Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (q.v.), unenumerated photo cutline:

It should not be presumed from this image that the author is in any way lacking in empathy or bonhomie, or that he would be unable (as is sometimes suspected of intellectuals) to take his place, man to man, amongst a group of illiterate Indian Ocean sailors exchanging anecdotes in an unfathomable Indo-Sanskrit tongue. He is merely in that preoccupied state, of necessity involving a distant gaze and extreme concentration, which often accompanies attempts to control runaway intestinal inflammation.

In 2004, I was hired to write the audio-description script for a Canadian-made “biopic” about Michael Jackson, Man in the Mirror: The Michael Jackson Story. It was a difficult job done too quickly with not enough of a budget. We had a great deal of trouble with the recording of the script – amazingly, we ran too short and kept coming in early during descriptions.

The finished described audio track was sent along to CITY-TV, then owned by CHUM. We never heard about it again.

Shortly after Michael Jackson died in June 2009, the movie popped up on TV, but without audio description. Since I own the rights to the work, I thought I’d publish the script out of interest.

In a couple of places below, we couldn’t figure out what something was from the low-resolution QuickTime file we were given and had to fill it in at recording time. I don’t remember, but we couldn’t possibly have read out all the opening and closing credits, particularly at the end.

This is solely the script of what the describer says. You aren’t seeing any visuals or hearing or reading any dialogue. As such it’s substantially worse than hearing only one side of a phone call. [continue with “I wrote a script about Michael Jackson” →]

Oft-ascotted Spacer™ Shawn Micallef “felt [a] weird force from behind” from an object labelled BDSM.

Whatever could he be trying to tell us?

Why aren’t there more wymmynz in graphic design?

The question is asinine. There are “enough” women in graphic design. That is, in a free society, it is up to women to choose to pursue design. The same applies to men. There are as many designers as wish to be.

Why aren’t there more wymmynz at high levels of graphic design – heading entire firms or academic departments? For the same reason there aren’t many female CEOs or law partners or engineers: Women have biological clocks and tend to drop out of the rat race to have kids at the same periods in their lives. Few women are neurologically predisposed to perform the same task for unremitting years on end, or to focus on abstractions or things for the same period of time. That isn’t sexism, it’s neuroscience. Contain your outrage and get your hands on the books by Pinker and Gurian.

Of course, the peer-reviewed research these authors report has to be wrong – indeed, it has to be The Bell Curve redux – because it conflicts with your insistence, based on nothing you can put your finger on, that every job must be 50% female. But you still want women’s jobs to stay that way. In fact, men’s jobs are viewed as the desirable ones and it is only those jobs where a 50% female quota is ostensibly required. (Nobody asks for an even gender split; what they ask for is 50% women.)

The definition is circular: If mostly men do a job, except of course for something like coal miner or roofer, then it must be a good job and women deserve half the positions.

But I doubt you want actual gender equality in the workplace. You do not want mostly-female jobs to become 50% male. You do not want half of nurses to be men, in part because most of them would be gay, as male nurses are now. You do not want more male schoolteachers, and you would actually go to court to prevent any male-teachers group from demanding a 50% quota on, say, kindergarten and primary-school teachers, particularly in all-girls private schools.

The entire discourse around sex distribution in employment has nothing to do with individual factors like interests and aptitude, nothing to do with actual scientific findings, and everything to do with unexamined biases. Would it be OK for male-dominated jobs to stay that way if most of the men were gay? If half the engineers and CEOs and law partners in the world were gay males, would there really be a need for 50% female hiring at that point?

Let’s try this another way. Would you like to pass a law requiring that no fewer than half of employable people with disabilities be gainfully employed in the free labour market, with accommodations paid for by the employer? No? Well, why not? Disabled people have higher unemployment than nondisabled women.

Do you want equality of outcome or do you want equality of opportunity? Have you even considered that question? [continue with “‘Women of Design’” →]

The new single-serving site Fix Outlook attempts to manufacture out of whole cloth a claimed consensus that Microsoft Outlook, a so-called E-mail program, needs to update its CSS renderer. (Ironically, the site’s misrendered JavaScript pollutes its CSS, and the site only really works with JavaScript turned on. Standards? What standards?)

The only approved way to join this masterful sockpuppetry project is via Twit. Here I withhold consensus two ways: Of course I’m not using the most convenient medium for cyberbullying invented by humankind, and of course I disagree with the cause. I have reason, and it comes from having been online longer than you.

Outlook is to be shunned (ideally scrapped), not “improved.” Its default settings – use HTML mail; top-post – single-handedly destroyed electronic mail. Someone who mails you via Outlook is presumptively a top-posting asshole who doesn’t know how E-mail works.

Here is one other thing that person doesn’t know, and it is a fact that Fix Outlook refuses to acknowledge. If HTML E-mail did not exist, phishing would not exist. In other words, what Fix Outlook seeks is an even better, more standards-compliant, more accurate and faithful method of committing electronic fraud.

The Fix Outlook campaign manages the impossible by aiding and abetting more than one enemy – Microsoft Outlook, in the first instance, and in the second instance an army of phishing criminals who seek to cheat users of HTML mail. These people, while ignorant and lamentable, are also vulnerable; they need to be protected from themselves, from each other, and from the criminals.

Anyone who uses Outlook is not my kind of people. Neither is anyone who wants Outlook “fixed” in this way. I would prefer a different sense of that term, as in neuter or castrate. So should you.

A large “harvester” of tuna is the Maldives. Alain de Botton, in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, reported from a fishing vessel:

The tuna has never been this far out of the water, has never seen light this bright, but he knows instinctively that he will drown in so much air. The fishermen need him to stop flooding his arteries with blood in panic, or he will darken, and therefore ruin, the appearance of his flesh against a dinner plate. So the captain’s brother swiftly wrestles him between his rubber boots and raises aloft a large, blunt mallet, resembling the archetypal club of a prehistoric man, carved from the trunk of a coconut tree. He brings it down heavily. The tuna’s eyes jerk out of their sockets. His tail convulses. His jaw opens and closes, as ours might do, but no scream emerges. The mallet strikes again. There is a dull sound….

The fisherman is himself enraged now, striking the beast vengefully, cursing the dying creature in Dhivehi: Nagoobalha, nagoobalha, hey aruvaalaanan (“Bitch! Bitch! You’ve had it now!”).

Because if we used Flyer or Futura or even Gill Kayo, it would mean “this movie sucks.”

It takes a while for the trend of ballpoint-pen illustration that was talked about on design blogs 18 months ago to trickle its way into “the mainstream,” to the extent anything Dave Eggers and his wife with the name one cannot take seriously (Coldplay album title? “hasta la Vida”?) actually are mainstream. And of course Juno authorized it, and now it’s everywhere. I fear Steven Heller will have colonized and assimilated this trend under the catchphrase “cult of the squiggly.”

1. New Yorker, April 27: “How not dumb is Gaga?”
2. Slate, June 16: “How smart is Lady Gaga?”

Can “genius” be next?