I don’t totally understand the giant blob of a serif on the 2 in this inscription.

At the rather pleasant offices of Idée at the rather unpleasant Queen and Sherbourne.

…is the child restraint, that is, the car seat or infant carrier. The Freakonomics dude found that injury rates for kids in child restraints are indistinguishable from those of kids wearing adult seatbelts. That isn’t because child restraints don’t work; it’s because they are nearly impossible to use.

1. They require absolutely precise installation and tremendous tightening of slack in all available belts.
2. Now-mandatory lower LATCH anchors and top tethers are often so hard to reach that installing a seat even once is a trial, let alone moving it from one car to another.
3. Sometimes you have to use seatbelts to attach the child restraint, an inexact process made worse by early rear three-point belts, some of which require clips you have to get from a dealer.
4. Parents (in essence, moms) never want to cinch their babies tightly enough into the seats. It seems too tight. Plus, children have all the time in the world back there and eventually develop enough motor control to squirm out from under the belts (and that’s when you have the accident).

I know all this because I went to engineer school to work in automotive safety. I bailed after I got my diploma, and I still have the profound disability that I cannot drive a car.

Nonetheless, I thought this would be perfect for World Usability Day and Usability Camp. I told the organizeuse about it at BarCamp, and she later showed up for my Toronto Interacts presentation, where she proceeded to pitch me to MC the entire event. Funny how registration was later frozen and I wasn’t even allowed to attend. This was all too reminiscent of CopyCamp, which refused to let me in without even asking what I wanted to talk about. (Hint: It wasn’t either of the only issues CopyCamp organizers care about, music and P2P. It was an entirely new topic.) Usability Camp is another of those complete Toronto fuckups. Rather like Mesh, in fact.

The October 2006 Consumer Reports had a very amusing set of tests of high-end sports cars.

While they’re built for speed, the 911 and Z06 are civilized enough for everyday driving. Driving the Viper, however, can be punishing. […] The Viper SRT is the fastest car we’ve ever tested, with staggering power and grip, but its lack of creature comforts cost it dearly in our testes. […] The 2007 SL is the most expensive car Consumer Reports has ever tested, with a base price of $94,800. Options… brought the total to $105,855, about the cost of four years of college.

It was diverting to read the “Driving with Kids” section of each review.

Porsche 911 (and I have seen two 911s with child restraints in the back, obviously from divorced dads on custody days)

Porsche recommends using only Porsche-approved child seats in the 911…. [A]n occupant-sensing system will disable passenger airbags if it detects the weight of a child. A Porsche dealership can add LATCH anchors if needed.

Corvette Z06

Transporting kids in the front seat is not recommended….

Dodge Viper

Everything about the Viper is loud. The engine is booming even in leisurely cruising and roars under acceleration…. Interior refinement is not the Viper’s forte. The utilitarian cabin is simply a place for the driver to operate the vehicle and one wide-eyed passenger to hang on…. Cabin access is very tricky over the tall, wide doorsills that house the scalding-hot exhaust pipes…. [T]here is a key-operated cutoff switch for the passenger airbag.

Mercedes SL550

[T]he SL automatically disables the passenger airbag if children are seated there. There are no LATCH anchors for child seats in the SL.

BMW 650i

The rear seats are not conducive to getting child seats to fit securely using the safety belt…. [F]ront-facing seats will be difficult to secure, even with LATCH.

Jaguar XK

Because the front seats don’t slide forward far enough and the rear backrest is too vertical, the rear seats are unusable for installing child seats, even though they have LATCH anchors.

Lexus SC

Rear-facing infant seats will not fit in the back seat because there is not enough room behind the front seatback. Front-facing child seats are difficult to secure, even with LATCH anchors, because the seatback is so upright that the child seat has to tilt forward.

Cadillac XLR

There’s no LATCH or top-tether anchor point for child seats.

(Mega.)

This dry cleaner’s, across from the Loblaws at Manning and Dupont, was abandoned over the spring. Guys in hazmat suits later cleaned the place out. (I thought I had a photo, but now I cannot find it.) It’s been up for lease, admittedly with an imperfect sign, ever since.

Why is this not a Seatonbucks or a Suction Village?

Yesterday (2006.11.12), I attended a memorial for the late Sid Adilman at Trinity–St. Paul’s Church at Bloor and Walmer. There was enough of a crowd that I had to sit in the balcony, which turned out to be a good vantage point for photos. Various luminaries from the media and the arts were present, but this is Toronto and you can’t treat them special.

I engaged 18th-century liveblogging techniques by writing in my notebook. The accounts below are sometimes more approximate than I would like, as the presentations by speakers were heavy on anecdotes with precise chronologies I had a hard time keeping up with. Corrections appreciated. [continue with: Sid Adilman memorial →]

Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984, p. 87:

Roxy were massive in Sheffield. The group’s flamboyant, future-retro image inspired the post-hippie generation to glam up and dance at Sheffield clubs like the Crazy Daisy. And Roxy performed regularly in the city. “When you went to see them you’d wait until you were on the bus before applying the glitter, so your mum and dad didn’t see,” recalls [Phil] Oakey. “Martyn [Ware] was more daring than me. He’d be going through the toughest areas of town in green fur jackets and high-heel shoes.” […]

Ambiguously pitched between irony and romanticism, Roxy were the æsthete’s option. “I remember buying the first Roxy album and listening to it with the gatefold sleeve open, spread out on the floor,” says Ware. “The entire atmosphere around the record was as important as the music. It all came together as a piece of art for me.”

I read this while seated in my morning haunt, located on the edge of nowhere in plain sight and with a great feeling of place. It caused me to look up, and I thought of a wordless impression I have lived and relived since my very first act of pulling a Peter Saville New Order album out of a bin. It resists description and it borders on embarrassing, as all my examples are dated and even trite.

The graphic-design band is inextricable from its graphic image, which, contrary to claims that refuse to disappear decades later, was not harmed one wit by CDs and still hasn’t been harmed now that “album covers” are JPEGs loaded into iTunes.

What is hard to reproduce or recapture, because it exists almost in a quantum state and dies just as it comes to life, is the wordless placeless feeling prompted by rare brief passages in rare industrial and electronic songs. It is an impression of a life where design means something, indeed of a life that manifests itself as a conjunction of design and sound. It is a life that is design. But it isn’t a real life and you cannot actually live there. You come back to earth – not crashing, but with the same sudden vague disappointment you get after patting the dog pleasantly for a few minutes and forgetting everything else around you.

The graphic-design band is, to coin a phrase, an ideal for living, but it’s a kind of magic spell and it expires just as you turn off your regular life and start to enjoy it.

Leitmotifs, not all of them mine: Saville, “Perfect Kiss” (Demme), Technology: Western Re-Works, DV8, Metro Music, Copper Blue, Very, XTRMNTR, songs played on online radio stations whose titles one can never actually learn.