Statistics Canada projects that large Canadian cities’ populations will be mostly “visible minority” by 2036. This immediately prompted the Star to warn that white people would be the visible minority in Toronto by that time.

This would make sense if you thought all white people are the same, a point made by the competing newspaper. (Jeffrey Reitz: “25 years ago they were issuing reports on how cities like Toronto were no longer majority British…. Now the Italians and the Poles are considered part of the dominant population.”) Obviously Italians look just like Serbs.

And the claim makes sense only if you are such a racist you can’t differentiate non-whites. I’m not talking about people who cannot, for the life of them, pick out a Japanese in a crowd of Chinese, let alone a Korean or Vietnamese. I mean people so racially biased that nonwhites are a massive blur. By 2036, these people will believe they are completely outnumbered by a teeming throng that surrounds them on the subway and on downtown streets.

But white people will not per se be a visible minority. Inspecting the actual statistics in Table 7 of the report (PDF), one scenario shows the following percentages for Toronto in 2036:

• Not a visible minority (this means white people but not aboriginals): 37.2%
• South Asian (this means Indic): 23.8%
• Black: 8.0%
• Chinese, 12.4%; Filipino, 4.6%; Korean, 1.6%; Japanese, 0.4%; Southeast Asian (this means Oriental but not Chinese, Korean, Filipino, or Japanese): 1.6%
• Latin American: 2.6%
• Arab, 2.3%; West Asian (this means Middle Eastern but not Arab, e.g., Persian and Pashtoun), 2.9%
• Other visible minorities: 2.7%

If you’re good at numbers, which it seems the Toronto Star isn’t, you can see that, like Hawaii, nobody will have a majority. Whites will have a plurality by about 14 percentage points (not “14%”). (Not many people know the word “plurality,” it seems.) Nine different categories, comprising more than nine distinct ethnic groups, would account for less than 10% of the Toronto population each, and their numbers will barely change from now till then. Reading these numbers, the actually interesting fact seems to be the large growth in the South Asian population (more than 10 percentage points).

Of course the Star has to take responsibility for its own coverage, but so does the writer – in this case Noor Javed, who did not respond to a question on the foregoing points.

In one projection given in Table A2, 871,000 more Muslims will live in Toronto (essentially triple the current population). Which do you think will affect daily life more – almost twice as many Indics or three times as many Muslims?

After trying out, and tiring of, one shitty E-book after another, and in recognition of plain facts and industry trends, I wrote a giant piece for Zeldman: “Web Standards for E-Books.” I hope it will be the definitive article demonstrating that the future of most electronic books is ePub, which in turn is real XHTML. Your Web-standards knowledge can serve you well here, although by advocating this HTML-triumphalist view I am foreclosing future book formats. (Check the sidebar of “typographic tragicomedy” in E-books.)

Errata

• The published piece is missing the section on sections:

  Sections. HTML’s single biggest deficiency for long documents is its lack of sections. They exist in HTML5, but ePub doesn’t use HTML5. Sections in nonfiction books may sometimes be differentiable through the use of headings, but the classic book-design paradigm of leaving extra space between sections (with different type on initial words of the new section) simply can’t be marked up in HTML. (In uncommon cases, section breaks like these occur right at the bottom of a printed page and have to be inferred.)

  There is another tradition in book composition that can be adapted – typesetting a fleuron or dash between sections. It’s functionally equivalent to the use of HR, which can, with difficulty, be styled to be less intrusive. Nonetheless, you are still merely suggesting that sections have changed; what you are not doing is definitively encapsulating sections in their own markup.

• Despite delivering it correctly and flagging the error, “I’ve Got Chills. They’re Multiplyin’ ” is mistypeset.

Coming up

One tries to walk the walk, as it were. Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours: How to Feel Good About Canadian English will be reissued quite soon in actual ePub. You’ll have to buy it all over again, of course.

Another year, another bobsleigh season, where giant strapping specimens of manhood gather, two and four at a time, to run faster than anyone you’ve ever met can run. These specimens gather, in essence, to be the exact opposite of Johnny Weir and of contestants on Project Runway; we’ve been through this before .

You can’t do what they can do and neither can I. It’s a combination that can’t be beat: No other group of guys, not even in pro football, is consistenly this tall, this big, this strong, and this fast.

And half of them are “on the Facebook,” and nearly all of them are my “Facebook friends.” This is merely the latest wrinkle in well more than a decade’s interest in an obscure, ruinously expensive, needlessly hazardous sport that muscles out everything but men’s “amateur” hockey for the elite spot at the Winter Olympics. (It’s one of only two sports Monaco has any real presence in; the other is equestrian, and if bobsledders don’t qualify as steeds I don’t know what does.)

I watch all bobsleigh coverage

My esteemed colleague gamely sat through three out of four runs at the Vancouver Olympics with me –  66 runs featuring 254 200-pound bobsledders. I am now at a point where what I blurt out at the television screen contains almost exactly half the content the actual colour commentator comes out with. We agree on quality and speed of starts nine times out of ten. I can peg a brush against the track before our “colour man” can get the words out. I’m not doing badly if I’ve got half as much knowledge as a former bobsledder who’s paid to talk us through a hundred runs every four years. And I can barely push a shopping coart. Come for the beef, stay for the action.

I am not the only one who thinks this! 100% of the guys involved in bobsleigh love being around these giant strapping fellas. They never shut up about it and they like to use nonironic terminology – “beef,” “jackhammering quads,” “the big boys.” That endless fountain of quotable quotes, good Christian Lyndon Rush, calls 254-pound Kevin Kuske “the perfect specimen,” which he pretty much is.

