Just what it says.

Even more blackletter.

And this whole layout is on a shop window!

Finally took out the trash, I gather.

Tonight I ran for the eetcarstray, hidden as it was behind another eetcarstray marked NOT IN SERVICE that was turning north on rue de l’Église. A left turn like that leaves the next car vulnerable, since the tracks have to be reset to a straight-ahead position. Barrel into a switch in the tracks without checking and it’s three days’ suspension, not to mention a derailment.

I bounded inside and cheerily said to the driver (and whenever I am cheery to strangers I get in trouble), “Does that make you turn left now? With the [I gestured] channel?”

“I’d rather not talk about it,” replied the very large driver, getting up to pull out the crowbar used to reposition the tracks. “You don’t remember me, sir, but I remember you. So you have a nice night.”

I sat down, turned on my iPod, and read my book of memoirs. Whatever could he mean?

Coming on the heels of two solid weeks of near-daily electronic-mail messages from a gentleman caller identified only as Akzidenz.Grotesk@Gmail.com, I got to wondering. Mr Grotesk is of the belief that I’m “posting nude pics of myself on the Internet,” which would be a very amusing use of a surveillance camera above the glassed-in showers at the Steamworks, I’m sure, but is otherwise quite impossible. Just who was the streetcar driver, and who is Mr Grotesk? (I don’t think it’s Hrant H. Papazian.)

This would be a good time for my defenders to drop Mr Grotesk a line and actually ask. Remember, “it’s no use trying to rent you, Oscar. You just laugh it off.”

(UPDATED)   Surely it is every invert’s dream to airbrush into existence a giant illustration of a professional hockey player positioning his Lycra-covered arse to advantage.

That’s Markus Naslund. (Why couldn’t it be Alfredsson?)

The man in the cherrypicker was all alone, remotely operating the diesel tractor below, and he was indeed airbrushing Naslund into existence, with a giant respirator over his mouth and nose. There were no large-format printing or vinyl cutouts in use here.

It turns out to be part of an advertising campaign that, like so very much in the world of sports (“thportth”), is homoerotic in ways the creators would claim not to notice.

This only reminds me – not for the first time recently – that, lo those many years ago, I turned down a proposal from Jossey-Bass to write a book about homoeroticism in sports media.

Curiously, my Village Voice editor told me two years ago that he had OKed the original story on that topic despite thinking it was a total crock of shit. Perhaps it worked out for the best, then, but I doubt it. And now I cannot find the editor’s name (nor does Jossey-Bass really exist anymore, having been swallowed by Wiley).

I will add that some old queen at the Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives refused to consider a donation of my vast clipping files on the topic, said collection having caused one local academic to widen his eyes and gasp when he saw it. (And these are people I’m thinking of helping out once they move into their new building?)

Mustn’t wallow.

Fine.

At any rate, the campaign’s Flash-based Web site uses an incorrect language selector (“French”) –

– and presents oodles of videos that cry out for captioning.

Not a lot of good news here, I guess, unless you like your Swedish hockey stars with their heels in the air, in which case I’ve just made your whole fucking day.

Update

Behold the finished mural.

Advantage: Naslund!

We all hate the Toronto Unlimited campaign. There’s nothing to like about it. Kyle Rae complained that they missed the boat in promoting Toronto as a nice place for queers to get married. (But, I mean, how could it be nicer than Edmonton?)

Nonetheless, things could be worse. From the July 5 Advocate, which I only borrow from the library and only then to marvel at its outdated, stale, middle-class-newsmagazine approach:

The ad copy is as bad as ours:

Four of Miami’s most popular and renown annual celebrations highlight a noteworthy calendar of events, attracting visitors from across the country and around the world.

“Most popular and renown” is the kind of error you’d expect from, say, a native Spanish speaker who thinks he can read and write English. Or somebody from the northern half of New Brunswick – but I assume they just hired the non-union Mexican equivalent of Cletus and Brandine to save on airfare.

In HTML or XHTML, there’s no such thing as a footnote. No structure for it exists at all. A fact like this is very difficult to get across, I find – a cochair of the WCAG Working Group required four separate explanations, for example. I think it would be pointless for me to try to persuade the more severe standardistas of the Tantek and Hickson ilk of the need for such an element; they’ll just laugh, as Tantek did when I asked about elements useful to newspapers. (But programmers will probably get blockcode. We know who really matters.) A markup language invented to present physics papers online was deficient for that purpose in the first place and will never be fixed.

Thus, David Foster Wallace cannot be adequately represented in HTML and Gruber’s footnotes aren’t footnotes at all, but merely a “Back to Top of Page” link in sequined cocktail dress and rouge. Hence they should not be given any more attention than such links have been. There’s no innovation whatsoever here, and even his choice of Unicode arrow character is wrong (we are not hooking and moving leftwards; we’re going straight up ↑).

Sorry for not being impressed, kids. This is an example of heaping praise upon an A-lister for doing something everyday and common under the guise of innovation. Give it a rest, please.

The technology of the DVD and the technique of the screenshot enable me to prove a claim I made in an old cinema review.

Description quality

Well, it’s very good, as ever. I’m sorry, but the motherfuckers down at DVS are motherfuckingly good writers.

Did you know that describers have to do some voicing for onscreen characters? They read out subtitles (much less of a problem than some people think – I’ll skip the details), but must also tell us words a character mouths with no voice. In Fatal Attraction, it was “Five minutes.” It popped up once in A Beautiful Mind, but I forget where. An episode of The Associates on CTV featured “The lawyer mouths ‘Three hundred’ to Amy.”

In Black Hawk Down, here it comes right through your headphones: “McKnight mouths the word ‘motherfucker.’ ”

(I was also able to correct my misidentification of the speaker. That took over ten minutes of fast-forwarding and rewinding.)

Through the screenshot, I can additionally show you proof that the failed concept of “same-language subtitles” fails yet another way: McKnight is not uttering the words “Motherfucker. Motherfucker.” The kind of two-bit operations that produce same-language subtitles are too inept to indicate mouthed words. They don’t even know they have to, and they’re perfectly willing to lie to the audience, whoever that might be. (I think the audience for same-language subtitles is some guy in Thailand who thinks he can understand English but needs a bit of backup, and who goes ballistic when faced with actual literal transcription, speaker identification via positioned captions, and non-speech information. Nobody has convinced me we have to cater to the inadequacies and prejudices of people like this.)