(UPDATED) As two years have passed, Sports Illustrated and the sports press in general again pretend to give a shit about the Olympics. This week, SI examines the state of American bobsleigh.

We endure yet another mention of tight bobsleigh uniforms (how else are they supposed to dress – like Santy Claus?), but here’s the kicker:

Driving by feel is something [Steve Holcomb] has grown accustomed to, and not entirely by choice. Two years ago, before he became a world champion, Holcomb almost quit the sport because he had nearly gone blind. His vision had deteriorated to 20/500 from a degenerative eye condition called keratoconus in which the corneas bulge outward.

Well, how very interesting. I just had Canadian bobsledder dudes telling me it was really out of the question to put a blind man on the team, even if he was otherwise one of the lightning-fast giants they aren’t exactly churning out by the thousands on an assembly line. How would that guy drive the van around Europe, they asked rhetorically? He wouldn’t, I said. You’re going to bounce him from the team just for that? You’ve got three other guys who can drive, plus coaches and staff.

And, well, whaddya know: The driver of USA1 has been visually impaired all along. Check the pullquote on the next page:

And they kept it a secret for seven years! As though there were something wrong with it. As though it were interfering with Holcomb’s game. The whole team came to rely on Holcomb’s driving while blind.

• Holcomb’s eye condition lasted from 2001 to 2008, during which years, USA Bobsled results (PDF) show, his guys won, placed, or showed ten times.
• 20/500 vision didn’t stop Holcomb from winning the four-man world championships this March, the two-man worlds a month earlier, and the four-man U.S. nationals a month before that.

Now, maybe he’d had his bionic eyes plugged in for those latter results (SI: “Last year doctors implanted lenses made of a special polymer behind Holcomb’s irises”), an experimental operation he almost had to pay for himself. But the difference is immaterial. He drives with a fuzzed-over visor now and he’s been driving blind for seven years anyway. He never lost his place as captain of USA1.

USA Bobsled will accommodate the adventitious visual impairment of an athlete they already know can do the job, but it seems no bobsleigh federation wants to even try out an athlete who walks in the door half-blind. (Update, 2009.11.15: There may be a surprise coming through the pipeline from Alberta.)

How many guys do you know who could even lift one corner of a bobsleigh into a van? And people are worried about driving the van?

Can somebody tell me what kind of sense it makes to turn away talent in a sport whose physical demands ensure that only one in a million guys could even try out? Want to make that one in five million?

Are you trying to lose this thing or something? Not only can you put a blind guy in the sled, he can drive it. Why stop at just one?

Silver-spoon silver fox Mr. ANDERSON COOPER is not even pretending not to be involved with the owner of an East Village gay bar, Mr. BENJAMIN MAISANI. Coop reminds us that holding a press conference to “admit” one’s homosexualism, as by reading a statement prepared by a hired publicist, is a practice as outdated as the superannuated news organization that conditioned us to expect that sort of thing, The Advocate.

Not being in the closet is functionally equivalent to being out of the closet, which is what being out of the closet was always supposed to mean. If the definition seems circular, so be it. This is how out gays are supposed to behave: Like there’s nothing wrong with it.

Previously associated with gorgeous Latino “personal trainers” who are a dime a dozen in New York, Cooper seems to have scored a unicorn this time. And no wonder Gawker is interested: The last time I read about an homosexualist art major, he edited a Gawker blog for years before finally realizing a long-time dream of becoming a Kunsthallenführer. This time the object is Maisani, who graduated art history with a perfect GPA and valedictorized. Like my friend the editor, he set that aside and lived a life of the body.

And why the hell not?

The really seriously value-adding feature is the fact that Maisani isn’t just French but Corsican. That makes him a member of an intrinsically interesting non-Muslim minority group within an interesting country. Presumably it also makes him an actual speaker of Corsican. Just the word “Corsican” sounds great. And judging from my viewing of the various video podcasts, if he were Breton he wouldn’t be as handsome. (He’d be a total dog.) The Italian influence is important, it seems.

