Other shape-based input methods have existed before, but they took a long time to learn, and if you didn’t get the input sequence exactly right, the character you wanted wouldn’t come up. With Jade Gazebo, you can hunt-and-peck Chinese just like English.

Let’s take a moment to think about how profound that is. Even if I don’t know Greek, I can look a passage of Greek text, look at a Greek keyboard, and successfully type it. I might not be very fast at it, but I’ll succeed. Same with Hindi. Same with Inuktitut. But with Chinese, that’s never before been possible.

Now it is.

But don’t think Jade Gazebo is just for hunting-and-pecking. Jade Gazebo can also be used for professional touch-typing, since 99% of characters have unique input sequences. Using this one input method, you can start as a hunt-and-pecker and eventually become a touch-typist. That’s something no other Chinese input method can claim.

Obviously the main beneficiaries of this will be people who want Hanzi tattoos. Now that the most ignorant English-speaker can type any random Chinese character by sight, there’s no excuse for them to not look up the meaning of their desired tattoo on Wiktionary before getting it.

God needs to bring back Tammy Faye.

In this U.S. #2 hit from 1987, George Michael begs his female lover to have sex with him. This was 11 years before George was caught soliciting anonymous gay sex in a public lavatory in Los Angeles.

His actual girlfriend of the time appeared in the videoclip. “Don’t you think it’s time you had sex with me?”, he asks of her. “I tell you that I love you but you still say no.”

I suspect it was actually the other way around.

2) Monkey

In this U.S. #1 hit from 1988, George rails against his lover’s addiction (unspecified, but presumably drugs).

This was 18 years before George was found passed out at the wheel of his car in the middle of the road due to habitual drug use. And 18 and half years before the second time George was found passed out at the wheel of his car in the middle of the road due to habitual drug use.

3) Spinning the Wheel

In this U.K. #2 hit from 1996, George laments the unfaithfulness of a lover who seeks out dangerous sex with strangers. “Ain’t you getting what you want from me?”, he asks.

Ten years later, George was (again) busted for seeking anonymous public sex. George told the media that it was okay because he and his boyfriend, Kenny Goss, had an open relationship. Apparently that was news to Kenny.

The gunman, George Sodini, had a blog. In it, he complained that he hadn’t had a girlfriend since 1984, and hadn’t been laid since 1990. In his last post, he explains his motive for the shooting.

“Why do this?? To young girls? [...]

“I was reading several posts on different forums and it seems many teenage girls have sex frequently. One 16 year old does it usually three times a day with her boyfriend. So, err, after a month of that, this little hoe [sic] has had more sex than ME in my LIFE, and I am 48. One more reason. Thanks for nada, bitches!”

The thing about George Sodini is that, when you watch that YouTube video of his, he actually looks like a pretty good catch at first. You can see that he works out, and wears cologne, and keeps his house immaculately organised.

So what went wrong? Why did he have so much trouble getting a date? And why did he turn violent?

Firstly, George was a racist with a penchant for guns. I suspect that’s why he didn’t date much. Women can spot assholes pretty easily.

Secondly, another video he reveals that he’s a fan of books by so-called “seduction gurus”. I think that explains the violence.

People think these seduction gurus are jokes, but they’re not. They’re a cancer who sell misogyny to the kind of gullible men who fall for big promises and cheap stage tricks.

We have one of them in Toronto. He goes by Dimitri the Lover (a.k.a. James Sears) and is much despised. He delights in referring to women as sluts, and claims that “men [are] born to be RAPISTS and women born to be RAPEES”. He believes that the only reason rape is illegal is because “every woman is CHATTEL, owned by a man … NOT because anyone truly cares about the feelings of the ‘RAPEE’”.

He tells men that women who won’t sleep with them are “stuck-up bitches who play games”. (And the ones who will sleep with them are “sluts”.)

What we saw in Pittsburgh is the logical result of this thinking. Stuck-up bitches, all of them. Maybe they deserve to be killed indiscriminately in a hail of bullets.