Unlike why gay guys love amateur wrestling, everything I like about bobsleigh is what everyone who likes bobsleigh likes about bobsleigh. And there you were thinking there was something else going on I wasn’t telling you about. I am as upfront about what’s going on as the God-fearing Mormons and Republicans and Christians in the sport, and the Eurotrash. [continue with “Steve Holcomb’s thousand gay boyfriends” →]

Insert the snowclone for artfags – “I saw the figure 5 in X” – here.

Just in the last week I have received three different invitations from Karen Walton to events sponsored by Ink Canada, the loose group of Canadian screenplay and teleplay writers. You may remember Walton from such Canadian feature films as Ginger Snaps, and as a prominent writer on the series that told more lies about gay men than anything in 20th-century television, Amerikanski Queer as Folk.

I note the foregoing because everybody’s favourite teleplay writer Denis McGrath recently wrote me an electronic-mail message that, when not calling me names, claimed that various wymmynz at the Ink Canada boozeup I attended complained I was “leering” at them. I talked to 15 people that night, of whom five were women, and of that number, three of them were Karen Walton and her girlfriends. (The others were a struggling writer and a Film Centre grad.)

Just on a mathematical basis alone, I must have packed a lot of leering into those chitchats. The objection I raise is that I don’t even notice women in the ordinary course of events, and, as an homosexualist, not only do I not look at them closely but would find that somewhat displeasing. I don’t even like watching documentaries about mammograms.

And after all this, they bombard me with invites to their friendly soirées. (Karen, get me a Diet Coke, will you? Twist of lime?)

Meanwhile, I guess it was no problem at all that I said the following to the fellow it applied to: “What’s it like being the only writer who works out?” And I guess nobody but me and Callaghan overheard that atrocious off-colour joke by a writer about his wife’s propensity for oral sex. McGrath also alleged that Walton or somebody had told the Paddock to bar me from the premises, something the Paddock wouldn’t confirm when I followed up on it, as I of course did.

All I remember is having a great time talking to all sorts of interesting writers, and being sneered at by Walton and her princessy girlfriend, who mocked my name.

People are always trying to nail down the difference between American TV and Canadian TV. The difference is: With the Americans, smart people write dumb shows.

The Internets, like other young men, hold grudges. The issue is not your own desire or need to change. It is enemies’ and opponents’ desire and need to stop you from doing that.

For longtime Internet users

The burden of past work makes you feel like you can never change your mind. Those with long memories and good search skills – few in number but armed to the teeth – can accuse you of hypocrisy and back it up with your own words. They conduct a gotcha campaign like an operative from a rival political party, with equal bloodlust.

Everything you did yesterday and last year is viewed as a guarantee of what you will do tomorrow and next year. But what if you are facing an upheaval? What if you’re getting divorced, or you left the Mormon church? What if you’re ashamed of a major upheaval? What if you lost your job and can’t find another one?

What if you’ve just been keeping things quiet all these years, like being a devout Mormon? Or keeping your spouse’s name quiet but not a secret, just out of probity? What if you decide to talk more about something you never particularly hid?

Can you make important changes like these imaginary examples? Once you do, at that point whatever you write is at odds with what you wrote before. Won’t people insist that proves you’re a hypocrite?

What if you have matured or simply changed and you want to do things differently? Will people let you? Will you hold back because you think people will criticize you for having changed your mind?

What makes you afraid to change your mind? Isn’t it other people?

For new Internet users

Every new platform attracts stupider and stupider people and induces them to act nastier and nastier. From E-mail software that defaults to top-posting (yes, it really is as bad as I have been telling you) to Twits to Tumblrs, the latter of which are at root cyberbullying media, the simpler it is to go online the trashier the results. LiveJournal and MySpace should have been a warning: The smartest people got online early. Then there’s everybody else.

I disagree with paternalistic predictions that young people today will come to regret all the personal details they publish. Eventually we will greet the first elected head of state with a portfolio of “embarrassing” party pics indistinguishable from the voters’.

But by then all those people will have become experienced Internet users, albeit of a different and worse Internet, and they too will find it is nearly impossible to articulate a significant change to anything important in their lives.

Comments

Anonymous online comments have caused tremendous harm to modern society. Comments sections in general are an insidious danger unless proven otherwise and ruthlessly patrolled. Even then, it is the patrolmen who suffer from the comments, not completely unlike police officers who must watch child pornography so they can testify in court that it really was that.

Wolves lurk in the forest. In my 20th year online, I know that trying to start over or doing something different or just changing your mind carries so much risk of attack and vituperation as to become a deterrent.

I have completely changed my mind about one thing: The permanence of records. I no longer believe you should never rewrite or delete something you once wrote, assuming you have no intent to deceive. In many cases you can specify what you changed or at least say why. Rewriting the past is not always Orwellian.

But will everybody else let you do it? Aren’t you afraid to try? Hasn’t your own experience proven to you how quickly the mob bares its fangs?

I guess it pays, in a nonremunerative sense, to be constantly rebuffed by the TTC. You’ll recall the Spacers tried to set up a licensing deal for their subway lapel buttons, but were spurned over and over again. TTC left tens of thousands of dollars (in gross sales) on the table.

I guess TTC felt all embarrassed, or somehow thought they owed him something, because whaddya know: Matthew fucking Blackett is now on the TTC customer-service panel.

That will be me at the meetings seated directly in front of him, daring him to call me a liar again.