I have a pretty good eye for a wad of yuan, and that was like 5000 kuai at most - less than a thousand dollars. That's not going to keep you in a half-decent opium den for longer than a couple of weeks. (The biggest Chinese note is the hundred - about $15. Gavin should have whipped out his phone and paid the guy with…

Also, of course, the Badadook is all about fear of parenthood. So it chimed with his emotions perfectly.

Well, if they're half-way informed, they would point out that that parthenos/almah means "young woman" as well is true (think "maiden" in English), but the idea that "virgin" is therefore a mistranslation of the descriptions of Mary in the Gospels is silly, since whole passages turn around her explicitly being a…

Christopher Brookmyre's crime novels include a bunch of Davies' references, like Francis Cornish's THE MARRIAGE AT CANA being one of the pictures stolen in his art heist book …

King is having a little fun here. "Fifth Business," as he probably knows, is a term more or less made up by Robertson Davies for his eponymous novel - for which he faked a quote from a Danish theater expert. (Davies claimed the term was real, but I've never seen any other reference to it that didn't derive from him.)

Uh, no. That's "Meiguoren," where the "Mei" is a phonetic rendition of "America." "Mei" is used both for the US and for the Americas as a whole (e.g. beimei, north america) - it's the exact same problem.

As I remember it, the waitresses they take to the party are also somewhat less cute than the ones they're flirting with.

Here's a link to the last part of the Moore dialogue - http://squaremans.com/image…

So I'm surprised no-one has pointed this out yet (maybe I've missed it.) The whole bit with the dark and the light and the stars and "the light is winning" - that's straight from an issue of Alan Moore's TOP TEN. (For those who've read it, the one with the teleporter accident). Nic P is a Moore fan, so I assume it's…

This may be too obscure, but "I'm a sexy cat" may be an oblique reference to a particularly ridiculous moment by the MP George Galloway on the UK's Celebrity Big Brother.

One of the most interesting short scenes in the movie, I think, is the brief stare-down between Watanabe and the yakuza boss. The film is very rooted in the postwar era, when the ties between the Japanese state, construction, and organized crime tightened. (The whole attitude of officialdom, meanwhile, is, I think, a…

I think the forest at the end is real, and that one of the possible readings is that it's the penance of humanity that's letting the earth gradually recover. That's the nastiest twist of all, in some ways - all of this seemingly pointless, dystopian existence actually *does* have a wider and grander purpose. Thinking…

The ongoing rehabilitation of lovable rapist Mike Tyson is pretty fucking disturbing.

OK, so let's explain this (n.b. not deaf, know some deaf people). A lot of deaf people have some hearing, to begin with. Even if they don't, they can experience the vibrations from the music. They like to be where their friends are. They like the sense of community at concerts. They like to get drunk and meet…