TK is a publishing term that means “to come.” You drop it in when you’re in mid-ramble and have to look something up later. You always capitalize it (otherwise it gets mixed in with uncommon strings like Kottke) and you never publish anything that contains TK in its usual sense. (As with other publishing terms, like hed, dek, and lede, the misspelling makes it possible to search for those terms or even have them located automatically. They won’t spontaneously appear in copy unless said copy discusses such usage, as I am doing here.)

Überdyke Alison Bechdel wrote a cartoon feature for Entertainment Weekly, “Life Drawing,” in the June 27–July 4 issue. (It’s billed as an exclusive, but it seems to be from an upcoming book.)

What’s printed in the gutter?

PHOTOGRAPH BY PHOTOGRAPHER NAME (several times) and GUTTER CREDITS TKHERE (several times).

Elaborate joke or spectacular production failure? (Inquiries to the magazine and Time Inc. went unanswered.)

Bruce LaBruce’s forthcoming porno, Otto, or: Up with Dead People, promises new forms of transgression. Just what we expect! But what I didn’t expect was the stunning iconography of the movie’s still photos, depicting a handsome, grey-faced, affectless zombie, dressed in high-fashion hoodies and hiding in plain sight amid flowers and shrubbery.

The Facebook invitation to a Toronto launch party–cum-screening for Otto includes a photo gallery. I was looking forward to seeing even more pictures, since the whole campaign is superb. But dead centre in the gallery I saw a thumbnail of our hoodied zombie and thought exactly the following: “Is he holding what I think he’s holding?” I made the mistake of enlarging the picture.

Yes, zombie Otto is standing there holding a dead bunny.

Here’s a proposition for you: Nobody has the right to use a dead animal in gay porn.

LaBruce explained the provenance of the bunny on his (unpermalinked) blog:

The art department has procured a huge dead rabbit for the scene in which Otto chows down on some roadkill. I feel guilty about the rabbit, so I ask if we can at least eat it at the end of the day – roadkill gourmet – but the art director informs me that it’s already been sitting out in the sun too long. Well, I tried….

The art director stuffs the gutted rabbit with cleaned pig intestines and sashimi tuna coated with strawberry sauce, which Otto has to eat. What next, waterboarding?

Indeed, what next?

I E-mailed LaBruce “on the Facebook” to find out if that really was a dead bunny. After he eventually figured out what I stated up front (that I was writing a blog post), he replied:

As I’ve talked about in a number of interviews already, the animal in question is a hare that we purchased at a farmer’s market in Berlin, where hares are eaten as commonly as foul. So the use of the hare is no different than using, say, a turkey in a Thanksgiving scene in a movie.

In fact, I wanted to see if we could eat the hare at the end of the day’s shoot, but the carcass was left out in the sun for too long and it was inebible.

I hope that answers your question.

Here’s another question: Can you show me the contract the hare signed in order to act in the picture? I thought porn was all about consenting adults. A dead bunny is neither.

Of course I don’t buy the argument that Germans eat hare so it was all right to kill that one. Nor that it would have been better to have eaten the thing after the shoot wrapped up. (It didn’t happen, so it didn’t improve things, either.) Nor that “a Thanksgiving scene in a movie” requires a dead turkey.

Do you buy the argument that it was OK to use a dead rabbit in a gay-porno video? Thought not.

The TTC has released its RFP for the six new subway stations that nobody but the corruption-addled City of Vaughan wants. (And, I grant you, York University.)

After inordinate effort, I have a copy of the RFP. Want me to write my typically hyperdetailed and ultra-trenchant dissection of same? Put some money into the kitty; I don’t do TTC work for free anymore.

It probably wouldn’t surprise you to learn that every architect in town has ordered these same documents, including an assured winner of one or two of the eventual contracts, Jack Diamond.

Want to write about movies during the Toronto International Film Festival? You can, but you won’t get paid. Your Orwellian title will be “volunteer blog reporter.”

The Toronto International Film Festival Group is seeking Volunteer Blog Reporters for the Toronto International Film Festival®. This volunteer position is an excellent opportunity for an emerging writer or arts journalist who would like to develop her/his craft. It is an opportunity to work on a daily blog for one of the world’s leading film festivals.

The Blog Reporter will attend screenings with a programmer, or if requested, will be sent to another screening to cover it. Other duties may include taking photos, shooting videos, and interviewing filmgoers and contributors.

