Utility van with surprisingly old-fashioned graphic design. (I think it’s the shades of brown that make it.) One overlooks the first city on the list.

From Bruce McCall’s Zany Afternoons, p. 107:

So All-Fired New They Make Tomorrow Seem Like Yesterday!

’58 Bulgemobiles!

Fireblast · Flashbolt · Blastfire · Firewood

Too Great Not to Be Changed,
Too Changed Not to Be Great!

Gunnar “Best-Ever Nordic Name” Swanson:

[S]ome faces have very strong connotations for very large groups. Fraktur type means German tradition. (Or does it mean Christmas? Or lowrider car clubs? Or Chicano gangs?)

Or submissive gay skinheads? Or Swedish fashion houses with golfer spokesmodels?

It would be hard to use Fraktur to sell industrial equipment without having someone think “Is this this a traditional German injection molding machine? (Or a Christmas mill or a lowrider forklift or a Chicano gang lathe?)”

Indeed, people need to understand the connotations. One of the phys-ed majors working at the Y, a unique and magnificent specimen, has the word LATINO tattooed on his shoulder in blackletter (inevitably capitals). Does that make him a Chicano?

Eye issue 50/03, Winter 2003, p. 44 has a squib by (inevitably) Steven Heller entitled “Sans Serif vs. Fraktur: The Jewish Question.” (Remember, he also wrote Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption? which I have.) The photo cutline reads “This double-page spread of ‘Aryan women’ taken from a recent copy of Resistance magazine illusrates blackletter’s continuing use by the extreme right wing.” I did some Googling; it appears to be a regular feature.

At the Value Village, where I regularly cruise the old books for type gems almost literally by the pound, I found this stunner:

Yes, it’s a book by an author with a German name entitled Male Fantasies. The title block is typeset in fraktur straight out of the Third Reich, the descending f bordered in blood like a knife. As I say, you need to meet a few real sexists.

Former editor Judy Stoffman (emphasis added):

Eats, Shoots & Leaves was book of the year at the British Book Awards and is currently Nº 1 in Canada. The fame of the book is such that a member named Lady Strange (I’m not making this up) told the panda joke in Britain’s House of Lords.

Lynne Truss, p. xvii (op. cit., emphasis added):

“It will be debated in every national newspaper and mentioned, yea, even in the House of Lords, where a woman named Lady Strange – I kid thee not – will actually tell the panda joke.”

Except I can find no evidence a Lady Strange ever said any such thing. (I did another two searches – bringing the total to six; they’re not bookmarkable – to no avail.) And aren’t the two grafs above a little too similar?

Crusty Blatchford (emphasis added):

I would miss [Don Cherry’s] trademark liberties with the English language; his easy-to-mock delivery (my nephew does a spectacular imitation that consists of much unintelligible staccato barking, the only understandable bit being a “Good Kingston boys!” exclamation)…; the frequent glimpses of his big sappy heart (invariably involving shout-outs to sick or dying children); his fierce loyalties and equally ferocious biases….

I bemoan the loss of characters and character both, and I think they are linked. The fewer rascals and curmudgeons about, the less tolerance for the few there are, and the higher and prissier the bar becomes, the more effete and precious the national temperament.

This from the mannish, high-strung prima donna – ever prone to ashtray-heaving shitfits if somebody so much as touches her commas, let alone eats, shoots, or leaves – who imagines that dorky Svend Robinson is “a bit of a flamer.” The fuck does she know? Her entire career, like those of Mary Ormsby and Rosie DiManno, is about apologizing for the guys with whom she grew up poor in a hardscrabble town. I did, too; the difference is I knew I was better and left.

At any rate, it is now well established that – to use the lesbian phrase – I self-identify as a curmudgeon. (It’s readily Googlable.) And yesterday, I moved heaven and earth through the rain and Beirut-like rubble of rue du Collège to attend the second and final screening of Alan Zweig’s documentary I, Curmudgeon.

