Online article, at least. Amy Chozick’s piece for the Journal on TV made for guys received a just-obvious-enough-but-your-kid-couldn’t-do-it treatment from Christopher Serra:

Storyboarding, John August–compliant Courier type for the faux-screenplay aspect, file-card punch holes. And he had the audacity to go monochrome.

Paul Ford (q.v.):

Most prose born on the Internet is highly defensive. Everyone is braced for audience attack and opens their posts with four paragraphs explaining why the remaining four paragraphs are worth reading.

Misty Harris (no relation) of the Tubby Postmedia News cobbled together a hodgepodge of entries from other people’s words-of-the-year lists. It was passed off under the hed “Lexicographers pick the strangest words of 2010,” though of course it is editors who select headlines and that hed was altered in syndicated variants of the article.

I didn’t expect any press coverage from my Canadian Word of the Year project. I didn’t expect to be ignored, either. But I definitely did not expect that a Canadian newspaper chain would gin up this unholy hybrid from the feedstock of the work of legitimate lexicographers, none of them Canadian.

If you’re going to write an article about words of the year, why not write an original article? Worse, why are all the entries “chosen by Postmedia News” American in origin or at least not Canadian?

Going from no coverage of words of 2010 to this coverage prompted me to change my mind and get upset that my original and Canadian work was ignored. Seriously: This was what the papers went with?

These words aren’t actually Canadian

Why are we including ugly and obsolete American terms in a newspaper article about words of the year?

The entries Postmedia News chooses as its favourites are either old and cross-national (guru [OED: 1967, in reference to McLuhan], hacktivist [1995]) or explicitly American (GTL). I’m going to focus in on that disposable nonce word as an indicator of everything that’s wrong with the piece, but I’m going to bring some Ginos along for the ride.

• I mailed Harris and called these choices derivative and colonial; all Harris would state is “GTL is from an American TV show, yes, but the show was also a huge pop-cult phenom in Canada.” If your paper’s former owners ran a TV network that buys its programming in bulk from Hollywood, I gather this would indeed be the derivative, colonial base from which your imagination springs. (I didn’t actually ask Harris about her imagination.)

• Is Harris one of those people who thinks there really isn’t any such thing as Canadian English? (Skill-testing question: What’s the last letter of the alphabet?)

  How else would she not have known that the Americanism Guido and its hideous distaff abomination Guidette were long ago eclipsed by two established Canadianisms, Gino and (note well) Gina?

  Both of those, unlike Guidette, are actual Italian names, which explains why they work so well as mildly derogatory references to Italian-Canadians. There’s no reason why we can’t export these words to other English-speaking countries. There’s also no reason to import inferior American variants, unless of course you’re so American in outlook and temperament, and so ignorant of your own language, that you never even noticed what was already in use in your own country.

• Neither Guido (OED: 1985) and Guidette dates from 2010 or became unusually popular this year.

• If The Smurfs is sexist because every smurf is a smurf except the only girl smurfs, unsubtly named Smurfette and Sassette, then isn’t it sexist to assume stereotypical Italian-Americans are guys unless you tag on a feminizing suffix?

With the popular press, I don’t expect something as detailed and scholarly as a paper delivered at the American Dialect Society convention. What I also don’t expect is something cobbled together from other sources that ignores the actual language of writer and reader.

A project down in Oz needs highest-calibre Web developers and designers. Small in scope but amusing (and pro bono). Apply within.

Asked to name her book of the year by the Globe, authoress Claire Berlinski chooses to demolish not only the sanctimony of the entire exercise but the undead premise of the entire publishing industry.

Books in print form are antiques. No one wants to buy them anymore; they cost too much; the way they are marketed and distributed is insanity. The traditional book publishing industry is dead. It is not coming back. I’d be surprised if any of the other books on this list have sold more than a few thousand copies, however terrific they are….

Everyone in the traditional publishing industry has lost his/her job or will lose it soon, and they deserve to; they have failed entirely to adapt to a technological revolution as significant as the invention of the printing press.

(UPDATED) Grindr (MeFi coverage) is an iPhone app whose actual purpose is to find guys nearby whom you might fuck or vice-versa. The app’s inventor, Joel Simkhai, insists up and down the app is merely a way to make friends, which I guess is true if you think a butcher shop is a great place to adopt a stray lamb.

