Via the “March and April 2007” Punk Planet, which curiously failed to publish my letter complaining that they use multiple f-ligatures in Mrs Eaves but cannot spell words right even on the cover, comes an interview by invert writer T Cooper (sic) with Crazy-L, a young white Detroit rap artiste who is not Eminem in two ways: He isn’t rich and famous and he’s got muscular dystrophy, scoliosis, and a brain injury. (If only he were also a black lesbian! Then he could be invited to speak at tech conferences.)

“And he was literally dragging himself around this smoky, half-empty club in the wee hours of the night, trying to convince [un]interested and jaded-looking hip-hop [fans] to drop a measly five-note on his CD.” Also, his “friend” fucked him over by “losing” all the tracks for what should have been his latest album.

Now, obviously somebody like this is going to have an ugly monstrosity of a MySpace page, the genre of which, no matter how Ze Frank and Patric(k) King dress it up, shall never be considered in good taste at any time between now and when the sun goes nova.

But hey! Somebody hire Crazy-L for a sit-down job so he can ply his wares without wearing out his wares.

As implied in a corrected post in June 2006, the AIGA is an Unfailed Redesign, as we officially learn today. Design sites sometimes do do Web standards.

Since I’ve already been assailed as someone who preaches to the converted, chiefly at technology conferences, and since I have exactly one more of those scheduled, take the following as expert advice. I grow weary of the biannual call for more wymmynz speakers at technology conferences. This demand is presented under the guise of “diversity,” but that is a lie, one that even its proponents do not understand they are telling.

If you want diversity, then you want a diverse range of speakers at conferences. If you want 50% women (or, if proponents were more honest, 50%+1 to 100% women), then you aren’t interested in diversity. You’re interested in quotas and vengeance.

Nobody seems to be too concerned with the actual quality of the delivered speech. I have no available biological or neurological evidence that would explain why I am a better speaker than every single woman I have ever watched at a technology conference. Yes, every single one, and yes, I really am saying that. Your opinion may vary, and that’s fine; this is my site and I don’t have to articulate your opinion. But if you agree with me and are keen on dismissing the foregoing as an artifact of experience accrued through endemic sexism (“You’ve had lots of speaking engagements purely because you’re a boy”), keep in mind that I was a better speaker on my first outing. I’m a good speaker because I have talent. That’s why they hire me. It certainly isn’t because I speak on mainstream topics and am a dream to work with. I don’t and I’m not.

Beware unintended results

Knock me out of a lineup of a conference because I’m a boy and suddenly the number of out gay speakers drops to zero. (And nobody wants to talk about that – ever. Tech conferences have a don’t-ask/don’t-tell mentality.) Still committed to diversity?

If you take Anil Dash’s advice to heart and knock him out of a conference lineup because he’s a boy, suddenly the number of Indic bipolarist speakers drops to zero. Still committed?

A speaker lineup can be “diverse” even if it has zero women speakers. Or zero men. Sex is not the only criterion of evaluation even if some women, and one scrawny nerd, think it is.

There are actually surprisingly few male speakers, even A-list speakers on the circuit, who are not minorities in some way. Pretty much everybody but Derek is.

On the question of disabled presenters talking about Web accessibility: Nearly everyone working in the field has no disability or has a disability unrelated to actual Web accessibility. (Really, most disabled people just want to surf the Web, you know?) To use the classic example of blind people, I can count on one hand the number working in the field. Two of them are semi- or completely retired and all but one are guys.

If you want to hire a wheelchair user as a speaker, well, have you set up your stage, podium, and microphone to accommodate someone at that height? (There were three people in wheelchairs in the audience at Web Directions. But they were all guys, so they’re out of the running.) There are almost no deaf people with an observable interest in Web standards and accessibility, but do you really want to pay for interpreters for such speakers? (They’ll need a team of interpreters, at $70 to $120 an hour each, for the entire duration of a conference. Or they may need real-time captioning. Or both.) Still committed to diversity? The accessibility topic is a classic example of hiring people for what they know rather than what they are.

If you want diversity, then you should be agitating for equality of opportunity, not outcome. If you want a good conference, you should be agitating for good speakers, a lot of whom are men. If you don’t want either of those things, then here’s something else you don’t actually want: Diversity. Sorry if I have to be the one to break it to you.

And obviously I’m saying all this solely because I’m a male, which further means I am in the wrong.

I have here the letter from Gary Webster of the TTC to Doors Open concerning its “participation” in the 2007 event. The only thing we are promised is that “the TTC will prepare Bay Lower for public tours on Saturday, May 26 from noon to 3:00 PM.” In the next paragraph, we are reminded of the TTC’s $8.50 day pass, implying that one will need to pay to get into the subway just to tour this disused station.