It’ll be on TVO this fall, probably, with no doubt simply appalling captioning, but I am here to tell you right now that almost every part of my life was up there on the screen and I was thrilled out of my mind for the first half-hour. I can back up everything they say; look in particular for Toby Young’s recounting what happens when he walks across a crowded room. Then the repeated truths, the self-recognition, and the sheer length caused me to get a bit blasé, itself a curmudgeonly reaction.

My reflex on hearing of the movie (just the title!) was “Why am I not in it?” I sat there imagining everything I could unload. I imagined where I’d sit in my penthouse loft here while the camera rolled. (With the benefit of having seen the finished product, I hoped I’d do a better job hiding the lavalier mike.) I imagined warning Zweig about simply appalling captioning. I imagined unburdening. Too many of the subjects seem to have suffered little, if at all, for their curmudgeonly natures. I had near-complete strangers and colleagues of long standing say nothing at all nice about me in a major U.S. magazine; try living through that.

Blatchford got it right with Grapes, though. Curmudgeons are not “negative” or “bitter”; we are frustrated idealists, romantic, sentimental. And Zweig has inaugurated what I hope will grow into a full canon of documentation of our lives. I am tired of Normals telling lies about my personality.

After the picture, Zweig summed it up: “I think that ‘Love people, hate the crowd’ is good. But every now and then you meet somebody from the crowd.” Earlier, with the movie still running, I left that crowd, walked up to Zweig, and said to him: “Your movie is about my entire life. My only regret is that I’m not in it.” He seemed actually shocked – and touched.

I gave him the red card.

Well, the disappointment of the week was the “in-store appearance” by Lynne Truss, authoress of the surprise British Überbestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero-Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. I had decided not to Amazon it from England, and it was just this week when I spotted a pile o’ books at This Ain’t. I enacted the mammalian instinct of immediately slapping my hand onto the pile, as if to keep the brood’s competing primates from getting their claws onto it.

I was beside myself with suppressed chuckles on the way home, to the extent that a woman on the subway asked me what I was reading and a Chinese chick on a candy-coloured cellphone walked out of my vicinity at the station. It’s a funny book if you’re situated where it’s forbidden to laugh out loud; reading it at home, the book is merely droll.

En tout cas, Thursday the 29th came around and I arrived at 12:22 for the 12:30 appearance by Truss. Held at the aptly-named Nicholas Hoare, a well-scrubbed upper-middle-class undergraduate girl immediately demanded I hand her my bag. Like I’m going to steal anything, particularly while standing in an authoress queue overseen by two Hoare staff. It turned out to be merely a book signing. Standing in line, I was let down in advance; I suffered anticipatory letdown. And I was certainly not going to pull out a copy of the book bought somewhere else for her to sign – the Hoares might’ve dialed 911.

While snapping photos with one’s spycam, I rehearsed what I was going to say and predicted it would last all of 60 seconds. I was optimistic by about 15. I told her the book jacket wrote e-mail while the body copy used (the hated, French-seeming) email (“Oh, yes, that’s the American spelling.” “Actually, there are several spellings – big-E-hyphen, small-e-hyphen…”). I then launched into my little spiel. In captioning and subtitling, rendition of the spoken word is important, I told her, but there are a few things we do there that we wouldn’t do in print; if you ever come out with a second edition, you might want to talk about captioning and subtitling.

She beamed quite a smile, nodded, and thanked me, and that was it.

At future readings and appearances, I pledge never to be as defensive or perfunctory as the authors I have met this year.

Now. Gems from the book?

1. p. xvii: “ ‘It will be debated… even in the House of Lords, where a woman named Lady Strange – I kid thee not – will actually tell the panda joke’ ”: Not quite.

   1. 15th December 2003 – Lord Faulkner of Worcester: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that positive Answer. Her belief in the correct use of English language and punctuation is clearly shared by a large number of people. Lynn Truss’s excellent little book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, is top of the best-seller lists this Christmas with a print run that has been extended from 15,000 to 400,000 copies. The title is a joke about pandas, which I do not have time to explain.