• Grindr: It’s what you use if you’re an Italian actor looking for work.

• “Our goal is to increase the number of people you’re meeting. That’s what Grindr is for us,” Simkhai straight-facedly explained.

  “We hope it’s a complement to real-life socializing,” he said. “It’s one of the options you have for meeting people around you. We always encourage people to not rely on it, and not have it replace real life.” […] “We know that our guys are interested in going out,” says Joel [deceptively] with confidence.

• Was Grindr used to facilitate homicide? No, it was not used for that “grizzly crime,” police insist, despite their inability to name any other plausible app or “social network” with anything remotely resembling similar capabilities.

• You can’t use a profile photo that would actually function for the intended use of the service, ostensibly to satisfy Steve’s no-porn edict. (Gay males don’t define porn the way Steve does, nor are particularly bothered by it. Nor is what a horrified straight guy would consider gay “porn” unusual or beyond the pale of genuine gay “community standards.”)

Now Wall Street Journal testing shows that Grindr “sent gender, location and phone ID to three ad companies.” (FTM wishful thinking aside, “gender” means “male.”)

No problemo, Simkhai bullshitted:

“There is no real-life ID here,” says Joel Simkhai, CEO of Nearby Buddy Finder LLC, the maker of the Grindr app for gay men. “Because we are not tying [the information] to a name, I don’t see an area of concern.”

And here we have further evidence why it’s a bad idea to let technically clueless gays (that’s most of us) run technology companies.

If you’ve got no programming chops to your name and have never researched the topic, or have never actually followed tech news for any period longer than the lifespan of your app, of course you’ll conclude that failing to give out an actual person’s name means nobody can discover that name. That’s what a complete ignoramus might believe. (Someone else who might believe that is a troubled technologist caught with his pants down [no photos!] who just realized Steve is about to pull Grindr from the App Store and privacy regulators are about to investigate his company.) It’s gladhanding at best, delusional irresponsibility at worst.

Think back to AOL’s “data dump” in 2006, where that company, renowned for its technical savvy, swore up and down that no personally identifiable information could be found among “20 million Web queries from 650,000 AOL users.” Anyone who actually could program his way out of a paper bag might be capable of isolating actual AOL usernames inside that data. It turns out a lot of people have those programming skills, and they went right ahead and did that. (I’m not going to link to the proof of that statement. However, somebody ginned up an interface anyone could use to mine the data.)

If “three ad companies” know you’re a guy in a certain location using Grindr with a certain phone, then they know some part of you is homosexual and that you’re looking for sex in the vicinity of that phone. (There is no other use case for Grindr.) Those ad companies are now in a position to track your phone – and out you to your wife.

If “ad companies” have that information, so could other parties, including the police, spy agencies, or bored programmers (most of them straight guys in arrested development, some with a penchant for mischief). All those people are part of “real life” and can derive an “ID” from data Joel Simkhai swears up and down does not endanger users’ privacy. We’ve heard that before. But Simkhai hasn’t.

Blocking guys on Grindr isn’t gonna help. If you use the app, your privacy has been violated. In the best-case scenario, nobody uses that information against you. How much are you willing to bet on an unbroken streak of best-case scenarios?

Update

(2011.01.03) A dynamite feature article by Tony Phillips in the November ’010 Out shows how Simkhai remains completely on-message in misleading the press about the true nature of his product. Phillips mentions “the completely nonsexualized environment Simkhai imagines while discussing his app…. [H]e’ll eventually conjure users messaging about a hot new jazz band playing in a coffee bar down the street. This idyll is so markedly different from my experience of Grindr…. ‘So I’m just looking forward to the day when we can tell you about the jazz singer down the street’ ” instead of telling you what Grindr really tells you, i.e. who within 500 feet is hot for your cock.

Phillips has the good sense to query leading commentators on digital immersion, including Jaron Lanier:

“[P]eople don’t see [Foursquare and Twitter] as basically feeding a spy agency for advertising.” […] Lanier sees “using the Internet to spy for the sake of advertising” as the model that will gradually “kill the middle class, democracy, and rights for minority groups.” He’s even surprised he has to explain the how and why of that statement….

