I’m not sure, but according to his agent, it’s something I can’t (emphasis added):

Interesting subject – we represent Cory Doctorow and so are deeply involved in this situation – but you don’t have the platform to get away with writing a book about this issue. You’d need publication credits and degrees.

To match Cory’s credits and degrees, I suppose. (A diploma from SEED would come in so handy right now. And if only I’d dropped out of four colleges instead of graduating from two!)

Here’s to you, Russell Galen of Scovil Galen Ghosh.

Canada and the United States are two separate countries. How do I know? We can’t even call our cars the same things even when the names are no different. Camaro? Miata? Solara? Nissan? Denali? What’s the vowel in there?

It’s an [æ] vs. [ɑː] distinction: Americans love to say pahsta instead of pæsta, and Canadians the converse. (Celica is another case, but there it’s a matter of stress: Sellica in American and Seleeca in Canadian.)

150 or 200 years ago, I interviewed for a job at a graphic-design/marketing agency. For some godawful reason, it was called Karo. Obviously in Canadian that’s pronounced like kerro. They insisted on a poncy British or lower-class American pronunciation, Kaaaro. The receptionist struggled all day to pronounce it that way.

They didn’t believe me when I told them there was even a discrepancy and it was bound to hurt their business, so I had the CEO read a few sample sentences out loud. Here’s an updated list.

1. The highlight of any Halloween is surely raking in a huge haul of Kraft caramel squares.
2. You can make your own pasta sauce at home, but it’s expensive.
3. Toronto would not have become some kind of nirvana if we’d won the Olympic bid.
4. Twenty years ago, who would have envisioned Steve Martin acting in a drama instead of a comedy?
5. The Bloor Viaduct offers quite the panorama of the Don Valley.
6. I whittled down my choices to a Mazda 626 or a Nissan Maxima. Of course, my brother says I should just buy a Camaro.
7. My sister’s name is Sandra, but she goes by Sandy.
8. I don’t want to sound like a Cassandra here, but global warming could just take out Tonga completely.
9. Two Vancouver mathematicians came up with a new algorithm for calculating π.
10. Coconuts and avocados are almost the only fruits containing saturated fats.
11. It was fun-o-rama at Caribana this year – now 15 years shooting-free!
12. This isn’t an office. It’s more like an alcove.
13. The White Cliffs of Dover look more like the Talcum Cliffs of Dover to me
14. I remember the halcyon days when you could have steak for lunch and nobody batted an eye.
15. The gala opening of the film festival is something I always manage to miss.
16. Put that out on the balcony to dry.
17. The hijacker pulled out a knife while the aircraft was airborne over Colorado. But unbeknownst to him, the first officer was a black belt in karate. The plane later landed in Nevada.
18. You try to order a custom burrito there and they get all Soup Nazi on your ass.
19. I asked for a burrito, not a taco.
20. My mom had a lava lamp – and she wasn’t even ironic.
21. Ben Kingsley playing Gandhi is like Keanu Reeves playing Buddha.
22. The line between bravado and swaggering is razor-thin.
23. I suppose I could have worked on my paper or something, but I had my eyes glued to the falcon-nest Webcam.
24. Java, whether as coffee or programming language, is a bitter elixir to swallow.
25. George Lucas is about the only person on earth who ever actually wanted to see Jabba the Hutt in another movie.

Others? Casablanca, balaclava, baklava, Jan Sibelius, Farrakhan, naan (overregularization error for Canadians – it’s never [næn]), falcon, Galloway, divan.

I promise you most Canadian speakers use [æ] in the relevant word in that list, while most Americans use [ɑː]. (Americans will, additionally, know the word Karo from a brand of corn syrup.)

What happened to Karo? I guess they went tits-up in Toronto, but they still have offices in Calgary and Vancouver. They completely shafted Paul Arthur while he was alive, incidentally, and would have shafted me, too. Karo wanted to start up a company-naming practice, but, exhibiting typical incompetence, couldn’t come up with a name for it. I had one in 30 seconds: Nominé. And they still didn’t hire me.

Some other time, ask me about Gottschalk “+” Ash. What are the vowels there, and how is a metrosexual involved?

I rode by the guardhouse on the Beach trail and saw a busty girl, dressed in a bikini and cape, slouching against the wall in that pre-runway downtime before a photo shoot. “Nice look,” I muttered. Then I thought this was too good to pass up, and circled back.

Down the path, two guys were seated on a lakeview bench, one of them holding a few sheets of paper. It took a short distance to realize the other guy was Mr. HUGH DILLON. Though his bald head was covered in a cable-knit toque, his pale blue eyes were so arresting they stopped me, as my wet brake pads announced. I circled back.