      Does the Minister not agree that regrettably few people know how to use commas, apostrophes and figures of speech properly and that the Government and Parliament should set an example? For example, there is a notice not far from your Lordships’ Chamber which gives “Fridays” a possessive apostrophe. Will she also impress on her colleagues how important it is that the comma is used correctly so that the sentence “A woman, without her man, is nothing” is corrected to “A woman: without her, man is nothing”?

      Baroness Ashton of Upholland: My Lords, in anticipation of my noble friend’s Question, I obtained Lynn Truss’s book and read it over the weekend. I recommend it to any noble Lord who is interested in pursuing grammar. Perhaps I shall receive a free copy now! Of course, the panda went into a bar and “eats, shoots and leaves.” As noble Lords will know, it depends on where the comma is placed; indeed, as it does in the phrase about women and their requirement for men, which is in the same vein.

   2. 8 [but not “8th”] January 2004 – Mr. Tom Harris (Glasgow, Cathcart) (Lab): I rise briefly in defence of the comma, and specifically to talk about amendment Nº 52. One of the joys of serving on Committees is that, as someone who is not a trained lawyer, and therefore probably in a minority, I find it interesting to look at how syntax and punctuation can change the meaning of sentences. I was given as a Christmas present by my son a book by Lynne Truss called, Eats, Shoots & Leaves. At the risk of boring the Committee, I should explain that the title is based on a story of a panda who walks into a café, orders and eats a sandwich, and then stands up, takes out a gun, fires two shots in the air and walks out. When the waiter asks him why he is doing that, the animal says, ‘‘I’m a panda, look it up,’’ and throws the waiter a badly-punctuated dictionary. The definition of panda says ‘‘Eats, shoots and leaves.’’ Amendment Nº 52 would insert a comma after the word ‘‘identity’’ which would render the sentence completely different from that in the clause as drafted and mean that establishing the person’s identity would be an option.

   3. 3 [but indeed not “3rd”] Mar 2004 – Baroness Barker: I shall speak to Amendment Nº 56. I merely observe that the duel over the preceding amendments ought to be fought between parliamentary counsel and the noble Earl, with copies of Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves at 50 paces.

   4. 23 Apr 2004 – David Cairns: I understand that a best-selling book at Christmas was about grammar. It was called Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and concerned the apostrophe. The hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon might have done well to study that book before framing the question, because I think it contains grammatical errors. I am not as concerned about grammar as my hon. Friend, who is far more learned in these matters, but I do not like the notion of being “bound” by the treaty.

2. pp. 4, 5: “No one understands us seventh-sense people. They regard us as freaks. When we point out illiterate mistakes, we are often aggressively instructed to ‘get a lfe’ by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves…. In short, we are unattractive know-all obsessives who get things out of proportion and are in continual peril of being disowned by our exasperated families.” Or readers. Or editors.

3. p. 15: Oh, does this one ever ring true. “While other girls were out with boyfriends on Sunday afternoons, getting their necks disfigured by love bites, I was at home with the wireless listening to an Ian Messiter quiz called Many a Slip, in which erudite and amusing contestants spotted grammatical errors in piees of prose. It was a fantastic program. I dream sometimes they have brought it back….

   “Around this time, when other girls of my age were attending the Isle of Wight Festival and having abortions, I bought a copy of Eric Partirdge’s Usage and Abusage and covered it in sticky-backed plastic so that it would last a lifetime (it has).”

   Cf. “TypoBlog”: “I grew up in the hick province of New Brunswick. (Eastern Canada. Think Mississippi, but with coarse French accents.) While the other kids my age were out running the streets and sniffing glue, I sat at home memorizing the Letraset catalogue and counting the days until the next baffling issue of U&lc arrived in the mail.”

4. p. 17: “And there is no editing on the internet!” Speak for yourself, honey. And the “Internet” is a place, hence capitalized. “[T]he inexorable advance of lower case into… everything on the non-case-sensitive [I]nternet”: You mean the case-insensitive Internet? Domain names are case-insensitive by spec. But filenames and paths are case-sensitive, as are an ever-rarer minority of E-mail userIDs.