“Auto mechanics will be disempowered,” Lanier predicts. “There’ll be a robotic auto assistant, and you’ll be expected to comment on how the robot is performing in exchange for being advertised at…. [T]here’s a class war going on, and this type of design unwittingly serves people who don’t like the middle class and would rather concentrate wealth.”

Lanier’s solution? “If you want to preserve the middle class and fight the concentration of money into a small elite,” he says, “just hook up in the park.”

A scorned “teenager” has been posting nude pictures of Australian footballers. In homosexualist circles, we’d call this a calendar and sell making-of DVDs of it on Amazon. We’d give it for Xmas as a stocking-stuffer present, then leave it out on the coffee table for guests to page through. Heterosexualists act like it’s a scandal.

Nonetheless, Karen Kissane in the Age can credit herself for coining the euphemism of the year. (Emphasis and links to actual photos added.)

In one image, Riewoldt is standing staring at the camera with a sheepish expression, his hands framing his genitals, while clothed fellow player Zac Dawson grins. Another photo shows Nick Dal Santo on a bed in a rapt state of self-communion.

On the upside, this scandal that isn’t one, in which heterosexualists act offended that professional athletes like each other’s company, often go unclothed, and engage in “self-communion,” has generated a snappy neologism in the dying days of ’010: dickileaks.

Or part of self. TV, Eh? is the less-than-euphoniously named Weblog run by Diane Wild, who single-handedly does more to promote Canadian television than all Canadian broadcasters put together. (The related podcast is marred by telephone-calibre voice quality and polite Canadians apologizing for talking over each other, but I was a guest once anyway.)

After years of abuse from someone related to a Canadian television curiosity – Murdoch Mysteries, a detective drama set in 19th-century Toronto – Diane Wild packed it in.

For three years he’s been sniping at me for my negativity while I’ve tried to grit my teeth and put up with his, and I’ve simply had enough. It’s not one big event that lead to this but three years of feeling harassed. A new season of the show is coming up and I can’t face it anymore.

I am reacting from anger, but it’s a long period of cumulative anger. I should have banned the man in question from the site and blocked his E-mails long ago, and that would have been the end. But after all our arguments about the value of criticism and his position that he’s protecting his wife’s work, I am going to both honour his intention and show by spiteful example what I’ve been saying for three years: Being ignored is worse than being subjected to the occasional negative remark.

Good for her. I would of course have no way of relating to a circumstance like this one.

Just today I learned that Canadian television is not actually overrun with snide, backbiting careerists with a habit of lobbing grenades from a comfortable distance. It is not, in other words, overrun with followers of the style of Karen Walton, Ink Canada’s founder and the woman whose tits I was accused of staring at. I say this as a fan of Canadian television. I’m hardly at the level of Ms Wild, who has made the mistake before of thinking I am a critic of her work. In fact, I defend more than Canadian TV shows; I have stuck up for the perennially vindictive and grudge-holding Denis McGrath (with whom I so often agree!) on more than one occasion. But, like Ms Wild, after a while there is a limit to the bullying one can take. And, I infer, as with my case, the bullies have made no effort to get to know Ms Wild, even at their own parties.

I am reliably informed that many of the writers who avoid industry events like Walton’s tend to be the kindest and most generous. I was touched and charmed to learn of this parallel universe of Canadian television, which lesson was delivered to me by a man who imparts all the life-affirming qualities I have just mentioned.

Aaron Martin’s chest hair

Sacrificing themselves, according to a meta-response to a book I have spent the last year picking through, Where Men Win Glory.

There is a lot of talk these days about making men good fathers, husbands and citizens. Much of this, of course, is predicated on the egregious myth that men are none of these things to begin with, and that their lives do not need or deserve compassionate attention simply for the sake of improving their lot in life. Everything we want men to be is somehow meant for the benefit of others. However well intended (and sometimes not), these efforts are doing little more than regarding men as human appliances….

[W]e also turned our attention to men, examined their gender role and concluded: Well, we concluded that we wouldn’t conclude anything if it got in the way of getting men to provide whatever service we needed or wanted.

For men, there would be no liberation from their role. Rather, we would just keep them trapped in it and start adding on the things we used to expect of women.

Put down that remote pick up a mop. Unless, of course, we need you to carry a rifle.