Idiots need to realise that following someone like Dmitri the Lover makes you less appealing to women, not more. Because women can spot an asshole.

Seriously, if you think a “seduction guru” can help you more than a therapist can, then you deserve to die a lonely childless virgin, and you probably will. In fact, you might as well do us all a favour and kill yourself now. It would save yourself another forty years of futility.

And do it before you take any innocent women with you.

Let’s get this out of the way now: Rebel Without a Cause is not a very good movie. Despite being a part of pop culture consciousness since its release in 1955, it’s pretty… dull.

At the time, people were shocked by the movie’s portrayal of a culture of mildly disaffected youths who felt they were neither children nor adults, who engaged in irresponsible or rebelious behaviour, and whose parents didn’t understand them. But nowadays, we take that for granted. We call them “teenagers”.

(You have to remember, the concept of being a teenager only emerged during the post-WWII economic boom. Before that, most people had jobs by the time they were 15 and grew up quickly.)

There are still a couple reasons to watch the movie, though.

The first is that it launched the careers of three very talented leads. It was the first starring role for Sal Mineo, the second for James Dean, and though Natalie Wood had been a child star before, it was her first role as an adult. All three would be nominated for Oscars that year.

And somewhat spookily, all three stars met tragic ends. James Dean died in a car accident. Natalie Wood drowned. Sal Mineo was murdered by stabbing. That seems to make this movie feel all the more mythic in retrospect.

The other reason to watch the movie is to be amazed that, once upon a time, people had no gaydar.

Seriously. Though the movie is pretty slow and tedious, it’s impossible to miss that the fact that James Dean and Sal Mineo spend the entire movie wanting to jump on each other, with Natalie Wood wanting to be the meat in that sandwich. I’m not kidding.

(This probably wasn’t much of a stretch for any of the actors. Both James and Sal were bisexual, and Natalie dated a number of gay men.)

And yet, with all that was written about the movie at the time, no one seems to mention that. Viewers at the time interpreted it as the three characters wanting to be a pseudo-family, with James and Natalie as the parents, and Sal as an adopted son. Seriously. They said that.

No gaydar, I’m telling you.

If you don’t believe me, watch the movie for yourself. It’s really obvious.

If you’re Australian, you already know about the movie Picnic at Hanging Rock. It’s a veritable masterpiece of cinema that mixes the lush beauty of a Merchant & Ivory film with the haunting trippiness of a David Lynch film. It was made in the 70s, but remarkably, hasn’t dated at all.

The story is based on a much-loved Australian novel set in 1904 about two private school girls (including the beautiful and ethereal Miranda) and one teacher who seemingly vanish into thin air during a school excursion to a rock formation called Hanging Rock.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of Australians of my generation avoid the film, assuming that it would be dated, or cringing away from any film described as “classic” (or worse, “Australian”). Maybe you were forced to watch it in school and weren’t really paying attention to it. But trust me, it’s worth a re-watch.

Sapphic subtext

One of the things that surprised me most about the film, watching it as an adult, was the heavy lesbian subtext. In fact, it’s not even subtext. The Sarah character is clearly in love with Miranda, something which Miranda happily acknowledges. Before Miranda vanishes, she enigmatically says to Sarah: “You’ll have to love someone else, because I won’t be here very long.”

I found the lesbian subtext surprising because I don’t remember any of my parents or teachers mentioning it. The movie was very popular when it was released, and a lot was written about it, but I don’t remember anyone ever mentioning how lesbian it is. This is yet another thing that convinces me that once upon a time, people had no gaydar.

(I also suspect that, traditionally, a lot of people expected that sort of thing in single-sex schools and didn’t think of it as homosexuality.)

Miranda and Sarah aren’t the only seemingly lesbian characters. The two other characters who go missing both seem somewhat lesbian too, though less through dialogue and more through stereotypes. The teacher who vanishes is an middle-aged spinster who is described as having a “masculine intellect”. And the other girl who went missing… well, she just seems angry a lot. (The angry lesbian may be a stereotype, but I figure you’d probably be angry too if you were a lesbian in 1904, suffering the confines of Victorian polite society.)