“You’re Hugh Dillon,” I told him. I think he grunted. “I watch all your movies.”

“Oh. Thank you.”

“I was surprised when you married a woman.” The other guy twitched his papers.

“What’s that mean?”

“It means I was surprised when you married a woman,” I replied, riding off.

There are only three of us who believe this, but that just means the rest of you are ignorant or wrong. I tell people that all the time.

Anyway, Pentagram designer/contributor to doomed blog/author/Helvetica scene-stealer Michael Bierut obsesses constantly over writing articles and postings when, all the while, what he needed is his own podcast. He is, after all, a raconteur.

So I am doing what I can to force his hand in the matter. This has all the effect of a neutrino whizzing through Rick Poynor’s Oystercard, but no matter. I’ve collected a few links to podcasts and other online videos where you can hear Bierut yourself (assuming you can hear – not always a fair assumption with my readership). All links open at iTunes.

1. Typeradio: First, second

2. Walker Art Center

3. AIGA Command X competition (delicious!)

4. Studio 360

5. Design Matters (warning: prolonged exposure to Debbie Millman’s voice)

What happens when you ask an agency if they’re looking at new proposals, then actually send one: Nothing.

Then, when you follow up, some underling top-posts the following:

Actually, your proposal was not attached to any of your previous E-mails in our correspondence, so we never did receive the attachment, my apologies if you had been waiting for an answer.

I.e., we’re too stupid to find an attachment or too stupid to ask you to send it again. But hey, other writers got in under the wire:

At this point, given that our proverbial plate is currently full, I’m afraid to say we have to rule ourselves off the court as agents for your book. We wish you the best of luck in finding representation for your work.

Right back atcha, Robbins Office. You’re a great match for the 21st century.

UPDATE (2009.06.18): It’s just as bad as predicted.

Leaked screenshots show that iPhone OS 3.0 will include Arabic and Hebrew.

(Note the errant left-alignment of the two language names there. No, you can’t fudge it even in an otherwise-left-aligned list; it’s just wrong. The easiest fix is to switch to centred type.)

Right-to-left text direction is always, repeat, always more complicated than people think even when people walk into the job knowing it’s complicated. That’s how deep the left-to-right biases are among software and UI developers.

Think of all the directions that need to be changed on an iPhone or iTouch:

1. You’ll slide “backwards” to unlock (and for other uses).

   

2. Lines of menu items have to fill from the right, not the left.

   

   Additional screens of menu items must grow to the left. (Swipe right for the next screen.) Bright dots at bottom would be reversed.

   

3. Menus and submenus must grow to the left. Thumbnails go on the other side.

   

4. Going back a level will happen rightward, not leftward.

   

5. Coverflow grows from the right, not the left (not visible in static screenshot).

   

6. Even in unproblematic all-centred typography, as in song lyrics, the surrounding UI has to point the other way. Play points left, status-bar order is backwards, the zero point on a timeline is at far right, and fast-forward and rewind take on different meanings.

   

   This last is a perpetual problem in Unicode, where it is confusing to learn that < cannot always mean “less than.” It means that when reading left to right, but means the opposite in the other direction. Compare A<X and א<ש. That’s the same character between the letters in both cases (really).

   (Smart podcasters use the Lyrics field as a duplicate for podcast description to overcome the bug, still present in iPhone OS 2.0, that podcast descriptions just are not displayed.)

7. Toggle switches appear to have directionality, though in practice all you do is touch them, not drag them. Nonetheless, the apparent directionality must reverse.

   

8. Swipe-to-delete goes LTR, not RTL. Thumbnail has to swap edges, and order of metadata (minutes left, etc.) must reverse.

   

Since Thomas Milo, in various video podcasts (look him up on iTunes), has explained that the worst Arabic typography in the history of that script is the kind that computers have stuck us with, there would seem to be significant room for fiasco. Just getting decent Arabic- and Hebrew-script fonts onto these machines is gonna be tricky. (And you need more characters than are sufficient just for the Arabic language.)

Typographically, at least, things could be worse: Did you know that, according to an expert I talked to, Hebrew Windows users prefer the most atrocious old fonts, like scrunched Hebrew Tahoma, over the nice new well-designed faces?

When you can prove I’m incorrect on anything, even to a tolerance of a tenth of a yard, then people might begin to find you credible. (It’s the only standard of comparison.) Another option is just to make fewer mistakes.

Meanwhile, how’s your amateur movie coming along? Do send me a copy.