“Remix culture” is about learning on the job and publishing every mistake you make. I recommend learning from the masters.

1. U2, “Desire (Hollywood Remix)”    (1988)

   • Sampled newscasts, later resampled and distorted (matches the of-era anti-Bush music video): “In Hollywood tonight—” “ ‘Voodoo’ economics—”
   • Loop of chorale and tambourine make soul danceable

2. Coldplay (MORRISSEY: “Oldplay”), “Talk (Thin White Duke Remix)”    (2006)

   • Sampled Speak & Spell
   • Theme crescendoes, crashes as “vinyl” grinds to a stop, resumes full bore as needle drops
   • Vocal stanzas spaced out and given breathing room; by comparision, the original song runs too fast
   • Here, and only here, does the voice of Chris Martin actually work. He desperately needs to sing on other dance albums (Cf. lugubrious “Where Is My Boy?”)

3. Lady Gaga, “Poker Face [‘Poker F♠ce’] (Space Cowboy Remix)”    (2009)

   Stunner. Lyrically originating from an actual premise (it isn’t about love), “Poker F♠ce” recapitulates the last 30 years of dance music:

   • “Sireens”
   • Sudden collapse of the whole song as a shotgun cocks and fires
   • Eurythmicsesque scales
   • Sweet-, clear-voiced Aughties chanteuse solo
   • Trance segments with deep-house backing vocals
   • Actual rap segment

These songs were all remixed with the foreknowledge and consent of the creators and everybody got paid. Compared to these, Danger Mouse and Girl Talk offer you… what? A way to stick it to the man?

I decided to start a happy, fun, positive, constructive, up-with-people kind of project. Strictly short-term, of course, since I can’t keep that business up very long.

Here, then, is TPLFans, the new blog for fans of the Toronto Public Library. (Yes.) It might last into the summer or it might not.

Surely this will turn out to be a tad more popular than the last microcommunity I launched, Gays for Adam Carolla. I guess that shouldn’t have been plural.

It seems Google is trying to do to online caption quality what it did to online video quality. If you don’t know what I mean, let me put it to you this way: I’ve got second-generation VHS tapes here that look better than YouTube. Now what does this have to do with captioning?

There’s a proposal floating around for yet another captioning/subtitling file format. This one has three strikes against it – it comes from Google; it’s linked to the ill-named, non-starter video format, Ogg, that nobody wants; and it is, furthermore, linked to HTML5.

I already mailed in my complaints, which have of course been ignored, but for the record:

1. This seems to be yet another way to get closed captioning to function online. How’s that been working out? Compared to, say, TV? Or even something brand-new like Blu-ray?

2. The proposal itself can’t get captioning and subtitling straight.

3. The proposal assumes a transcript is a caption. It assumes nobody would want to include a real transcript with a video, as via RSS for a video podcast.

4. It confuses “accessible”: Does it mean “available,” “easy to turn on and off,” or “remedying a barrier faced by a disabled person”? I expect it does not mean accessible to people with disabilities other than impaired hearing. (Quick: Turn YouTube captions on using Jaws.)

5. It assumes JavaScript is the only possible way to “[l]ist, add, delete, and create caption tracks.”

6. It actually allows authors to create “caption” or “subtitle” tracks that do not tell the world which of those they are and what language they’re in. No guessing and no nonsense heuristics here, please. (This is the Google mistake all over again – we don’t need semantic coding because we just run our bull through the china shop of your content.)

   Then they make matters worse by just playing whatever happens to be the first “caption” or “subtitle” track if such are not identified properly. Since we’d already be allowing people not to declare the type of title track and the language, you are exposing users to being given e.g. French subtitles when they’re deaf and want English captions just because French subtitles came first.

7. It’s missing a a Format field for e.g. pop-on, scrollup, paint-on, overlay, several kinds of karaoke.

8. No awareness, at all, that simultaneous captions and subtitles are even possible, let alone necessary.

9. No way to handle sign language.

10. No backward-compatible predefined primitives for every caption format now in existence. For example, CC1 through CC4 and Text1 through Text4 from Line 21, and all the DVD subtitle and caption designations.

