Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (q.v.), p. 87:

In Liège, I booked in [at] the Holiday Inn, a concrete block which hovered on the outskirts of the town, seemingly fearful of entering its medieval centre and keenly nostalgic for the architecture of Detroit or Atlanta. In the evening, I ordered a breaded chicken escalope from room service, and ate it whilst sitting on my bed, reading a book on the history of art in the Low Countries. Some time past midnight, I began watching a television program made up of a rolling succession of illustrated personal ads submitted by members of the public, including a baker from Charleroi who was on the lookout for l’amour et un peu plus, a program which continued for several hours deep into an insomniac night and revealed levels of longing that I had not until then suspected from my brief exchanges in this small and fractured nation [Belgium].

Here’s your July 2009 Metropass:

It now contains rock-solid anticounterfeiting features, like a hologram and a sticker. (Except the passes sold by the handful of vending machines TTC has managed to install don’t have the sticker. So those would be the ones you’d want to copy.)

You have to take the sticker off the pass to use it. (Except you don’t have to do that at any automated turnstile or entrance.) How do you know you have to take off the sticker? Well, half the city won’t know that because they can’t understand the instructions. Can you?

This fare media is only valid
if this sticker is removed

Did you have to think about it?

1. What’s a fare media?

   1. Isn’t it a fare medium?

   2. Isn’t it just a Metropass?

2. Who calls a Metropass a fare medium? Somebody who works at the TTC and lives in a bubble?

3. Is it only valid or valid only?

4. Why is this a conditional sentence? The following outcome takes place if you do this action?

5. Why is there nobody, nobody at all, inside this billion-dollar organization who can write a simple sentence, like “Remove this sticker to use this pass”?

6. How many layers of incompetence does an organization need in order to approve an incomprehensible sentence like this one for imprinting on a quarter-million transit passes?

So.

You thought I was done with documenting the abject failure of TTC signage. So did I. But obviously I’m not, because the problem rages on unabated.

You probably think everything is being handled. You probably think that because the greater the evidence I amass (sometimes from TTC’s own documents) that TTC is screwing it up, the greater the TTC’s insistence that everything’s just fine. Because I’m from outside the organization and am not a jumped-up motorman using CorelDraw for Windows, I couldn’t possibly be right.

Instead of admitting it, or not admitting it and just fixing things (a face-saving option always and still available), TTC pushes back even harder. And as a result, the Bloor-Danforth line’s precious design symmetry will be intentionally destroyed. You can blame Susan Reed Tanaka, Adam Giambrone, noted art expert/android Sandra Bussin, Gary Webster, and a host of miscreants. They so resent my rubbing their noses in their own incompetence that they’ll show me! They’ll reassert their authority over their entire transit system by busting up entire subway stations.

Of course I take this personally. It’s meant personally. They’re so incensed with my proof of their own failings that they take the grandiose step of remodelling entire stations exactly their own way, comfortably free of outside influence. Or rationality or history, or responsibility.

Now, why else might you believe the TTC “communications” problem has been resolved? Because they’ve got some guy on Twitter. That isn’t just a joke, it’s a punchline, but it shows just how gullible and shallow people can be. Are you one of them?

Let me explain it to you via analogy: “Twittering” about sunlight cell does not cure skin cancer. Having some guy defend every single thing TTC does, 140 characters at a time, doesn’t fix TTC signs.

Quick: This guy may be issuing Twits from his CrackBerry, but:

• When’s the next bus coming?

• Where do I get the Bathurst bus going north?

• Where’s the Wychwood stop on St. Clair West?

• How many months did it take them to install the ceiling-mounted box signs at Museum station? (Why weren’t there seven identical instances of them, as the original drawings promised?) How’s the upstairs looking at Museum station?

• Why is there perpetually “No information available” on those advertising screens masquerading as information displays?

• How do I get to Greenwood station from Queen and Greenwood? (Did you know you could buy duct tape in flat black? It’s right there on the sign for the bus at Greenwood station. What’s it covering up?)

