Baby Courage Wolf

Ehh, even with 300, the reference is probably too oblique. And the little guy doesn't have a shield. Maybe pasting a shield in there would help tie it together, but meh.

"Brad, I am your father."

In Sneakers (1992) Robert Redford plays a sneaky bastard, Martin Bishop.

In Spy Game (2001) Redford plays a CIA handler running an agent named Tom Bishop, played by Brad Pitt.

So after the events of Sneakers, Martin Bishop used the crypto-cracking chip to fake a new identity, "Nathan Muir," even inventing a CIA background and Langley records going back decades. Later he reunites with the son he abandoned back in the 70s. So ok, it's a fanciful stretch.

Haiku remix: Margin Call

Feels like waking up.
The ground beneath us, shifting.
The party's over.

-paraphrased lines from the excellent film Margin Call.

Beyond lateral thinking to the orthogonal

In Laurie King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice, an informant relays a message to Sherlock Holmes that says "There's Glasgow Rangers with buckets of bees, and the toss is somebody's trouble." I'd read about Cockney rhyming slang in an abstract way before, as lists of examples, but seeing actual usage was striking. The passage is memorably peculiar yet impenetrably opaque, it's both a code and the mnemonics for the code. Recalling xkcd's comic on Password Strength, rhyming slang can work as a way to make up cryptic codenames and passwords. Of course, stay away from the historical slang terms like "trouble and strife" for "wife," but for target word C, make up a conceptually linked word pair A, B, where B rhymes with C. Ideally, the link between A and B intuitively makes sense to you, but isn't otherwise widely well-known. So A -> [B ->] C, where outsiders can't figure out the blackbox operation.

"Don't Occupy Wall Street. Sell Out instead!"

Sykes bus ad. Sad. Some ad monkey regurgitates the Occupy Wall Street buzzword he heard about, misses the point entirely.