Philip Stearns’ New Æsthetic–style landscapes.

He’ll also sell you an area rug designed like Kodak camera “glitches.”

The Globe tells us about the TTC’s two “court advocates.” In classic journalistic style, we approach the topic with a relatable human anecdote.

On… the night of the attack, [collector Joanne] McFadden was staffing a booth at Dundas station when a man cradling a 26-ounce bottle of liquor told her he only had one dollar to pay for his subway ride.

“I said to him, ‘If you took the 26er back to the liquor store where you got it, then you’d have money for the subway,’ ” she recalled. The man, Mr. Musuli, left for a minute, then walked through an open gate without paying.

Spotting him, Ms McFadden left her booth and demanded he pay up. Mr. Musuli punched her in the chest, a move she did not take lightly. “I had a pop in my left hand… I punched him quite a few times and threw my pop on him,” she recalled with a laugh.

[I]n the courtroom, Mr. Musuli’s lawyer explained the accused had previously lived in a shelter, and his mental-health workers and doctors would need to be contacted for the pre-sentence report.

Mr. Musuli was, in short, the kind of needy and troubled culprit the advocates often meet in court.

And McFadden was and apparently is the kind of easily angered, embittered TTC lifer with a penchant for escalating arguments still prevalent in the system. She made it worse. That’s my informed opinion based on years of dealing with disagreement-escalating TTC drivers – up to and including an incident last month that I had to document in writing with a signature so union and management would take it seriously.

Given two months to do so, neither of the court advocates mentioned in the article answered my mail about the escalation issue, nor did the only plausible Joanne McFadden on Facebook confirm she was one and the same person as the entitled, crabby, pampered, defended lifer depicted in the newspaper article.

Unless they’re made by Apple.

Like so many hot new iOS applications that don’t work in VoiceOver, camera apps don’t, either. I assume you aren’t going to bother with the argument that blind people don’t take pictures, because you already know they do. The built-in Camera app works fine for that, but I haven’t found a third-party camera application that works in VoiceOver – very much including the biggest names.

• Instagram. Jolly, audio-description-rejecting blink Tommy Edison can pretend to give YouTube lessons on “how blind people use Instagram,” but the fact remains blind people barely can use it or have to hack their way through it. I’ve suffered through four revisions – and a $715 million buyout – and nothing’s changed. I call that gold-plated incompetence. (What impact will Facebook’s new accessibility team have? Again: None.)

• Camera+ is actually worse. I’ll spare the developer, rolling in dough, some embarrassment here – I won’t publish their textbook angry and defensive response to my request to add a few features to make it accessible.

• Flickr. These are supposedly smart people, but they aren’t very good at accessible iOS development. (Another way I look at it is: Upgrading to this version finally rid me of that goddamned “kk+” photograph of a kid in a cereal-bowl haircut and round glasses doing Ken Burns effect every time I open the thing. And now this!)

You’ll want proof, so I uploaded some videos. (No captioning.)

• Instagram doesn’t work in VoiceOver. Tab order wrong seemingly everywhere; comments and comment counts unreadable; Like/Comment/More section unusable and Like button misread in Liked state; classic mishandling of text equivalents for images (Flickr doesn’t make that mistake in Explore tab); endless mislabelled buttons, headings, lists; cannot upload from library (button invisible to VoiceOver). I didn’t even try to use filters

• Camera+ doesn’t work in VoiceOver. Can’t zoom; mislabelled buttons, list items (especially settings); wrong tab order; can’t use Lightbox, which means you can’t apply filters, upload, or, in essence, use the application

• Flickr doesn’t work in VoiceOver. Mislabelling of the sort we’ve come to expect; unlabelled images basically everywhere but Explore; lousy grouping; cannot move from image to image; zoom doesn’t work here, either; tells you how many comments a photos has but won’t read them

iOS accessibility is the easiest application accessibility in the history of computing. Quit blowing it.

Could you really get through Craig Mod’s precious, overwrought, flowery prose elucidating his so-called subcompact publishing (not capitalized)? That style is his claim to fame and that is in fact what it’s brought him, presumably alongside healthy consulting contracts. Craig Mod is a smart lad and his grandiloquent manner assures you never forget that. It plays particularly well with the ladies, I expect. (My blind item about Japan was all about him. I still want to know.)

He’s also being disingenuous when he claims he never really was defining a new publishing model. He was. And, à la Clay Shirky, he’ll ride that model all the way to the bank. (I asked about his overwrought style and disingenuousness. But Mod left me with an autoresponder message about the E-sabbatical he’s allegedly taking, one easily disproved by his blog posts and Twits.)

Marco Arment isn’t being any less disingenuous when he insists he too has not really defined a new publishing style. Of course he has. (It’s a style that, like everything he produces, ends up with “typesetting” like a Microsoft Word document, a default blog template, or an O’Reilly book. Arment, afflicted with developer type autism [not hyphenated], obsesses about “dyslexic” fonts with no proven worth yet cannot be persuaded that body copy must not be set with blank lines between unindented paragraphs.)

These informed, intelligent observers are young and green enough to be surprised by what will now happen like clockwork. Whenever a new publishing style comes along that is immediately apprehensible and so simple it can be copied even by an amateur, such copying then occurs. (Simplicity: It’s hard to create but easy to clone.) The antecedents here are Butt and FANTASTIC MAN (list), neither of which these fellows will have read or whose histories they’ll know. (UPDATE: Perhaps Jeremy Leslie could fill them in.)

The amazing dazzle camouflage of the Polish bobsleigh team.

(Via Patryk Pieczarka’s Facebook)

Few remember the equally amazerblades asymmetrical Italian uniforms of about three years back.