First of all, thanks to my mother, who pointed out that this site was reporting internal server errors. For the record, I believe the maintainers of this server upgraded the web server installation. As a result I was running on a more recent version of Python, in which the random number generator I was trying to use was deprecated. I changed my calls to random (mainly used to choose a tagline at the top of the home page) and all was well.

I realize that I left the riddle in the previous entry unanswered. Ian was the first to respond with the correct answer (not surprising, since he studies codes for a living, at least to a first approximation). I'm sure most readers recognized the mysterious black writing as Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, the writing system used to write aboriginal languages such as Inuktitut. OK, great, so they included some Inuktitut message in the ad, perhaps the name of the film, right?

Wrong. The text is a simple substitution cypher (a cryptogram) of the English name. It's easy to see that, because the syllabic characters are broken into "words" with the same length as those in the English name. Looking more closely, you can see that the same symbols are used consistently to represent the same letters: ᑎ for T, ᕿ for E, and so on (go ahead, test your browser's Unicode support!).

So what's the deal here? It comes across as a cheap and insensitive stunt, as if the person creating the ad thought they had to make it look more "Inuity". As if it didn't matter what the text was; the syllabics are just clip art, after all, not actual language. Besides, in Canada the movie doesn't even use an Inuktitut name or writing, as is obvious from the movie's official site -- just French and English. (They do use the name Inuujjutiksaq internationally; I wonder what that translates as.)

I've been trying to come up with a good analogy for what kind of insensitive graphic could accompany a movie about a different culture or group, just to reinforce the point. But I haven't been able to pick the appropriate group or offensive graphic: "Can you believe that the ad for that movie about a black/Jewish/gay/furry has a _________ in it?" And no, I don't mean a black-Jewish-gay-furry person (as interesting a movie as that would make). Pick one, or devise your own.