After we see an animated movie I invariably start complaining that almost no characters are female. You'd think that with main characters being toys, animals, monsters, cars, and other things that have no obvious physical sex differentiators, they could be split 50-50. But somehow, they are usually male. Obvious exceptions are things like Little Bo-Peep in Toy Story (and wasn't she a great character), and of course hippos wearing pink bows. I mean, how would you possible be able to tell an animal is female unless it's wearing pink, or makeup, or a tutu?

I kept saying I was going to do some research and figure out the real numbers, but Geena Davis beat me to it:

In the 101 [G-rated] animated and live-action films examined, 28 percent of speaking characters were female, and just 17 percent of people in crowd scenes were female, researchers found in the study released by See Jane.

Surprise. I don't think this is limited to children's films, however--how many movies are you aware of that have a female lead, or multiple female leads, that aren't labeled as "chick flicks"? Women and girls are perfectly willing to see movies without female characters, but either the opposite is not true of men/boys, or Hollywood just hasn't caught up yet.

My favorite class in college was about non-human animal intelligence. We studied chimpanzees and dolphins of course, but one of the most intriguing animals was the African Grey parrot named Alex. Alex is remarkably intelligent and since then I've always wanted to know someone who owned one of these birds. I don't want to own one myself--too much responsibility--but it'd be nice to have a next-door neighbor or something who had one.

A few weeks ago Mark Morford wrote a funny article about living with an African Grey:

Hence, she can now imitate, with freakish precision, the exact tone and cadence of the ring of my SO's home phone. She will ring the phone two or three times, answer it with the exact same beep as the on button, say, "Hello, how are you?" in pitch-perfect girlfriend intonation, proceed to have a full conversation in human-pitched bird gibberish (with all appropriate pauses and cadences), say, "OK, OK, bye-bye," and hang up with another perfect beep. She will do this over and over again. All day long.

Too bad I don't live next door to him.