• Listen to the stop announcements and tell me the name of the station between Rosedale and Davisville. How many words in the name of the station between Broadview and Pape? Does the terminus of that new subway line have one name or two?

• What does that error message say on buses’ next-stop displays? (You have ample chance to write it down, since it shows up every day. Did you know your wristwatch has more RAM than that system does? The error message tells you so.)

• Why does the 92 Woodbine South bus always claim it’s headed to Lake Shore even when it’s hauling ass up Woodbine? (Same goes for 83 Jones and its perpetual stated destination, Commissioners.)

• What are those fare collectors doing when they barricade themselves inside their booths, covering every square inch of glass up to the five-foot mark with TTC maps?

• Why was that poster protesting the Ukrainian genocide installed in the Christie fare booth for a week and a half?

• How many new handwritten signs were posted this week? (Handwritten signs are the problem, right? Once we lick that problem, we can pack up and go home, can we not? And we have in fact licked it, surely?)

I know all the answers to these questions, and I’ve got the pictures to prove it – 2,261 of them, in fact. I can really back up what I’m saying.

So that’s what I’ll be doing during the month of July. I’ll publish new postings on a specific issue that remains unfixed years and years after TTC should have known better. And I’ll post a few additional pictures over on Flickr. Expect those on most days.

Think I shouldn’t be doing this? Well, maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe TTC managers will be so embarrassed and incensed that the Commission will pass yet another resolution that everything’s just fine, but for good measure will order the replacement of all those enamelled metal signs with fake Helvetica on polycarbonate. Such an exercise, easily attainable, would again demonstrate TTC’s supreme authority over its own system, rather akin to an execution in the town square. Shall we consider it a dare?

We’ve been waiting far too long for the Toronto Transit Commission to act like informed, rational, literate adults. We’ve been waiting for them to heed knowledgeable criticism. We’ve waited for them to accept that graphic design is functional, not decorative, and is not the sort of thing only girls and fairies care about. We’ve waited, and waited and waited, for them to fix their defects.

And they haven’t. All they’ve done is put some guy on Twitter.

Time’s up, TTC.

Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (q.v.), p. 313–315:

“No,” he shouted at me, without even raising his head. I explained that I had been driving by the airfield and had been captivated by the peculiar and desolate beauty of the gigantic machines which lay abandoned, and slowly decomposing, in the desert.

“Fuck off. We don’t give tours,” he responded decisively.

Certain that his logic would benefit from being exposed to the deeper wellspring of my curiosity, I proceeded to deliver a soliloquy, a polished but approximate version of which it seems unfair to deprive the reader:

“My desire further to investigate these semi-ruined objects, though personal in nature, nevertheless fits into a long Western tradition of preoccupation with remnants of collapsing civilizations, which can be traced at least as far back as the eighteenth century. It was then that large numbers of ruin-gazers, Goethe among them, travelled to the Italian peninsula to admire the remains of ancient Rome, often by moonlight, deriving solace from the sight of once-grand palaces and theatres now covered in weeds and sheltering wolves and wild dogs. The Germans, always a proficient people in the coining of compound words, invented the term Ruinenlust to describe this new passion. It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth. It stands to reason, therefore, that a visitor to the United States, this most technologically developed of all modern societies, should take a particular interest in the flipside of the nation’s progress. The disintegrating Continental Airlines 747 visible outside of your window seems the equivalent, for myself, of what the Colosseum in Rome must have been for the young Edward Gibbon.”

There was a silence as my companion took in the eloquence, cultural range, and sheer profundity of what I had just said…. But the man was evidently disinclined by nature to pay extravagant compliments, for when he finally spoke, it was to say “Fuck off” again with a resolve which his previous riposte had perhaps lacked – to which sentiment he then added, lest there remain any ambiguity, “Get the hell out of here before I shoot you in the ass.”

Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (q.v.), p. 312:

I went back to the car for a drive around Mojave. However, like many small towns in the American west, it seemed not to have a centre where citizens could gather for fellowship, javelin contests and philosophical debate, as they had done, according to most historical accounts, in Athens in the age of Pericles. There was not even a Wal-Mart.

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 →]

(UPDATED) 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!”).