Uptight and proper Anderson Cooper is following in the footsteps of the non-archangel Gabriel in Trick, the 1999 trifle that is memorably mostly for the frequent near-nudity of its costar, John Paul Pitoc (no relation).

Mousy Gabe, a song-and-dance man, is ever so worried about being mistaken for the “queen” he is and presents himself in a gay sackcloth and ashes of saggy shirts and baggy chinos. He barely glances at a go-go dancer named Mark and cannot believe his eyes. It’s not only that he’s gorgeous – can he ever move. He’s a beautiful machine.

John Paul Pitoc has a lot to be proud of in this, his début picture. He can look back at his beauty and how well it suited the movie. Mark is all about being generous with himself, whether by dancing nearly naked, wearing a tight, wide-necked T-shirt that emphasizes his wide neck, or just finding Gabe more than cute enough to bed. (If only they could find one – the thin conceit of the movie.)

Coop can stand and deliver but he’s really quite rigid and upright. Balls-out Kathy Griffin reduced him to a giggling nerd on New Year’s Eve. (“ ‘Did you just bring your wallet out on television?’ ‘I keep it here because I – if I have it in my pocket, it hurts my back.’ ‘Oh, that’s oldschool New York money. OK. “How did you get your back injury?” “Um, my wallet, because I have so much money, I can’t even hold my own torso up.” ’ ”) Maisani is a perfect foil for him – foreign, gorgeous, free with his physical self.

They can surely carry on a conversation and, even though they may wear interchangeable Fred Perry polo shirts, they complement each other. Together they demonstrate a classic æsthetic of gay pairings – not a yin and a yang but a tad more than twice the yin. It’s a multiplicative or synergistic effect. Two beautiful but slightly divergent men together don’t look ridiculous, like tuxedoed penguins getting married. They make even the hottest hetero male look like not enough man for the job.

Cooper will always have a career. Maisani can have any career he wants even after Coop gets cold feet and dumps him: He just has to show up for an interview in a tailored suit, beam a big smile, and hand over his college transcripts. He may fare better than Pitoc, who has lost his baby fat and has shrink-wrapped himself into a kind of ultimate-fighter manqué, albeit with a dose of irony. (He certainly writes amusing Twits.) The acting roles have been kind of lousy, too. “Harsh, ripped, borderline emaciated” isn’t working for him.

Meanwhile, Maisani’s lush, arms-wide-open style serves him in better stead. Like hitting even a single baseball out to the boards, it’s something upstanding intellectuals can never pull off. They know the pain: They’re just dying for it and it hurts. The easiest way is to snag a boyfriend who’s already got it. 1 + 1 > 2.

Tools of Change, O’Reilly’s (surely profitable) conference series that enables publishing executives to articulate just how afraid they are of nonbook technologies, produced a transcript of its Fall 2009 session. As a Microsoft Word document. (With unreadably long paragraphs.)

Isn’t this a lot worse than Amazon 1984ing your Kindle? At other events, they’ve airlifted in Cory Doctorow to lecture publishers on technical reality. O’Reilly, heal thyself.

For the benefit of this multi-million-dollar publishing mini-empire, I have created a proper HTML version of the transcript. O’Reilly may hoover it in and publish it on their crap Web site. Free ePubs all around!

(Where, incidentally, are all the other transcripts and, more usefully, podcasts?)

Hard-done-by elitist gourmands tragically lose one of their wittle monthly journals.

(UPDATED) The library has, at long last, delivered Scott Rosenberg’s book on the history of blogging, Say Everything. It figures that a corporate publisher (Crown) would entrust the writing of such history to a corporate blogger (from Salon). History is written not by the victors but by people you meet at convivial Upper East Side Pacific Heights dinner parties.

I am quoted and dismissed on pp. 212–213. “Deconstructing ‘You’ve Got Blog’ ” is, almost predictably, the topic.

