I tried to sign up for the Netflix-like online DVD rental service, Zip.CA, and gave up after their JavaScript-heavy form demanded that I retype all my credit-card information three more times. Why? Because apparently I had made a single mistake in one of the fields, which caused the entire page to reload and all of my correct fields to be erased. I make one mistake and it forces me to re-enter everything.
I must fill out all mandatory fields<bang> Over and over again<bang> Even the fields I got right the first three times<bang>
How’s that for E-commerce?
It gets better: The Live Help chat-mode option requires Java, which their system thinks Firefox doesn’t have. (Did they build this thing just for IE6?) You could also find a lot of things wrong with their forms, semantics, overuse of pictures of text, accessibility, and general cluefulness.
I rang their “customer service” line (costing them actual money) and insisted that the Valley Girl–accented “customer service representative” send E-mail to the developers to get this fixed. (They had no method at all to assign a ticket to a tech-support complaint. She was initially just going to make a “note” in my “account” that would sit there unread until Armageddon.)
She offered twice to sign me up over the phone. Sorry, honey, but no go: This is an online DVD rental service, I do everything on the computer now, and if an expert can’t sign up for your service, he won’t be signing up at all.
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2006.02.15 17:48. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2006/02/15/zip/
Now you know where they get their fuel. SOYLENT ZAMBONI IS PEOPLE!
I initially missed this shot (and you know how I hate that), but the firefightron, who was, sadly, not Chris the Fireman, obligingly reënacted this news story for me, just like on network television.
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2006.02.15 16:30. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2006/02/15/maws/
OrJOE DOES FREAKONOMICS™ – Circa 1999, I wrote an article for the Village Voice sports section entitled “Chix with stix: After only about a hundred years, women’s hockey is finally getting some respect.” In a cruel twist of fate, the sports section was canned before the article could run (and the section was later resuscitated and canned more times that I kept track of).
One feature of that article was an analysis of heights and weights of all NHL players and all female world championship team members. My hypothesis was that the complaint that wymmynz are too small to play NHL hockey was bogus because there were obviously some guys in the league who were of a size comparable to some of the grrrlz in the world championships. Since this was before mass availability of data on the Web, I distinctly recall spending many hours manually entering data into what turned out to be an orphan application, Lotus 1-2-3 for Macintosh (yes). I ended up with 713 records.
The results were as expected: Yes, there really were some girl-sized boys in the National Hockey League. “There are 35 NHL players smaller… than the largest world-championship woman. If there’s room in the NHL for 35 woman-sized men, there ought to be room for a similar number of woman-sized women.” [continue with: ‘Chix with Stix’ redux →]
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2006.02.13 15:49. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2006/02/13/chix/
This THRILL-CAM shot depicts a full-sized Lande Rovère with Ontario and (apparently) British plates (front plate is one row, black type on white) and what I thought were ill-rendered numerals on its spare-tire cover. After I noticed the bumper sticker, I decided I was looking at Hebrew.
The left rear seat (the one behind the steering wheel, another oddity) contained a child restraint; the driver, évidemment, was busy talking on a shoephone.
If I had to drive from Brighton to Toronto I’m not sure I’d start out in Tel Aviv, but that’s just me, innit?
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2006.02.11 17:33. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2006/02/11/rovere/
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2006.02.08 17:56. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2006/02/08/duct/
No sooner did I enter a chatroom than one ill-mannered lout began taunting me about my ugliness, a refrain taken up by yet another boor, both of whom received some encouragement from the she-bitches in the room, who love the spectacle of a public stoning, having starred in such communal sports themselves, and who feel absolutely no esprit de corps, indeed who delight in the discomfiture of people they view as competition, contestants for limited resources…. I defended myself as best as I could, skewering them with my rapier wit until they lapsed into silence and I was able to retreat gracelessly from the battlefield, my self-esteem in tatters. […]
Try as I might, I cannot take this sophomoric ridicule in stride and… feel the humiliation of allowing myself to be humiliated by such small fry, by uneducated teenage boys who have turned the Internet into a bully’s playground where they gain prestige among their peers by deriding the “nerds” and “retards.” I think with despair that this is what I’ve come to: At the age of 46, after a lifetime of study, after three books and countless essays, I squander my days providing rowdy young boys with a bull’s-eye for target practice.
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2006.02.08 17:42. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2006/02/08/she-torontoists/
Peter Shapiro, Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco, p. 237:
early rap star Kurtis Blow opening for Chic on one of their tours and playing at the legendary disco club Paradise Garage shortly after their first single, ‘Christmas Rappin’’, was released.
How does that look with neutral apostrophes?
early rap star Kurtis Blow opening for Chic on one of their tours and playing at the legendary disco club Paradise Garage shortly after their first single, 'Christmas Rappin'', was released.
Now let’s try that in U.S. or Canadian English:
early rap star Kurtis Blow opening for Chic on one of their tours and playing at the legendary disco club Paradise Garage shortly after their first single, “Christmas Rappin’,” was released.
Just a tiny bit better, don’t you think?
Note that things get even worse online, given that Unicode pulled a WCAG and were too stupid to give closing single quotation mark and apostrophe their own separate character numbers.
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2006.02.08 17:41. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2006/02/08/apostrophe/
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2006.02.04 15:38. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2006/02/04/gifts/
Premiere, December 2005–January 2006, p. 32 (bold, but indeed not emphasis, added):
Based on Bond creator Ian Fleming’s first book,
Casino (and, no, it’s nothing like the 1967 Woody
Allen spoof version) tells how Bond becomes a
hotshot British spy—and, yes, as a trainee, that
means he gets fewer cool gadgets. Director Martin Campbell (GoldenEye) says the gritty coming-of-
spy tale in the novel will be toned down to PG-
13–ville—Bond won’t smoke 70 cigarettes a day,
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2006.02.03 18:35. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2006/02/03/em-en/