Obviously none of this is sufficient.

• There will be an avalanche of interest in Bay Lower. Three hours aren’t gonna cut it. Remember, everyone travelling east or west last weekend or during the next five weekends will have glimpsed the station through closed doors. We started out with a large number of transit fans interested in the station; now everybody who takes the train during six weekends knows it exists. And we want in.

• A three-hour tour window insults even the previous transit-fan base, whom the TTC has spent decades ignoring. After Transit Camp, I thought the TTC knew better than to ignore its most ardent fans. Don’t make us line up for hours (on what could be a hot day) only to tell us at some arbitrary cutoff point like 2:30 that nobody else is getting in. Forty years of disuse cannot be rectified by three hours of public access.

• Of course the station needs to be upgraded slightly for safety. But once you do that, you can run tours all afternoon on both days of Doors Open.

• Don’t charge admission of any kind. It is trivial to set up a line for Bay Lower tours that is separate from the entrance to Bay station.

• Webster’s letter lists 18 TV commercials that were filmed at Bay Lower (of little interest) and 32 movies:

  1. Bait
  2. Bless the Child
  3. Broken
  4. Bulletproof Monk
  5. Caveman’s Valentine
  6. Claire’s Hat
  7. Cletis Tout
  8. Colony, The
  9. Darkman
  10. Don’t Say a Word
  11. Extreme Measures
  12. Hades Factor, The
  13. Hate
  14. Honey
  15. Johnny Mnemonic
  16. Judgement
  17. Last Night
  18. Loser
  19. Mimic
  20. New York Minute
  21. Paper, Scissors, Stone
  22. Quints
  23. Recruit, The
  24. Republic of Love
  25. Runaway
  26. 16 Blocks
  27. Take the Lead
  28. Thoughtcrimes
  29. ’Til Death
  30. Undercover Brother
  31. Walter & Henry
  32. You Stupid Man

  How many of those have you seen or even heard of? How many have Toronto standing in for New York or for an unnamed city? How many are actual Canadian movies? (By my count, three.)

Let’s not blow this, please.

…for the TTC to make its signage during the subway diversion even worse. Not only do we have enormous wordy signs on every column, all cunningly Typeset in faux-Helvetica with random Capitals, a day after the diversion began we now have that TTC favourite, the shitty laser-printed sign (in Times all-caps) that gets ripped to shreds.

Except we’ve got three of them on each of several pillars.

And did you know they’re still informing people which train to get on by bullhorn? I actually asked the most reasonable-looking “supervisor” present (the only woman) if they’d even considered deaf people. She had – that morning. But that’s pretty much it. (The bullhorn announcements were completely incomprehensible on day two.)

You understand there is a perfectly viable low-tech way to solve this problem, right?

And did you know they intend to leave all those signs up on the columns for the full six weeks, even during weekdays when the diversion isn’t happening?

It’s like Christmas in February for transit fans in Toronto. The TTC’s subway is so old and decaying they have to shut down an entire station for up to six weekends just to fix it. And they have to divert an entire line onto the first station of another line south of the first line, where you must exit the train and get on another train to continue in your original direction. It’s almost as Byzantine as the New York MTA! Doesn’t that make us world-class?

But the really fun part is that, riding westbound, your train runs through the sepulchral, mythic Bay Lower (“Lower Bay”) station, unused since 1967 except for movie shoots. Last night we parked there for several minutes, enabling extensive digicamatio (better).

I looked at it and I thought – let me be honest here – “Fucking decrepit piece of shit.”

Then we emerged at Museum station (consistenly mispronounced by the foreign-born conductor to sound like Union, which audibly confused many people in my car) and lo and behold, more shitty TTC signage, plus a guy with a megaphone on the other side telling you where the train that just came into the station is going. Tell me: If I’m deaf, how do I get on the right train? I have a one-in-three chance if I guess.

Lower Bay has been the subject of infiltration and may be a destination during Doors Open 2007; if so, I am totally going.

Logo Cities is a proposed conference in Montreal (perverse orthography: Montréal) “addressing signage, branding and lettering in public space, with a particular focus on the city of Montréal [perverse orthography sic].” And of course Blackett is in there alreay trying to own the turf for the Spacers. Maybe he’ll give a presentation about how Toronto’s entire identity revolves around little acorns on old streetsigns.

What I asked Matt Soar in an E-mail, to which he has refused to respond, was this: You aren’t planning on doing something so rash as to charge speakers to attend, are you? Because, I add now, only total arseholes do that. And, I mean, Matt Soar has written for Eye, so we know he isn’t that.