“Preference will be given to candidates” with “[f]lexible schedule[s]” and a “[j]ournalism background.” By the way, you have to provide your own computer and camera.

The Toronto International Film Festival Group had revenues of $19,899,510 in 2007 ($150,151 in retained earnings). They’re building their own tower, with other funding agencies and a real-estate deal, in a prime location downtown.

TIFF’s expenses for marketing and communications in 2007 were $2,381,141. If these three positions ran for three weeks and paid a (paltry) annualized $30,000 per year exclusive of benefits, then the total cost to TIFF would be $5,192. If the “volunteer” jobs paid $100,000 a year, it would still cost the Festival only about 17 grand.

I asked Christopher McKinnon, manager of volunteer and intern respources, “On what basis must reporters be volunteers if they write for blogs, but not if, say, they write for the media-relations department? Are they really reporters then?”

McKinnon’s answer (inevitably top-posted) did him no favours:

I am not sure how to answer your question – I suspect it is rhetorical.

“It wasn’t,” I replied.

This is a volunteer position, recruited and hired through the volunteer programme [British English sic]. They are indeed reporters, as they work in the function of reporters. They are volunteers and hence unpaid, in terms of money, though there are substantial non-monetary benefits.

Thanks for your (sort of) inquiry.

So they’re volunteers because we aren’t paying them and reporters because they’re reporting. But think of the exposure!

The Toronto International Film Festival is merely the latest extravagantly wealthy media organization to use blogging as a means of exploitation and cheap labour. McKinnon can’t even see what’s wrong with it. Here’s a hint for him: You draw a salary, don’t you?

Somebody tell Russell Smith (admission: I’m a fan) that character encoding and spores growing on an 8-track are two different things.

I recently completed a book, printed it and gave the manuscript to my agent. To give it to a publisher, she wanted it in a digital version, so I gave her a Word file. When she opened it on her computer, it was full of garbage characters. There had been some problem in the document conversions among several programs.

I thought it was a Word file, not the Rosetta Stone.

I couldn’t fix it.

Because writers (especially fashionable ones) pride themselves on their technical incompetence. While Smith knows enough to rewrite a Wikipedia entry enough to avoid actual plagiarism, he has no conception of character encoding. Nor does he know enough to resave his original file in another format (RTF or Word-style “HTML” would be sufficient), or just print to a PDF. (He probably doesn’t know that every Macintosh application can print to PDF. It’s understandable – the “PDF” button sits there on every Print dialogue, easily missed.)

True to form if not stereotype, very sensitive, very artistique people are flummoxed when the slightest thing goes wrong with their computers, which, they have told themselves, are just too, too complicated to understand. Having enough knowledge to solve their own problems is beneath them. (Think of the undersocialized commoners who tinker with computers. Why, I run a fashion site! I’m hardly like them, now, am I?)

What’s curious is the fact that Smith didn’t bother searching Wikipedia for help.

Axel Peemöller, 2001–2006:

He’s getting all the attention this week. But wasn’t there a precedent? Panya Clark Espinal (no relation), Bayview station, 2002:

Statistics Canada publishes a regular series of disability statistics under the euphemism Participation and Activity Limitation Survey. The 2006 results were recently announced and they contain some shockers!

• The most common assistive technology that deaf and hard-of-hearing people do not have is a closed-caption decoder (72%). This strains credulity, as captioning has been built into TV sets for 15 years. Does this mean three-quarters of surveyed persons haven’t upgraded their TVs in a decade and a half? (I asked the StatsCan researcher: “It is possible that people have this feature but are unaware they have it and/or how to work it,” or might be older with no TV at all.)
• Sign language is not widely used in Canada, and of that usage, well more than two sign languages are used. The conventional wisdom is that, unlike the United States, Canada has two sign languages, ASL and LSQ, but that has been disproved now. The data are presented unintelligibly, but I extracted some clarifications:
  • 35,000 adults and 2,620 children use sign language (out of 1,266,120 adults and 20,020 children aged 5–14 reporting a hearing impairment).
  • 49.8% use ASL, 23.1% LSQ, and, interestingly, 27.1% use some other sign language – one from another country, homesigns (barely “language”), or gestures (not “language”).
• How many deaf people use interpreters? The numbers are reported almost unintelligibly. But about 16% of all deaf people use interpreters once a month and another 16% use them once a week to once a day.