Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Porsche to go green with Panamera S Hybrid

2010-porsche-panamera

Porsche’s Panamera luxury-performance car is going green. Porsche announced that a Panamera S Hybrid will go into production in 2011.

The new vehicle will reportedly share the same engine as the Cayenne S Hybrid, marrying a supercharged 3.0-liter V-6 engine from the Audi S4 to a 47-hp electric motor.

The addition of a Panamera S Hybrid to the 2012 lineup will complete Porsche’s hybrid line.

Hugo Boss Orange Menswear Fall/Winter 2010/11

More from Hugo Boss – this time their Orange Menswear Fall/Winter 2010/11.

The Orange collection offers a mixture of toughness and grit, mixed with casual and relaxed. There are some great accessories – the scarves are big this year.

It’s a nice collection for anyone looking for something hip, but not too hip.

Top 10 Tips to get Your Kids to Eat Healthily

Looking for some tips on how to get your kids to eat better? here are some great ideas:

1. Eating with your Children – Children learn by example, sitting on the sofa and eating a takeaway will teach them to do the same! Sitting down with them to a nutritious home cooked meal at the table with them will teach them the importance of home cooking, social interaction and establishing a routine.

2. Make food fun! Experimenting with new foods and making meals more colourful will give children a chance to learn about different foods and perhaps different food cultures.

3. Include two portions of vegetables in your evening meal and provide fruit for desserts. This will ensure that you can at least satisfy three out of the requisite five-a-day.

4. Hide fruit and vegetables if you have a particularly fussy eater. Blended veg in soups and puree fruit with ice-cream – a great way to disguise some healthy nutrients.

5. Encourage your children to drink water and sugar free squash between meals to help stop snacking.

6. Don’t give up – it may be hard to encourage your children to eat healthier but tastes do change over time so do try that portion of broccoli again and again…

7. Make sure that lean meat or a portion of protein is included within every other meal. Protein fills you up for longer and discourages snacking in between meals.

8. Serve oily fish twice a week – Great source of omega oils and keeps heart and mind healthy, if fish is not on your diet then add plant seeds to their cereals to give the plant version of these oils.

9. Pack a healthy lunch box – Whether it’s a lunch box for school or a picnic box make sure that you include a variety of salad items in sandwiches and fruits ready to eat – they don’t want food that’s fussy when on the go!

10. Make sure your children eat breakfast – Ensuring your children have fortified breakfast cereals with iron and vitamin B will give them a great start to the day and establish a good routine that spills over to adulthood. Research suggests that adults that who eat a healthy breakfast are ‘less’ likely to be overweight than those who skip it.

Disney·Pixar 2011 Weekly Calendar


Earlier today, I received in the mail an early copy of the Disney·Pixar 2011 Weekly Calendar, printed by Andrews McMeel Publishing. It's put together quite well, starting with an attractive cover that lets you know what's inside. The calendar feature isn't even the important part.

Each page has high quality punch-out bookmarks, collector cards, postcards, door hangers, and mini standees featuring characters from Pixar's films. The Ratatouille postcard with Paris in the background is one of my favourites, as is the Up bookmark with Carl clutching some balloons.

While it'll appeal first of all to Pixar-loving kids, fans of all ages should find the calendar to be pretty cool. It can be pre-ordered now from Amazon.com and .ca for around $12 and will be in stores soon.

Pixar "brain trust" consults on Muppets, Tron: Legacy

Pixar Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter in 2005 during production on Cars.
Photo by Deborah Coleman/Pixar.

Today's issue of The Hollywood Reporter (THR) describes how key people from the untitled Muppets movie in production at Disney were at Pixar's Emeryville headquarters yesterday for discussions with members of the studio's "brain trust"*.

The THR cover article doesn't say which "brain trust" members were present for the meeting, which included a read-through of the story, but notes that "[Pete] Docter is a particularly avid Muppets fan, so he almost certainly was one of the attendees. "

Just last week, Entertainment Weekly (EW) reported that Pixar assisted in the production Walt Disney Pictures' highly-anticipated Tron: Legacy, in theatres December 17.

(Watch the stunning new trailer released this afternoon at Yahoo! Movies.)

Late in March, "brain trust" members provided valuable feedback to the filmmakers after seeing a "very early working cut" of the live-action sci-fi epic. Disney even hired Brad Bird and Toy Story 3 screenwriter Michael Arndt to write some material for upcoming re-shoots.

Although no one from the studios would go on the record, something about both articles tells me that Disney wanted the stories out there. It's great press for the films and the entire Walt Disney Company (and CEO Bob Iger's management) that Pixar is working to make projects from other Disney-owned studios even better.

*As of 2010, the Pixar Senior Creative Team or "brain trust" consists of (in alphabetical order): Michael Arndt, Brad Bird, Brenda Chapman, Pete Docter, John Lasseter, Bob Peterson, Gary Rydstrom, Andrew Stanton, and Lee Unkrich.

2010 RenderMan Walking Teapot

The 2010 edition of Pixar's RenderMan Walking Teapot was finally revealed at its Official Fan Club on Facebook this evening.

Dylan Sisson tells me that this year's design is based on Mr. Potato Head and that he modelled it —"his hat, eyes, and mouth"— using ZBrush digital art creation software.

Sisson created the first Walking Teapot in 2003 as an homage to the "Utah Teapot" created in 1975 by computer graphics researcher Martin Newell. Newell's teapot model is a standard reference object and famous in-joke in the CG community.

Keeping with tradition, 1000 of the collectable windup teapot toys will be given away each day at Pixar's RenderMan booth at SIGGRAPH 2010 next week, starting at 1 PM on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. A complete schedule of RenderMan-related events at SIGGRAPH can be found at Pixar's website.

Pixar news this week

The past ten days have been among the slowest for big Pixar news in a while. But if you've been following @The_Pixar_Blog on Twitter (and how could you not!) you'll know there have been a few things going on and they're worth recapping here.

Toy Story 3 continues to do well at the box office, reaching $390.6 million domestically and $436.4 million in foreign markets, bringing the film's total worldwide lifetime gross to $827,006,539.

This past Friday, a new "Cars Toon" short, Monster Truck Mater, aired on the Disney Channel. I haven't seen it yet, but there's been a lot of positive buzz about it online. It's one of the best Cars Toons to date.

On Saturday, the long-running touring exhibition Pixar: 25 Years of Animation (formerly Pixar: 20 Years of Animation) returned to the United States, arriving at the Oakland Museum of California.

The exhibition, which features over 500 works of art created by Pixar during the past two and a half decades (including never-before-seen pieces from Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, and Toy Story 3) and the famous Pixar Zoetrope, will run at the OMCA until January 9. More info can be found in this press release.

Finally, I'm a huge fan of NBC's The Office, and the very funny Mindy Kaling, who plays the loquacious Kelly Kapoor on the show, has been expressing her love of Pixar and Toy Story 3 over the past few days on Twitter (@mindykaling) with tweets like "The Toy Story trilogy beats all trilogies" and "Uh, when is Pixar going to do a live-action movie?"