -- respectfully point out that they're underrepresented in movies, it's seen as some sort of angry feminist screed?

I hate that fucking reaction. No, we don't want everybody at Pixar to, as it's put in the article, "fire all the male animators and hire angry lesbians in big, stompy boots to wipe boys off the Pixar landscape by brute force." We don't want Tinkerbell Princess bullshit. That's the point.

It's like Up. I love that movie SO MUCH. And I know people have problems with Russell not being a girl or Carl not being a girl or ( cut for spoiler )

, but I think it's perfectly fine the way it is. But now I want an Ellie movie. That's the kind of girl *I* was as a kid -- climbing trees, running around the woods getting dirty, exploring places I probably shouldn't -- and I know a hell of a lot of other women who were the same way as kids.

Look, there is a large percentage of us who would gleefully never see a sparkly princess romance again. And it's characters like Ellie Fredericksen and Jessie and Violet Parr that show that Pixar knows how to write girls that refuse to sport a pretty dress and a tiara because it'll get in the way of trying to catch baby catfish in the pond or playing basketball in the park. *shifty eyes*

I really wish their first female lead in The Bear And The Bow weren't a damn princess, because other than that she sounds like a real kickass character. Having said that, I'm crossing my fingers, because if anybody can make me like a princess character for a change, it's Pixar. (Actually, I have this mental image of her chucking her tiara in the end and becoming a great archer, which would be more than a little awesome.)

In related news, the agent-shaped person and I got into a discussion last night about those urban fantasy book covers with the women with naked backs on them, and I joked that I should just write a book with an elderly overweight lead just because of that, and now I'm seriously considering how to pull that off. Yeah, naked-back THIS, fuckers.

You had me, and then you lost me.

This ... kinda gets to the heart of my problem with the Palin/Letterman thing.

A quick summation for those who've missed it: Sarah Palin takes her daughter to a baseball game. Letterman then makes a tasteless, not-really-funny joke about A-Rod knocking up the daughter. Letterman thought she took Bristol except, oops, no, she took 14-year-old Willow. Palin calls him on it, and Letterman apologizes on his show.

If it had ended right then and there, I probably would have stayed on Palin's -- or at least her daughter's -- side.

But of course, we're talking about Sarah Palin here, and as you can tell in that article she went on the Today show this morning, took the opportunity to sarcastically call Obama "the candidate who must be obeyed," and also said this:

Host Matt Lauer questioned the Governor on the Letterman flap, pressing her on some of her more provocative statements about situation, asking, "Are you suggesting that David Letterman can't be trusted around a 14 year old girl?" Her response: "Take it how you want to take it."

Okay, putting aside the fact that Obama is not secretly writing jokes for Letterman's show and therefore has nothing to do with this particular instance of bad form, making some snotty comment that Letterman's probably some sort of pedophile is probably even more crass than what he said. Letterman made a joke -- a lame, awful sexist JOKE -- about A-Rod, in which your daughter was simply a prop. (The prop part is skeevy, I'm not going to deny that.) You went into an interview and implied in a flip manner that Letterman couldn't be trusted around pre-teen girls.

Do you have any idea how appalling that is?

You had me. You HAD me. For one blessed moment, I was like, "I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm on Palin's side." A broken clock's right twice a day, right? Eventually you had to come up with something that wasn't completely tone-deaf and selfish.

And then you proceeded to do what you always do -- open your mouth and speak.

I'm surprised I expected anything better of you.

EDIT: RT @Kaydeb: someone is exploiting palin's daughter for publicity, but it ain't letterman... | Exactly. Exactly.