D. Powazek, demonstrating his worth now for a second full decade: “Given how much work communicating has been for the majority of human history, do you really think that a software keyboard is going to stop people from ‘creating content’ on the iPad?”

I read this yesterday and enjoyed it. Then this morning I had a full Looney Tunes–compliant experience: I stopped cold and thought Hey, waaait… aaa… miiinute!

The iPad is the first popular use of an onscreen keyboard on a big screen. But what do you think quadriplegics and seriously disabled people have been using for a decade and a half?

If you can’t type for whatever reason, you can use a hardware keyboard, or a pointer, or a set of triangulated light beams, or any number of other methods to operate an onscreen keyboard with word prediction, just like the iPad (and, in miniature, the iPhone and iTouch). These products have been continuously developed for years and do more than just enter text; you can control a huge range of computer functions just by activating onscreen controls, through whatever mechanism works for you.

And it does work, whether you’re a member of parliament or a baseball columnist. Do you need to type? A lot of people need to type. Are you crippled? Well, who cares? We’ve got you covered.

It turns out that people with iPhones were using an adaptive technology all the while. If you don’t have a hardware keyboard and all you can type with is a couple of fingers – presto, you’re de facto disabled. And now the whole experience has been supersized: You the iPad user are doing the same thing every quadriplegic, zero-handed person, person with cerebral palsy, or any number of other disabled people have been doing since the 1990s.

With your big new iPad screen, you’re even more de facto disabled than ever! Welcome to the club. But since Apple has set up the entire system to solve that problem, why the hell is anyone complaining?

And yes, blind people have begun buying and using iPads, since VoiceOver is built right in. One podcast went into a lot of detail on how much easier it is to type on the iPad than the iPhone. It’s easier for everyone, isn’t it?

Here, then, is the future of adaptive technology: It’s no big deal if you’re disabled because everybody using the system is. Do you need to type? A lot of people need to type. Aren’t you crippled? Well, who cares? We’ve got you covered.

At a certain point, you have to admit you aren’t good enough to do something better than an expert could do it even if the technical option exists for you to give it a shot anyway.

While people will tolerate a lot of things, what we want are beautiful things that work well. There aren’t many nonexperts who can accomplish that. Expertise needs schooling, maturation, taste, and quite a lot of attitude.

The foregoing explains why open source has nothing to teach literature or indeed any artistic creation, since talent doesn’t scale as you give more and more developers check-in access to the version-control system set up for your novel. It further explains why one’s inability to hack an iPad means precisely nothing. Nobody needs to program an iPad to enjoy using it, except those who have no capacity for enjoyment other than programming and complaining about same.

This was the weekend those of us with high standards lost their remaining residue of patience for ideologues who hyperbolize about open systems without actually creating something people want to use.

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, in Freakonomics, explain that “car seats” provide barely any protection above and beyond what seatbelts would provide. This in itself was not a well-qualified statement (what size of child? lap belts only? what seatbelt-induced injuries, if any?), but the sequel made matters worse.

• Supercalifreakonomicsexpialidocious, p. 151, states that “car seats” must “be anchored in place by the car’s existing seatbelt.” Have they even looked at a car built in the last eight years? Lower anchors and top tethers are required to be installed in many rear seating positions by U.S. and Canadian spec. These LATCH anchors allow you to attach a child restraint directly to the frame. You may instead use seatbelts, but there is no reason to do so unless (a) you don’t know LATCH exists or (b) your child restraint or car is so old it doesn’t have LATCH.

• I was surprised to see a mention of incorrect installation in the book, but the authors still have not that as a variable in the data. Remember: Car seats are the least usable consumer product. A reasonable prediction for an economic scientist would hold that child restraints are so hard to install properly that most of them won’t be. If so, as attested data shows, then injuries and deaths can be traced to incorrect installation. A true comparison would be known-well-installed vs. known-poorly-installed child restraints.

