So much is wrong with Tom Bianchi’s ethos, mien, œuvre. And no man his age – gay or not, “We’ve been pretty longer” or not – should have that kind of body. But his reflexive Doug Johnsonson photo and painting are the ne plus ultra of gay narcissism.

Jules Kingdom:

Names, many quite delightful, of seemingly every gay(‑)rugby team in existence. Not all use the city or place name in the generally-used designation. [continue with: Every gay rugby team →]

(UPDATED) I re-read Matthew Debord’s piece in the L.A. Times about the Aspergerian male compulsion to efficiently load the autoclave, or, as non-male non-Aspergerians call it, the dishwasher.

In response to inquiries… General Electric sent me an owner’s manual for its current Profile line of dishwashers. There on Page 14 are instructions for getting 12 place settings into the upper and lower racks.

In my own response, I did the obvious thing. I downloaded one or more instruction manuals from essentially every dishwasher manufacturer in existence (even Haier), extracted just the pages or parts thereof that illustrate how to load the dishwasher, and assembled them on Flickr: How to load the dishwasher.

(Several marques use the same manuals, presumably because all that distinguishes them is marque. The best manuals have actual pictures instead of undifferentiable line drawings. And note the emphasis on the upper-middle-class frippery of ten‑ or even twelve-piece place settings. But never any instructions on where to put the dog’s bowls.)

Gruesome typography of the week

From that same article:

Movie titles don’t go in quotation marks. They also don’t go in neutral quotation marks. Neutral quotation marks are not to be gruesomely featured in a drop cap, a print-typography cœlacanth that needs to be killed off.

Update: 3 million views later

Deconstructing Rebecca Mead’s New Yorker article “You’ve Got Blog” 14 years ago:

Jason Kottke… is widely admired among bloggers as a thoughtful critic of Web culture…. Getting blogged by Kottke, or by Meg Hourihan or one of her colleagues at Pyra, is the blog equivalent of having your book featured on Oprah.

Finally, independent confirmation of an obvious fact that is self-servingly denied by the Weblog aristocracy itself: Despite no appreciable difference in the “thoughtfulness” of their respective Web criticism, some Webloggers are superstars.

As it was then, yea it is today: A single link from Kottke led to 3 million views of my dishwasher-manual extracts. (Extracted PDF pages, not “screenshots.”) Nothing in my 23 years onliné has been viewed so many times.

And it’s already over.

(Talking point: Is Tom Coates still as upset now by my article as he was in the year 2000? You do realize the galactic timescales we’re dealing with here, do you not?)

Updated from time to time.

2014.12.09

1. Love & Radio, which is quite good:

   1. “Violent”: Joyce Carol Oates–compliant “MMA” fighter with actual self-awareness Nick Salvatore:

      I was with my friend Alex, and one thing led to another, and we took to grappling. I realized it was one of the most intense experiences I’d had. Um, kind of like being in a crash, but, uh, not as necessarily life-threatening. And, I dunno, it drove me nuts. I started doing it as often as possible. I mean, it’s not necessarily what human beings are built to do, but it’s something that human beings seem very adept at, and I guess it just struck some sort of atavistic core with me – and drove me nuts.

      It’s – it’s almost like dancing, and it’s almost like fucking…. And sort of trying to find a way to arrange your body the way one might arrange words or paint or beats or whatever to achieve this sort of optimal æsthetic effect, which just happens to be, you know, the other person lying unconscious on the floor or whatever. It’s creative, but you get created, you get re-created….

      But, you know, I, and we – me and my friend Alex, we fought naked, uh, and, I mean, that was really weird…. Really weird. [“Did you like it?”] I did. I don’t know if we would do it again necessarily. Also, the tile floors really ripped up our knees and ankles.

   2. Daryl K. Davis, an African-American who befriends Klansmen

   3. Mathias Rust lands his plane in Red Square

2. Grant mentions me on a Way with Words episode and gets Canadian spelling kind of wrong.

3. The Nerdist talks to Clive Barker for almost two hours about every aspect of health and sexuality while never bothering to talk about his having AIDS or allegedly shooting up his husband with needles (case dismissed).

   (Previously: Why do we write?)

2014.10.05

• KCRW Design & Architecture podcast: Gay males want Modernist houses, lesbians Craftsman (sic)

• Back to DeGrassi podcast: Twitter; at iTunes

• Favourite interview podcast: Sunday Night Safran (also a radio show).

  Tie: The obscure KERA Think podcast from Dallas, which often interviews authors so thoroughly you don’t need to buy the book. That was certainly true for a smashing interview with Steve Almond on football. But after the interview with Laurel Braitman on animal emotions and madness, I read her book and learned even more

• “Coonass” on the World in Words, which I appeared on back dans la journée