11. Reuses an element that already exists, caption, for something else. It’s already used for tables. title is also already used but is threatened with reuse here. An alternative like captitle or subcaption might work.

    Don’t dick around with this: Browsers expect captions to be tied to tables and also expect one title per page. Meanwhile, a two-hour movie has 1,200 to 1,500 units in each caption or subtitle track. That means a typical Canadian DVD has up to 6,000 titles of one kind or anohter. When translated to the Web, do you really want a browser to make the same rendering mistake 6,000 times on a single page?

12. Captions are block-level elements and do not “count as <span class="caption"></span>.”

13. In one’s “context menu,” one sees only lists of available captions, not subtitles.

And are these “captions” and “subtitles” all going to be 20-character-wide centred blocks of white Helvetica on black? Because that works fine for everybody, right?

Let me reserve a particularly harsh criticism for last: Captions would be indicated “[p]referably by a button on the UI with either ‘CC’ or a double underscore (preferred).” This is the kind of atrocious iconography we associate with a billion-dollar corporation that employs exactly one visual designer. (What do we use in French? In Tibetan?) Besides, we’ve been through this already.

I’d be nicer to these beginners if they weren’t working for the biggest company on the Web. I expect rather more competence. Now let’s see if they try to push their bullshit straight through just because they don’t like my attitude. It’s happened before.

Or so I suspect.

The Ontario Realty Corp., which, despite its grand name, manages only provincial-government buildings, sent out a questionnaire recently about accessible signage in buildings. Apparently they’re trying to research some kind of standard for same.

My suspicions were immediately raised by the fact that the whole process was being done in secret. It seems obvious to me that only incumbent organizations like the CNIB were being canvassed. CNIB wouldn’t be the only one, of course, but they would be the organization viewed with the most credibility on issues of blindness – about which they have exactly none when it comes to accessibility of signage. The entire “Ckear Print” fiasco barely scratches the surface of it; I have an entire folder of documentation on how the CNIB and GO Transit bungled GO’s new signage standard, for example.

So here’s what I think is going to happen: These incumbent organizations will pretend there isn’t enough research on the topic, ignore the findings of whatever research they did manage to dig up, and issue counterfactual and baseless advice for this upcoming “standard.” By coïncidence, the advice will be to use whatever fonts come free with Windows NT – and only fonts that appear high up in an alphabetized Font menu. That means Arial.

There’ll be lots of Braille, too, despite the fact that Braille-and-raised-letter wall signage is completely useless to blind and low-vision people. (Blind people don’t know the sign exists; low-vision people can barely spot the smudge on the wall. Braille-and-raised wall signage exists to make sighted people, who can walk right over to it and rub their fingers across it, feel good about doing something for blind people.) [continue with: Accessible signage: A boondoggle in the making →]

This book by humoristrix (“conservative columnist”) Kathleen Parker has a somewhat half-assed cover design (using stock photography, no less), but it had me crying with suppressed laughter for the first 60 pages. Then she started talking about sexual assault, sending men off to war, and other deadly serious topics.

There are a couple of oddball copy-editing errors, such as the sentence that begins “Not only that, tasking attentively stimulates the female pleasure cent[re]s, hence 42 of the National Organization for Women.” The answer to life, the universe, and gender equality? (There’s another flub like that on p. 180.)

• En tout cas, what was wrong with Take Our Daughters to Work Day?

  We browbeat our kids about the importance of sharing and being nice, then one day the gender fairy flits into their lives and sprinkles cootie dust on all things male…. Getting out of school for a day… is otherwise known as playing hooky – while staying behind with a female teacher, most likely a feminist herself, to have his brain chip tuned must be a little boy’s idea of hell. I know it is mine.

• Parker dared to volunteer as a Cub Scout leader, “which mysteriously seems to have prompted my son’s decision to abandon Scouting forever.”

