Carl “Not Carol” Burnett (on the Twitter) is a Paralympic alpine skiier and a lexicographer with a degree in linguistics. My kinda guy.

The CN/CP usage of Helvetica – particularly CP Rail’s Helvetica Bold Italic (other example) – is seared into the memory of a specific generation.

I’ve met two men with Alsatian surnames – Nate “Koechley” (aboriginally Köchle) and Nic Boshart, esteemed colleague at a nonprofit dealing with Canadian publishing, who writes:

People don’t think it’s hard to write, and those who do think it’s hard won’t read a book. Tech people don’t let you forget that what they do is hard, but they have an interesting and super-duper-effective way of going about it: By telling you exactly what they do and how they do it.

Tech people write blogs on how to do what they’re doing. They participate with other people in their fields to build better things. They purposely interact with outsiders to help them learn for free. They point them at products, not necessarily their own, that they think the non-techie needs and/or would like. The real clincher is that everybody does this, so it comes back around.

What do publishers do? Close Book Expo America to the public.

Euphoniously-named homosexualist écrivain Josh Kilmer-Purcell makes the following statements that seem internally inconsistent in a way I can’t put my finger on. Please write in with your own interpretation, because I’m kind of stuck here.

• “We live in a world of media everywhere…. I don’t have any idea what the media landscape will wind up in ten years, so I’m putting a stake in the ground everywhere. I think that eventually we’ll all be working for ourselves, and it’s the quality of our ideas, and our ability to disseminate them, that will determine our success”

• “[I]f gay men compensate for growing up as social outcasts by pulling together amazing dinner parties, well, it’s a lot more beneficial to society than if we were obsessed with getting even. We’re smart like that”

• “I rarely think about being gay anymore. I don’t think there’s anything any more unique about Brent’s and my relationship than any straight one,” except of course there aren’t any ladies involved and quite possibly issues of what it means to be a man might pop up now and then, but I shouldn’t be interjecting here. “I can’t think of a less interesting or truthful slant on my life than attributing what has happened to me to being gay,” he said with debatable truthfulness, as a straight Josh Kilmer-Purcell wouldn’t have written what he did

Adorable Italianate invert wolfcub Matthew Fox, rare among Canadian belletrists in actually holding down a day job peripherally in the literary field, pauses from griping about the streetcar and mentioning his workouts to reveal that Toronto Life is about to be redesigned. (“Expect everything to be slicker and easier to navigate”! And with shitty code. Last time, they hired the best – then, as all design‑ and code-ignorant managers will do, sabotaged his work once he was out the door.)

This new redesign will not include James Chatto, one presumes, but that’s not the baffling part. Didn’t they just hire whippersnapper Jessica Rose to breathe new life into the journal of the dumb rich? True to her generation, she can’t design a page of type to save her life – explainable, in my experience with designers of her age, by the fact that young graphic designers cannot and will not read.

At a theoretical level, how does one “redesign” a city magazine that makes its own city unrecognizable? (Add “a lot of entry points on every page”?) A magazine for a city none of its readers bodily live in? (The sky above Toronto Life readers is the colour of a dowager, asleep on a Muskoka chair on the back deck.) A magazine devoted to a city of the aspiration? How many graphical ways are there to exalt the real-estate tastes of high-earning homosexualists?

Matthew Fox runs the most-lampooned Web site about Toronto. He holds down that job at a publishing house that considers shitcanning its Web-only writers a viable online strategy. (That resulted in a conspicuously credible chronology of the shitcanning obtained and published by Frank. What insider had that many facts at his disposal?)

How far can and does the fantastic Mr. Fox go on looks alone? How much credit does he get just for showing up in a well-fitted shirt? Is he so adorable we should buy (into) his enthusiasm? Is that how he truly feels? Would he have other stories to tell, if only he could pry himself out of that wretched place? Would he hesitate to do so, knowing that everyone to whom he could possibly tell those stories is a member of the social set that attends Toronto Life cocktail receptions – which, readers will be aware, is my proxy for this city’s journalistic Family Compact?

If Matthew Fox could in fact run the place better, would he ever be given the chance, and would he have the guts?

Is Toronto Life really an unkillable institution?

Are we on the verge of finding out?

Full truth: It’s 2137 and we still don’t have captioning on EyeStream video. Or on Onion News Network video, a favourite for years. I spent my $2.99 for the iTunes download of ONN’s Future: News from the Year 2137 (on the Facebook).

An instant classic. We spent all last evening freeze-framing the thing and just rerewatching it from scratch. It’s got everything you need in a communiqué from the future – typography, linguistics, gay marriage. But even after working on it for a year, it ain’t got captioning. Even TwatVision’s got captioning.

For the iTunes ecosystem, the only captioning format that works is conventional Line 21 or 608 captioning (skiamorphically enough), and pretty much only WGBH can bundle together the video and captioning files. a 13-minute video costs a few hundred bucks to caption. So let’s consider that a sweet solution to the fucking problem and not bother waiting for all eight houses of Lil Congress to pass a law.

Or does somebody need an obedience chip?

Lingo

This isn’t quite the exolinguistics of District 9, but the writers made another stab at a dystopian English while still remaining comprehensible to American viewers. Now, what do I mean by that? Refer to the following transcript while watching. It’s not as though there’s any other way to read the dialogue, now, is it? [continue with: It’s 2137 and nothing’s changed →]

Greeted with initial critical interest and later bafflment, David Shields’s Reality Hunger (interview) compiles 618 bits and pieces from other literary works to amass a contention that nonfiction speaks a truth for which fiction is now mute. I buy the argument, though the disjointed tones of the book – tautologically, there couldn’t possibly be a consistent tone – made it a tad hard to follow while reading it for 20 minutes at a time on the subway.

But if one in fact does read the much-discussed, legally-mandated endnoted citations, lo and behold it turns out all the good parts of the book are original works by Shields, or are somebody else’s words goosed up a bit by Shields. As an example:

In the aftermath of the Million Little Pieces outrage, Random House reached a tentative settlement with readers who felt defrauded by Frey. To receive a refund, hoodwinked customers had to mail in a piece of the book: For hardcover owners it was page 163; those with paperback copies were required to actually tear off the front cover and send it in. Also, readers had to sign a sworn statement confirming that they had bought the book with the belief it was a real memoir or, in other words, that they felt bad having accidentally read a novel. [Nº 118]

Late afternoon, G20 protest outside “detention centre,” Pape north of Eastern.