“There is pretty much no way to breach the velvet rope,” Clark declared. “If you’re not an A-list blogger, you will stay off that list forever.”

On the face of it, this last claim, at least, was plainly wrong. Boing Boing was one good counterexample. It wouldn’t have made anyone’s A-list at the time Clark wrote; two years later, it was near the top of everyone’s.

Rosenberg also mentions TechCrunch, worsening his error. The early-Aughties A-list was made up exclusively of personal blogs, not group or corporate blogs. I was addressing A-list personal blogs, not anything else. Here Rosenberg does something worse than comparing apples to oranges.

Throughout his book, Rosenberg refuses to contact bloggers he disagrees with. He spends an entire chapter on Jorn Barger, for example, ending with the sanctimonious admission he had debookmarked Barger for rampant anti-Semitism. (Rosenberg later told me the notes to the book clearly show he conducted an E-interview with Barger.) Yet Rosenberg quotes bloggers he treats favourably, including Mark Frauenfelder, Jesse James Garrett, and (inexplicably) Dave Winer. Either Rosenberg never contacted me or his mail was eaten by my spam filters.

I believe few experienced journalists would disagree that it is unethical to run your ideas past only the sources you agree with.

Rosenberg does document how the A-list-blogger phenomenon was later diagnosed by Clay Shirky as a power-law effect independent of human motive. Shirky was right. And wasn’t it just the other week that I uttered the term “power law” to Shirky’s face?

On the face of it, who’s been plainly wrong all along?

This photocopied zine from 1988 rocked to Internet stardom when it was subjected to a forensic investigation at the Morning News. I have copy-edited an available version and uploaded it for posterity.

If you read the blog by that grizzled positoid (ideally not via loading it in your browser, as it will crash) or the emanations of that excitable, bipolar British Twit, you know that Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir besmirched the saintly memory of a boy-band singer, Stephen Gately. He died “of natural causes.”

In 2006, Gately entered into a civil union with Internet businessman Andrew Cowles, who had been introduced to him by mutual friends Elton John and David Furnish…. [T]he couple were enjoying a holiday together in their apartment in Mallorca before their world was capsized. […]

But hang on a minute…. Healthy and fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again. Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one. […]

After a night of clubbing, Cowles and Gately took a young Bulgarian man back to their apartment. It is not disrespectful to assume that a game of canasta with 25-year-old Georgi Dochev was not what was on the cards.
Cowles and Dochev went to the bedroom together while Stephen remained alone in the living room. […]

Another real sadness about Gately’s death is that it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships. Gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages. Not everyone, they say, is like George Michael.

Of course, in many cases this may be true.

And in many cases it isn’t. Equal marriage is billed as a calming and civilizing force that confers stability, all of which society should support. What Moir is talking about is the additional assumption that gay men willingly take a vow of monogamy when they get married, as straight people nominally do.

You must not know many gay guys if you believe gay couples are remotely as monogamous as straight couples claim to be. Let’s not even bother quantifying adultery among opposite-sex couples. What I’m talking about here is gay-male couples’ outright declaration that they are not and will not be monogamous.

If you doubt this analysis because surely it must be homophobic (the truth, if unpalatable, is dismissed as homophobia), let’s look at some numbers. I hacked together a search string at BigMuscle.com, the atrociously-coded “dating” site that helpfully includes the following option for relationship status: “Partnered – Open w/Partner.” That is, they’ll do guys, but only when they’re together. They’re open to three-ways.

This is the scenario explicated by Moir in her article: Two gay men in a civil partnership pick up another guy.

How many BigMuscle subscribers define themselves thus? 375. It isn’t important to remove duplicates here. If both guys in a couple have BigMuscle ads, they represent only one couple, not two, but we’re counting individuals, not couples.