  Levitt and Dubner should be looking at figures from Australia, a safety-obsessed nation with seriously rigorous specs for child restraints. (New Zealand standards are functionally equivalent.) Rear-facing infant carriers, for example, may use a foot that anchors them to the car floor to reduce deflection.

• I would discourage the use of “car seats” as a generic term. I know that’s what ordinary people use and the Freakonomics empire is a populist one. But “car seat” invariably conjures an image of a booster seat. “Child restraint” is the hardware-neutral term. I would also encourage being specific: Rear-facing infant carrier? Convertible car seat? (Facing which direction?) Booster seat?

• Several auto manufacturers have addressed the problem of designing seats compatible with child bodies. It isn’t hard to buy a wagon or SUV with a built-in child restraint.

The Freako dudes have really been dining out on their deliciously contrarian findings on child restraints. It’s almost part of their mystique by now: You may think you know all there is to know about car seats, but step aside and let the experts tell you what’s really happening. But what Levitt and Dubner write just is not accurate and specific enough.

There’s all the sneer and offhand dismissal you’d expect from Gerry Leonidas in his essay on what he’s learned as a typeface-design instructor. Then there’s this:

To paraphrase Goudy, the problem is not… that the old-timers stole all the best ideas, but that the old ideas are in danger of being rediscovered from scratch. (Just look at the Web designers rediscovering the basic principles of text typography and information design, as if these were newly-found disciplines.)

Pink Triangle Press publisher-for-life Ken Popert’s long reign of error is finally over: Italics and something approaching real typography have finally caught up with Xtra, the chain of homosexualist fortnightlies whose parent company also owns “charitable” phone-sex lines and TV porn stations.

The haphazardly written, copy-edited, and typeset newspapers had been creaking along with the same aliterate, bang-festooned “design” for 13 years, making Xtra is the GM Fishbowl of Toronto newspapers – a cœlecanth that people put up with as a consequence of the strongest force in the city, the narcotized embrace of mediocrity.

I used to write articles and a music column for Xtra in the ’90s. We were younger then, weren’t we? I got the music column after a grilling from Popert and Dayne Ogilvie, which was intended as a kind of political litmus test that, even then, I was smart enough to deflect. Ogilvie, now deceased, did not interfere with my copy, except for that one time when he killed a feature after we had a wee argument on the phone on an unrelated topic. I would not have expected my copy to be interfered with because I wrote good shit for the paper.

But, seemingly from time immemorial, Popert insisted on creating his own house style. You see this in publications with a delusion of grandeur, whether such delusions are also ludicrous (Xtra), pompous (the Globe), or magisterial (the New Yorker).

• Street names had the street designation removed except where absolutely necessary, hence 190 Spadina Ave or 25 Spadina Rd but also 16 Ryerson. (“16 Ryerson” what? Isn’t that a university now?)

• Without actually understanding the British tradition, abbreviations never used periods, as shown above.

• Months and days were always abbreviated even with no reason to do it, viz Sun, Jul 3.

• Later, URLs were run all in lower case with initial capital, which makes no sense from any standpoint, including a technical one. (The hostname is case-insensitive.)

But above all, Popert’s pride and joy was his outright fatwa against italics. Responses to letters to editors and little tidbits at the ends of columns – giving, say, the location of a performance (“16 Ryerson”)? – might be italicized en masse, but titles of artworks never were. It became almost impossible to understand my responsibly written music columns because, unless you already knew everything about the topic, you couldn’t differentiate artist and title, particularly in sentence-initial usage. (All you had to go on was the initial capital, but sentences almost always have an initial capital.)

In my paper files somewhere is Xtra’s old style guide. I am just not going to bother digging it up, but trust me when I tell you that it clearly said if somebody doesn’t like our house style, they can buy us and change it. Or, it didn’t say, wait till Popert retires or croaks.

Checking the masthead of this first redesigned Toronto Xtra, I see that Popert is merely a member of the Pink Triangle Press board and has no editorial function. Hence the aphorism I have used for nearly 20 years – the one that opened this posting – is no longer accurate. [continue with: Thu, Mar 25 on Church St, hell froze over →]

Just when I thought he was improving, which the Internets don’t want you to do, comes the non-sequitur <br class="joe_clark_i_wont_validate">, which is in fact valid HTML.