The solution to the mystery?

Of course, the question that was on everyone’s lips when the movie came out was: Where did the girls vanish to? Watching the movie through contemporary eyes, I couldn’t help but wonder if the  disappearance of the girls had something to do with their homosexuality.

Is it possible that the characters went missing because they decided to flee their hetero-normative environment in search of gayer lives for themselves?

Consider that all three characters who go missing could be reasonably interpreted as being lesbian. Consider also that Miranda seems to know in advance that she’s going to go missing.

And consider that Irma, the one witness who was with them when they vanished — who was also the only determinably heterosexual girl in the film — was either unable or unwilling to tell anyone what happened. (How could a polite Victorian girl possibly explain what she knew about their gay secret?)

It makes sense to me.

(And yes, I’m aware that the author, Joan Lindsay, once wrote a “final chapter” providing an answer to the mystery, but that doesn’t count. From what I understand, the publishers asked her to write that final chapter, but she didn’t want to, and I’m convinced that it’s not the answer she intended. In interviews, she always insisted that she wanted to leave the answer unrevealed.)

We’ll probably never know what Joan Lindsay really intended, but watch the film again and keep an open mind. Maybe you can imagine a few reasons why Miranda and her friends leave their corsets behind on that rock.

Pi is a somewhat cryptic movie, filmed in black-and-white, about a mathematical genius who accidentally stumbles upon a 216-digit number that is the secret name of God according to Kabbalistic Jewish numerology.

While the protagonist drifts between surreal (God-like?) hallucinations, he is pursued by some kind of secret order of Jews who have been seeking out the number for some magical purpose.

In a climactic confrontation, a member of the order demands the number from him, and the genius reveals his belief that just having the number isn’t enough, justifying his belief by saying something like: “I’m sure you’ve tried every 216-digit number already!”

Now, the idea that some sect of Kabbalistic Jews have managed to try every single 216-digit number is ridiculous, and a mathematics genius should know that.

Do you know how many 216-digit numbers there are? Ten raised to the 216th power (10²¹⁶), that’s how many.

Even if there were a billion people in this sect, and they each tried a billion different numbers every day, and had been doing so for a billion years, they’ve still only tried 3.6 × 10²⁹ different numbers. Nowhere near all of them. Not even close.

Cube is a very good independent Canadian science-fiction movie that you should see if you haven’t already. With just one set and a total of seven actors, it efficiently tells a riveting and thought-provoking story in the best tradition of science fiction.

Alas, it too suffers from bad science (or, rather, mathematics) right near the climax.

As the characters wander through a deadly maze with only a series of cryptic three-digit numbers to guide them, the mathematics genius (a pre-Star Trek Nicole de Boer) realises that the key to safely navigating the maze lies in the prime factors of the three-digit numbers.

In a tense argument with another character, she shouts something like “No one can factor three-digit numbers. It’s impossible!”.

But… factoring a three-digit number isn’t difficult. In fact, it’s really easy.

At the climax of Alien Resurrection, an alien-hybrid Ripley is trapped on the ship with the terrifying monster that she gave birth to. Oh no, what will she do?!

So she slices her hand and flicks some of her acid blood against the ship’s window. (Well, “porthole” if you want to get nautical.) The blood dissolves a small hole in the window, and the harsh vacuum of space sucks everything out of the ship and into space, through the tiny hole! Including the monster!

How does a monster get sucked through a tiny hole? Well, you see, apparently the vacuum of space is so strong that it manages to extrude the monster through the hole, crushing his bones and squishing his organs until he fits. Pretty gruesome, eh?

Except that it’s bullshit. Do you know how much pressure difference would exist between the inside of the ship and the vacuum outside? One atmosphere. That’s about 1000 hPa, or 10 meters of water. I could put my hand over that hole, and it wouldn’t even hurt. My vacuum cleaner has more suction than that.