On this “dating” site, 375 guys openly advertise their willingness to engage in three-ways with their individual partners. I suppose it’s not out of the question that two such couples could get together and hold what any reasonable straight person would call an orgy. And these are merely statements of openness or willingness, not declarations it’s actually happened.

How do these numbers break down for regions that allow same-sex marriage?

• Belgium: 5
• Canda: 21
• Netherlands: 4
• Norway and Sweden: 0
• South Africa: 1
• Spain: 8

How do the numbers break down for regions that allow civil unions or civil partnerships?

• Andorra, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Iceland, Luxembourg, New Caledonia (!), Slovenia, Uruguay: 0
• Czech Republic, New Zealand, Switzerland: 1
• France: 17
• Germany: 9
• United Kingdom: 17

(Those are just sample numbers. I’m not going to run through every combination.)

BigMuscle has a few satellite sites. BigMuscleBears.com is for fatties, you could say, only somewhat incorrectly. Let’s look at all the BigMuscle and BigMuscleBears relationship settings that don’t apply to singletons:

“Open All” is another way of saying “completely nonmonogamous.” Most BigMuscleBears members also have BigMuscle profiles. So you can pretty much subtract the BigMuscle number from the corresponding BigMuscleBears number to remove duplicates.

Just on these two sites, then, how many guys advertise they are in relationships but are willing to have sex with other men, as long as they stay together?

• BigMuscle: 375 + 342 + 39 + 36 = 792
• BigMuscleBears (net): (521 + 600 +53 + 72) – 792 = 454
• Total: 1,246

On a good day, that’s twice as many guys as claim to be monogamous with their partners or husbands.

(For interest, BigMuscleLeather.com allows only Married, not Partnered, and the numbers are are 153:125:35:N/A.)

Would you like to run your own numbers? Try Manhunt. Call them up; they could probably do a custom data run just for you.

So in fact Jan Moir was articulating a truth gay-male couples openly advertise: Thousands of them are in relationships where picking up guys is permitted as long as the partnered or married guys stick together while they’re doing it.

Far from being insensitive and stereotypical, Moir was merely reporting what other gay men already admit. She has little to apologize for. Her description of some gay men’s “louche lifestyle” is a perfect turn of phrase.

What about drug use? Again, you must not know many gays if you think straight couples do more drugs than gay-male couples. But let’s wait for a toxicology report on Gately before we ruminate on that one.

So indeed, “[h]ealthy and fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again,” especially when their spouses are in the next room with a guy they just picked up.

Are you still sure you want to express your outrage to the U.K. Press Complaints Council? Your outrage is just like all your friends’ outrage. And I rather doubt the attested facts back it up.

Golden Krishna (no relation):

I recently spent an hour chatting with Firefox developers trying to convince them that their browser should properly display the thin-space character.

That doesn’t seem to be going well. (See test suite.)

The thin space, used by typesetters long before computers, can enhance the readability between words and typographic elements like ampersands or em dashes, or it can be used to improve spacing between words in oddly-fitting lines of justified text.

Actually, you use it to separate consecutive quotation marks (’ ”) or locutions like “Poster Nº 1” and “15° C.” As a matter of principle, I have given up approximating such usages with nonbreaking space and have begun using the real thing (along with em spaces).

When given the HTML entity for a thin space (  [or just  , or just type the damned character]), Firefox 3.0 for Mac not only displays the thin space incorrectly, but also uses a visually worse and unexpected wider space…. At the end of our conversation, the developers conceded that my version of Firefox failed to accurately display the thin space, but maintained that this particular age-old typographic detail, well, didn’t matter because they couldn’t wrap their minds around what it might be used for.

Once again I see that nobody produces better copy for the Web than I do. It isn’t solely your fault: Your tools may fail you even if you aren’t using Windows.

Only Eye would publish a cultural interpretation of modern typography in which the only font identified by name isn’t even used in any of the samples.

Jessica Jenkins once “fled mean Thatcher’s Britain for Berlin.” With that level of skill she could run an entire university here.