Now an interesting meta-interlude: It occurred to me that my notetaking, done on second read of Eats, Shoots, is simply a waste of my time. I’m on hiatus from genuine new contributions in the review genre (viz. Ten Years Ago in Spy and most MoPix movie reviews), yet the horse had already reached full gallop here when I realized I’m not gonna get that time back. Even though I’ve done this sort of thing before, in this case nitpicking a book about nitpicking when I manifestly have other things to do seems an unwise use of my time.

Sorry, Lynne. Give us more when next you visit Toronto, select a less-pissy bookstore to do it in, and poll me for some intricacies of orthography in captioning and subtitling and maybe I’ll put some time in.

Some online publishing, it seems, is actually not worth it.

My esteemed colleague – who, whilst married to a woman, has tattoos and suchlike – used messagerie instananée to ask me what sort of lads I fancied.

I don’t like talking about this with straight people. My other esteemed colleague, invariably found in a suit despite being under 30, queried me on what “gay guys” notice first in a man (“Girls seem to go eyes, hands, shoes, watch”). I project this question onto the expectation that inverts all get along just famously with girls. We get along so famously that we go out together, let our eyes wander, and feel oh-so-free to blurt out whatever we want about whatever hunk o’ meat lumbers by. After all, we both like guys!

The problem is: You aren’t one!

Some of us are a big zero when it comes to girls. We’re not sexist; we just don’t care. You think we’re a –1, but we’re not; we’re a big zero, and as far as we’re concerned, so are you. We can’t relate. I quite hope you can understand that; four decades of liberal feminism have misled women that any man who doesn’t immediately cut his balls off on request is sexist. We like our balls, thank you very much. We just don’t want to talk about them with you.

Our kind don’t get any press, because girls are in no rush to accept that they simply don’t matter to some people. But that’s understandable; fags are equally surprised to learn that some straight people – including the straight guys they so fervently wish they were like – don’t give a shit about them, either. Nobody likes to be ignored. But really, girls, you have to get used to it, and to the implication that we aren’t really interested in discussing our intimate details with you. It’s nothing personal; we just don’t want to think about what you’d be doing with the guys we like. We don’t want to have to deal with female sexuality and in particular with female genitalia. We leave that to the flamers, who, quite possibly until this very moment, you thought were the only kind of gay men in the entire world.

For the group I discuss here, the most excruciating television program in history was Sex and the City, and praise God it’s finally over. (At this point in the narrative, you remain convinced this way of life is functionally equivalent to sexism. You need to meet a few real sexists. In the meantime, we will overlook your reflex slander.)

The straight guys who actually take an interest in us are great. We love them. But we can’t really talk about our sexualism with them because they’re implicated in it by being male. Just as years of TV shows about child abuse have made adults jittery about touching children in any way whatsoever, the fact that homosexual panic ever even entered the collective imagination makes us worry about giving the wrong impression. We like our balls, thank you very much, but we don’t want to talk about them lest someone think we’re really talking about yours.

Interestingly, the tendency of the Web to expand and collapse distance all at once makes it easy for us to write about our sexual natures. But, for the love of God, don’t make us talk about it face to face. How mortifying.

For ’04, as has previously been adduced here, the answer to my first esteemed colleague’s question is “compact and æsthetically appealing.” One need not have red hair or be black, for example, though these categories are overrepresented in my History. I will provide the seemingly inconsequential addendum that proportions trump everything, as they have from time immemorial.

There’s a reason ancient statuary looks the way it does. Broad, square shoulders, a narrow waist, and something resembling muscle tone will light up the room. If you’re even slightly too tall or have arms that are even trivially too short or if you’re simply a stick insect, you won’t thread the needle and your key won’t fit the lock. You won’t even rate.

But if your slots turn up cherries, I’ll spot you from around the corner and I’ll want to fight off your accompanying flock of acolytes to get at you. You, however, will not even glance my way unless we’re in the shower at the Y and you happen to be a fetishist of some kind. This, you see, is my tragedy.

If you’re wondering why the renowned veganist has gone hog-wild with photographs all of a sudden: They are now so easy to publish with WordPress I have no reason not to. And I’m not even using the built-in photo(b)logging feature.