E.B. White and his dachshund, Minnie.

I have your letter, undated, saying that I am harbo[u]ring an unlicensed dog in violation of the law. If by “harbo[u]ring” you mean getting up two or three times every night to pull Minnie’s blanket up over her, I am harboring a dog all right. The blanket keeps slipping off. I suppose you are wondering by now why I don’t get her a sweater instead. That’s a joke on you. She has a knitted sweater, but she doesn’t like to wear it for sleeping; her legs are so short they work out of a sweater and her toenails get caught in the mesh, and this disturbs her rest. If Minnie doesn’t get her rest, she feels it right away. I do myself, and of course with this night duty of mine, the way the blanket slips and all, I haven’t had any real rest in years. Minnie is 12.

Tyler Brûlé vs. transsexuals (not Brazilian), in two parts.

1. April 12: “[I]t’s not as if your son has told you he wants to work in finance but would like to wear a dress to work every day and have you pay for a decade’s worth of gender-reassignment surgery. That would be cause for distress.”

2. May 10: Brûlé and transsexual Jan Morris evaluate trendy cultural trinkets handed to them.

Matt Johnson regards the World Trade Center.

Nice-guy Dan Benjamin built a podcast empire on being unable to ask a real question. I told you about this already.

Interviewing Marco Arment about his sale of Instapaper, Benjamin again showed he is not up to the job of interviewer (≈18:21):

– Well, I mean, I – regardless of – um, you know, I’m not gonna put you on the spot and say, tell me exactly – I mean, unless they [sic] want to – tell me exactly how much it makes for you, but it makes enough, I would assume, that not having – I mean, obviously, you made some money with Instapaper when you sold it. You wouldn’t sell anything for – nobody’s gonna sell something like that and not make some money about it. I’m not gonna put you on the s—people want me – by the way, everybody wants me to ask you – I will ask you! How much money did you make on the sale? I don’t expect you to answer. You can say “Pass!” But the point is you made some money on that, and you’re making some money from the Magazine – enough to live, I’m gonna guess – enough to live –

– Yeah.

– that you, you don’t have to, you don’t have to, you’re not freaking – OK, you’re not freaking out about money right now.

– No. No, I’m not.

Instapaper raked in a million bucks a year before its sale, a fact we didn’t learn from Benjamin’s interview, because he was too chickenshit to ask questions like that one. Benjamin is afraid of actual content. And (this is a separate but related issue), as a natural pushover, he is far too easily bulldozed into a thin bloody membrane by the undermedicated, manipulative, heavily-coddled and ‑enabled huckster known as Merlin Mann.

I could try to solve the problem, but it’s clearly never going to happen, especially with Monteiro’s Twitter goons attacking the very concept.

Let’s nip this misconception in the bud: Being Erica, which I decided I would loathe before even seeing it yet of which I became an ardent defender, was not on the air on CBC for “too long.” John Doyle and Bill Brioux both make this claim. Curiously, they do so in the same breath as maintaining that Little Mosque on the Prairie also had too long a run.

When you see the same point stated in two different places, you know there’s an effort, overt or subconscious, to form a consensus among right-thinking people. (Or just to lie to you.)

Being Erica lasted exactly as long as it should have. Any reasonable viewer knew what would transpire: Dr. Tom would quit and Erica would, in effect, take his place. I doubt you wanted Jana Sinyor and Aaron Martin to rush a story that documented two characters’ gradual personal evolutions. (Had they rushed it, Doyle and Brioux would be first to complain.) At least Sinyor and Martin had the audacity to create a TV show about a character who could actually be real (a Jewess in Toronto publishing) as opposed to, say, a “fisher” from “the regions” or a colony of lovable Islamic mascots lodged deep up the prairies’ backside.

Little Mosque should not have survived its first year. This Muslim appeasement exercise was intolerable from the start but became an outright scandal when its star, Zaib Shaikh, started fucking the boss, CBC programming executive Kirstine Stewart. We are admonished not to treat Stewart in a sexist manner now that she has decamped – bafflingly, you must admit – for Twitter. So I will apply the same standard to her as I would to a female fucking her male boss or a male fucking his female underling. It was sleazy, unethical, and wrong unless and until one of them quit. Being Erica’s creators did not fuck the boss, chiefly because Jana Sinyor is not a lesbian, esteemed colleague Aaron Martin is a gay bear, and both have high moral standards.

The Toronto chattering class already has its talking points lined up – Being Erica was on too long; Stewart’s status as a woman can be discussed only in correct ways. Yet heterosexualist male critics Doyle and Brioux never bothered to cover her Sharia-compliant wedding. Think of the assault to Kirstine Layfield Stewart Shaikh’s integrity she suffered when she covered up her arms at her own wedding to prevent Muslim males from sexually fetishizing her. Yet we’re told to uphold liberal pieties about how difficult it was for her to work as a woman in a man’s business. That’s a trifling deflection from real issues, not to mention hypocrisy in action.

I have taken great pleasure in demolishing right-wing assholes’ endless bitching about the CBC. But here it is liberal TV critics – both male – who are acting sexist, not their imagined opponents.

About a million dollars a year, net.

Aleks Buldoček (not quite his real name) by the argumentative Richard Mitchell. [continue with “‘Adult’ photo of the year” →]