The only object of interest in the abomination known as Blade Runner 2049 is K’s resolutely antitechnological shearling-collared overcoat. (It’s all non-leather.)

K’s coat isn’t merely “cool” but tactile. Technology will collapse distance and even time, but the gap between you and your clothing was uncollapsible yea unto the Middle Ages and will stay that way. It is a calculus exercise in determining just how close to zero is the distance between your skin and your clothing. Pace W. Gibson, there will always be bicycle couriers in a technological future, because somebody will always need a birthday cake or an Academy Award pedalled across town. Your neck will always need a collar, and you will need to feel it.

As with Bane’s overcoat, which, after the manner of Alkali, Iowa, I misremembered as sitting over Tom Hardy’s shirtless torso, K’s overcoat continues a pattern of rebuke of THX 1138 jumpsuits and Star Trek pocketless raglan velour. It’s always overcoats doing the rebuking.

(Gallery; but cf. Chris Evans’ eyes.)

I don’t go whining to Black Lives Matter when somebody calls me a faggot on the subway. Yet here we have BLM, operating as its wholly-owned subsidiary Pride Toronto, presenting us with a hideous Squarespace-templated Web site unwisely named UntilWereSafe. (“Were”?)

It’s all about nonwhites, and only passingly about gays and lesbians.

• There has been a clear increase in hate crimes and other assaults against our community

  Yeah – mostly against Jews (66 out of 186 reports in 2017, up from 43/145 in 2016).

• – particularly those that are racialized.

  Not really.

  • Classing Muslims as “racialized” for the moment, Black (33), Muslim (33), Pakistani (4), Chinese (4), “Brown Skinned” (3) and Somali (1) amount to 78/186. All told, that’s up from 59/145 in 2016 (a year with many more subcategories).

  • White and Canadian amount to 6 in 2017 (2 White in 2016).

  • None of these numbers are huge, and the year-to-year variance since 2008 covers 52 percentage points.

  • So yes, numbers are up grossly. But in a decade, the biggest city in Canada still has yet to break 200 reported “hate crimes.” And none of those were real hate crimes requiring signoff from the attorney general.

• There has been a long history of violence targeted at the LGBTQ2S+ community. Whether interpersonal, opportunistic or systemic hate crime, it’s clear the problem is growing.

  Nope: “LGBTQ” went down by two occurrences.

  But the creators here aren’t really concerned about gays and lesbians – just vizmins. They aren’t interested in documenting violence; they want to portray Toronto as a cesspool of racism, of which transphobia and homophobia (in that order) are mere subsets.

I went through the entire site (by downloading it and paging through its source code, skills you don’t need to be White to have) and categorized its subjects’ claims. I corrected most of the endemic copy errors. [continue with: Until Were Safe (sic) →]

Transgenders lie about gay and lesbian history. (Link added.)

[I]f the ACT UP/AIDS activism of the 1980s/early ’90s hadn’t been so meticulously documented, we would now be hearing how it was trans people who were solely responsible for that as well. Fortunately, there is way too much video/photo documentation for them to make such an outrageous claim. But if there weren’t, you can best believe they would be trying to change the historical record about that, as they’re trying to do with Stonewall.

Canadian Press editor James McCarten put out a call for additions to its periodically-issued reference book CP Caps and Spelling. McCarten put that call out on the medium where all Canadian journalists spend the majority of their time, Twitter.

Eventually I got McCarten’s attention, though all he did was tone-police. Disregarding all that (and McCarten), I assembled a list of over a hundred (not “a 100”; not “100”) neologisms that could be added to CP Caps and Spelling. The intent is to redress hacks’ left-wing bias and their unwillingness to admit the Internet is real despite their spending all day online.

(As a point of comparison, searching the Canadian Business & Current affairs database shows that Canadian Press–bylined or –implicated articles use anti-fascist 20 times more often than antifa. That’s evidence of bias.)

Gays Going Their Own Way or GGTOW (“gigtau”) is a new, and rather small, movement that puts gay males first, feminism last. Its chief proponent is Prince of Queens (q.v.); discussion about it seems to exists on YouTube and almost nowhere else. A lot of that discussion seems to be a reiteration of GGTOW’s rules.

The three rules of GGTOW

1. It is composed of gay men exclusively.

2. It aims to do things that exclusively benefit gay men.

3. Anyone who seeks to change either or both of the previous rules is diametrically opposed to GGTOW (and will be ejected from any such group).

A good start, but there’s no there there as yet. Further, the GGTOW Tumblère is the work of an enemy provocateur.

Pace Isaac Asimov, we could say that certain homosexualists or environments are “three-laws-safe.”

(Update [2018.07.29]: On Gaytriarchy Nº 21, Prince of Queens stated: “GGTOW is not a way of life. It is a reminder of who will stick up for you.”)

When those Kanadski bobsledders were wheeled into town last year, most were baffled, or were sad sacks, or were visibly hostile. Indeed there is no SURLY in “team,” except on this one, apparently.

Yet Mr. ALEX KOPACZ, a sky-high Polski-Kanadski engineer who speaks passable German, answered my questions and was kind and outgoing. He and Justin Kripps would tie for gold at the Olympics. (We keep doing that.)

Alex, Justin, and the Germans are now brothers forever, says Alex, who was later awarded his team ring. Not his only such item of jewelry, I had noted.

We didn’t have the usual reception at City Hall for Olympic and Paralympic athletes, hence I was unable to walk right up, shake his hand again, and say “I think you’re going to have a nice life, Alex. You already are.” (Nor was I able to turn slightly and say “And I’m proud of you, too, Justin, whether you like it or not.)

I think Mr. KOPACZ is really swell.

I previously established that conservatives cannot design, save for outlier cases. You should have believed me.

But when I tell you I’ve never seen anything like the following in my entire life, now you should really believe me. [continue with: Worst conservative design →]