  My co-Akela (Cub Scout for Wolf Leader) was Dr. Judy Sullivan – friend, fellow mother, and clinical psychologist. Imagine the boys’ excitement when they learned who would be leading them in guy pursuits: A reporter and a shrink – two intense, overachieving helicopter mothers of only boys. Shouldn’t there be a law against this? […] [T]rust me when I say that seven-year-old boys are not interested in making lanterns from coffee tins.

  Old Saturday Night Live commercial for Homocil: Apron-wearing boy triumphantly bursts into sitting room and exclaims “Who wants crème brûlée?”

  They want to shoot bows and arrows, preferably at one another, chop wood with stone-hewn axes, and sink canoes, preferably while in them.

  At the end of a school day, during which they have been steeped in estrogen and told how many “bad choices” they’ve made, boys are ready to make some really bad choices. They do not want to sit quietly and listen to yet more women speak soothingly of important things. Here’s how one memorable meeting began: “Boys, thank you for taking your seats and being quiet while we explain our Women’s History Month Project.” […]

  Akela Sullivan and I put our heads together, epiphanized in unison, and decided that we would recruit transients from the homeless shelter if necessary to give these boys what they wanted and needed – men. As luck would have it, a Cub Scout’s father was semi-retired or between jobs or something – we didn’t ask – and could attend the meetings. He didn’t have to do a thing. He just had to be there and respire testosterone vapo[u]rs into the atmosphere…. I suspect they would have found coffee tins brilliantly useful as lanterns if he had suggested as much.

• And did you know Jodie Foster was a single mom? Well, that can’t be right, can it, Parker asks – isn’t it “[m]om, dad, baby”? “Foster became one more imprimatur stamped on single motherhood by choice while the message was clear: Single moms aren’t just good. They’re glam!”

  But this one was never actually single, having lived with her lesbian partner for a decade and a half. (They’ve been photographed together, and the partner, a civilian, has been photographed with one of the children.) Please, Kathleen: If your book dissects how the Culture lies to us about men’s and women’s true natures, don’t lie to us about a married lesbian with a couple of kids.

Can somebody tell me how a book entitled Detail in Typography uses (c) instead of a copyright symbol twice in its own front matter, recommends using an x instead of a multiplication symbol, uses parens inside parens (instead of brackets inside parens [or vice-versa]), calls I “lowercase,” and preserves Germanicisms like “photo- and crt-composition”?

If, as the back cover claims (complete with echo), “[a]n attractive, interesting layout can certainly attract and please the reader,” shouldn’t mistakes like these repel and sour the reader? They did so here.

And if the author of the book is listed as Jost Hochuli, how am I expected to pronounce that? Sort of like Vox Populi?

Was dead crypto-fascist Austrian Jörg Haider also homosexualist? Well, no. Like Cary Grant, he was married to a woman. But whose company did he fancy? An absolutely delicious piece by Ilya Marritz offers clues.

“Newspapers didn’t want to say ‘gay’ bar. More like ‘scene’ bar or ‘trendy’ bar…. There was this homophobic tone…. You know, ‘Should a governor do something like that?’  ” […]

Like former New Jersey governor James McGreevey, Haider relied on hetero bonafides… to deflect inconvenient questions. Like why Haider’s closest aides (Stefan Petzner was merely the latest) seemed always to have a Y chromosome and be height-weight proportional. […]

In 1994, Haider made Karl-Heinz Grasser, a 25-year-old with dimples like David Duchovny’s, deputy governor of Carinthia. “He had no qualifications whatsoever,” Krickler says. “Everybody was wondering about it.” […] Then there was Franz Koloini, “der schöne Franz” (“handsome Franz”), the waiter who became Haider’s personal secretary at age 22. […]

What about Petzner, at 27? Was he the One?

Einicher flattens his palms and holds them perhaps 10 inches apart. “That’s what he liked about Petzner,” Einicher says.