I DON'T LIKE TO BE TOUCHED!

Unlike The Great Gatsby, I haven’t actually read Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (thanks a lot, high school English class), so I may not be the best person to explain what’s going on in these new pictures from David Fincher’s adaptation (opening December 21st). Here’s what I do know: that’s Rooney “boring tits” Mara as Dame Lizardbreath von Salamander on the left, consoling Dutch actor Yorick van Wageningen (as Nils Bjurman), whose last name seems to have at least one vestigial syllable. I’m not sure what he’s so upset about. Maybe a møøse bit his sister?

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After 41 years, someone has finally solved the case of the Zodiac killer, and as usual, it was a stubbly fat guy. Okay, he may not have really solved the case, but Corey Starliper thinks he cracked the previously-undeciphered code from a letter the Zodiac Killer sent to the San Francisco Chronicle, a letter which ends, according to Starliper, with the words “My name is Leigh Allen.” As in Arthur Leigh Allen, a Zodiac suspect who died in 1992. In the 2007 David Fincher movie, Zodiac, Allen was played by John Carroll Lynch.

After the decryption of the first code, Zodiac sent many more communications to law enforcement and the media, including his most famous: a 340-character cipher, mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle, according to zodiackillerfacts.com. To this day, the cipher has not been completely cracked.

According to Robert Graysmith, in “Zodiac”, [the book] tips received by police after Darlene Ferrin’s murder indicated that the killing was connected to the U.S Virgin Islands. Starliper believed that the “340” of the 340 cipher was significant, and had some tie-in with the U.S. Virgin Islands. It was then that he found out that 340 is the area code for a portion of the U.S Virgin Islands — not an insignificant connection.

“So that’s what I started with,” said Starliper. “I thought, there’s no way … that Zodiac is going to be prosaic enough not to mention the U.S. Virgin Islands in this code. This is where it gets even creepier. 3+4+0=7. Right. So you get 7+0=7. 707…707 are the area codes for Vallejo, Napa, and Solano. So I figured, why not start this with Caesar code using 3,4.”

Caesar code is a substitution type cipher where an encoder has “simply replaced each letter in a message with the letter that is three places further down the alphabet.”
This doesn’t mean the 340 is such an easy task to decode, considering the fact that the original 340 cipher is full of symbols: >, +, and ▲ being just a few of the signs found in the code. To combat this problem, Starliper extracted symbols and changed them to letters they could correspond with. For example, a ^ or < symbol could be interpreted as inverted or sideways “V”s.

“I first went in there and I did that,” he said. After everything symbolic had been interpreted alphabetically, he started applying reverse Caesar shifts. He found the first two letters to be “K” and “I”.

“What are the next two going to be? right? I figure, what’s the first word he’s going to throw in there? Kill,” said Starliper. “And I was able to keep going from there.” For the first few lines, the pattern remained constant, but it changed beyond that. He said he was able to figure out the non-patterned series that by finding “similarities in the numerical sequence.”

Starliper split his work into two sessions of 6 hours and 3 hours. When he was done, he had decoded the following text:

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The red-band trailer for David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo “leaked” online the other day, with many speculating that this was some viral marketing effort by Sony. Still no word on that, but now we’ve got an official trailer, which you can watch below. It’s basically the same as the other one, with some quick shots cut to Karen O. (of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and Trent Reznor’s cover of “Immigrant Song,” only with less sideboob this time (BOO!).

More importantly, there’s a new poster featuring ROONEY MARA’S TOPLESS BOOBS NIPSLIP LESBIAN KITTEN TORTURE GOOGLE.  Phew, sorry about that.  It seems I’ve come down with a case of the search-term Tourette’s. ROONEY MARA NAKED! PUPPY WIGS! KARDASHIAN SEX TAPE!  Check out the stuff below while I get this looked at. CAKE FARTS! LEMON PARTY! BILLY BUSH!

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The red-band trailer for David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo leaked its way online.  Fincher’s much-anticipated remake of the 2009 Swedish film, based on the first of author Stieg Larssen’s Millennium Series, opens December 21st, starring Rooney Mara, Daniel Craig, Stellan Skarsgård, and Christopher Plummer, among others.  This is the bootleg, buttcam version of the trailer (with the official version supposedly hitting this Thursday), so watch it while you can before it gets pulled.  A lot of people like to get all self-righteous about not posting bootleg trailers, but the way I look at it, it’s an advertisement for a movie, not the polio vaccine.

As for the trailer, it seems like you’d have to be a big fan of the book or the Swedish movie to get much out of it.  It’s just out-of-context shots set to music, the first lesson of any high school video productions class.  Ooh, you mean it seems cooler if I set the cuts to the drumbeat of a Led Zeppelin song?  Call the Pulitzer committee, I think I’ve made an important discovery. At least it’s not little kids singing Radiohead this time, that’d make a hobo taking a dump seem epic.

Before The Social Network came out, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had vowed never to see it, dismissing it as a work of fiction and even going so far as to remove The West Wing from his favorite TV shows after he heard it was Social Net screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s show.  But contrary to the movie, he’s not actually a super villain who lives in the penthouse of a clock tower with a hairless cat, he’s just a 20-something dude.  And what 20-something dude could resist seeing it if David Fincher made a movie out of his life?  Zuckerberg recently admitted to USWeekly that he’d taken his employees to a screening party, where they drank apple martinis like Justin Timberlake did in the movie.

Zuckerberg was asked about the difference between the movie and what he experienced while creating Facebook. “Where do you want to start?” he asked. Every shirt and fleece worn by the actor (Jesse Eisenberg) who played him was one he had actually worn, Zuckerberg said. The movie got a lot of stuff wrong and random details right, he said.
Reviewing the film thematically, Zuckerberg said it featured a girl who was not part of his real life. In the movie she dumped him, which, he joked, happened to him often. “They framed it as if I wanted to get girls or into some social institution,” Zuckerberg said. “I’ve been dating the same girl since before Facebook.” He concluded that the filmmakers “can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.” [Yahoo]

I respect that Sorkin was able to write an entertaining movie about these dorks, but the fact that he still seems to think he was blowing the lid off a ring of woman-hating megalomaniacs makes him sound like a class-A Hollywood fart huffer.  Professor Appletini here is supposed to be a misogynist?  If I was Mark Zuckerberg, I’d be telling people “People can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like being KNEE-DEEP IN BUSTY TEENS!”  Then I’d flick my tongue at the interviewer like Gene Simmons and ride off on a high-speed cigarette boat, doing that “suck it” thing in between hip thrusts.  But fast cars and fast sluts are kind of my thing.