Mr. Mann is 104.

The other book by Bryony Gomez-Palacio and Armin Vit (again in that order) is Graphic Design, Referenced. I don’t have a clue who it’s meant for, unless it’s meant for functionally illiterate graphic-design students who need everything explained to them in pictures.

The book isn’t so terrible for such a designer. Nor is an illustrated guide a bad idea for a design book; it sure beats turgid, self-important, completely unillustrated art-history monographs masquerading as graphic-design “criticism.”

But really: Who is this book for? And will they be able to use it? It’s supposed to be practical – the subtitle is “A Visual Guide to the Language, Applications, and History of Graphic Design” (Oxford comma in original). But as someone who has read a hundred graphic-design books over 30 years and every English-language history of graphic design, this book is so disorganized as to be incomprehensible. The confounding fact is that it is teeming with “organization,” with sections and chapters straplined thus: [continue with: Graphic design, mishmashed →]

Today I’m putting out one more, ideally one last, call for contributions to The Cranky Copyright Book. I have to survive day to day between now and the receipt of tens of thousands of dollars in a copyright settlement. This settlement has cast a shadow over my life for the last 16 years.

I wrote hundreds of freelance articles for Canadian newspapers in the 1990s. (Among other work, I was a columnist for the Star and also for the Globe and Mail.) Starting in the ’90s, Canadian newspapers illegally reproduced freelance writers’ articles on electronic databases, to which they charged access. We took them to court and won at the Supremes. Hence what they did was indisputably wrong. This is one of those rare copyright issues that are open and shut. There’s no room for debate.

Publishers and database owners settled the lawsuit – but rich, detached lawyers are now dragging out the payment process. This is merely the latest indignity I have had to suffer in a decade-and-a-half-long process.

• Newspapers’ duplication of our articles was illegal because it was unauthorized. So newspapers attempted to extort post-facto and perpetual authorization from freelancers. I was the first person to get the Globe and Mail’s freelancer contract in the mail.

• Years ago, I attended exactly one information meeting about the court case, chaired by representative plaintiff Heather Robertson and her lawyer. She wrote her address (in King City) and phone number on the blackboard, but has never actually returned a phone call or E-mail from me. I find this bothersome because I am one of the larger claimants, she seems not to actually need the money, and she gets an extra payment as the representative plaintiff.

• The settlement had to be approved by a judge. For weeks last summer I planned to attend the approval hearing and report on it. An old lady and I showed up at the courthouse to watch the proceedings, but the courtroom location was unlisted everywhere we looked. (We looked everywhere. We also asked everyone, and had them check their databases, and did all the same things at neighbouring courthouses. We left no stone unturned.)

  Whaddya know: The details had been hidden on the lawyers’ Web site the whole time, which I couldn’t load on my iTouch in the courtroom or anywhere nearby.

• There have been quite a few postings of late by freelance writers incensed at another publisher’s contract. All those postings tend to take the form “Why I won’t sign the Transcontinental contract.” Their cause is just, but their tone is a bit precious, for this is the same cause for which I’ve been suffering for these last 16 years. (I’m not the only one. And how many of those new writers have spouses or other sources of income?)

• Adding insult to injury, well-heeled lawyers (abetted by a fellow lawyer, Howard Knopf) have talked the judge into extending the filing deadline. All this does is string us along and keep us poor longer.

So: I’ve got to keep my head above water between now and receipt of my long-delayed settlement funds. That’s why I’m asking for contributions again.

But there’s going to be a payoff. Even though the settlement money is mine and barely compensates me for the harm caused, I am going to turn right around and use part of that money to write, edit, and publish The Cranky Copyright Book, in print and electronically. I am transforming the ill-gotten gains of notorious copyright assholes into an original work of literature defending the rights of creators in a time of copyright reform. Do you see anybody else doing anything like that?

But I’ve got to get there from here first.