Nothing made me sadder about my contribution to typography than this photograph.

Typography is a fraternity with all the expected fraternal rivalries, none of which stand in the way of working with each other. Everybody hates Hrant’s guts, but Microsoft still hired him to work on Armenian. The man whose photo I am excerpting here couldn’t be arsed to hang around the office 20 minutes after work to meet me while I was in San Francisco, yet here his photo is.

We all work together because, as I mentioned before, no one understands the whole of typography. That would mean understanding the whole of writing. Everyone sees only one side of the mountain, its apex misty in fog.

I’ve tried and tried to contribute. What I have contributed is not nothing, but it is not enough. (Along the way, I have earned barely a penny for my work.) I look at this picture of three great minds of two generations working together just to draw a single character (ẞ) and I see the camaraderie; I see the acceptance as equals, on which score Spiekermann is especially generous; I see the collaboration. (I see Ivo looking sharp.) I don’t see how I could have helped, nor do I see anyone anywhere eager for my help in the areas where I have true expertise.

Nothing made me sadder about my contribution to typography than this photograph.

Grizzled positoid/anti-bullying advocate Joe·My·God continues his crusade to enact the greatest possible online harm. Not only might his site take down your browser, it explicitly invites comments that not only are not vetted but may be reported to law enforcement and, Jervis reminds us with a straight, if ravaged, face, can and will be used by anti-gay shock troops. Perhaps It Gets Better for “LGBTQ” youth, but it never gets better for anyone splattered by Jervis’s toxic mash.

The irrevocable decay of the gay press has no stronger indicator than Jervis’s site’s role as copier-and-paster of other people’s news. There are better things for a man like him to be doing; one that leaps to mind is working at the paying job he ostensibly holds down. For that matter, there are better things for his commenters to be doing, especially those of a certain age.

There is no credible rival site, and Matt Mills has given me every indication he intends to steer Xtra’s new “Web presence” at a similarly-sized iceberg.

For some godawful reason, Republic of Doyle has been renewed for next season. This year’s episodes were atrocious – and I am not referring here to the still-unimproved scrollup captioning and half-assed homemade audio description these cheapskates use. IMCHD in Toronto is credited with the bogus captioning job, which in and of itself makes Republic of Doyle noncompliant with CRTC regulations. Fancy a complaint, b’y?

Right: That word. It’s in nearly every episode. In one of them, I heard it five times in the first 45 minutes, at which point I deleted the episode. Of course Republic of Doyle imbues St. John’s with even more mystique than it already has. But St. John’s doesn’t need goosing up! The truth is already delightful enough. The show gilds the lily so many ways – with hackneyed dialect, with ill-edited and echo-laden dialogue, with an unrealistic panoply of black ladies guest-starring in every second episode – that it became as fun to watch as Rookie Blue.

Like the show itself, Allan Hawco began to believe his own press. Plus he seemingly forgot how to act. Try your own drinking game: Every time he’s half-naked, drink a full glass, and every time you see him holding his hands up at sternum level (whether in cuffs or not) gesticulating like a first-year drama student, do a shot.

Des was always the most adorable character on the show. He has now become the only watchable character. (Simon Pegg could play Des in the movie; as Benji in Mission: Impossible, he almost does already.) I used to adore this show. I would dearly love to ask John Callahan “What the hell?” Even Rose’s hair is a mess.

There remains the matter of the permanent injuries that stuntman Christy Ring alleges he suffered on set. I find it odd that TV writers and bloggers are shying away from what is, at first blush, an outright scandal.

Andi Schwartz (no relation) wrote a piece for Xtra about the many troubles gay and lesbian soldiers face in the Canadian Forces. It was given cover-story treatment in the 2012.02.23 issue. And, in essence, the story is factually wrong based on the reports of its own sources. Worse, Schwartz didn’t even bother asking the Department of National Defence for a comment.

As such, I nominated “Gay in the Army” as the least ethical article of the year as published in the gay press. I did that nominating in a letter to the editors of Xtra – that really means the troublesome and dismissive Matt Mills – that the paper curiously cannot find room to publish even while copying and pasting blog comments into the printed newspaper. (I couldn’t find a way to contact Schwartz. I did find her on Twitter, which doesn’t count. Neither she nor Mills responded.)

I wrote:

If I understand Andi Schwartz correctly (and if I refer to the subhead of her article, which an editor probably wrote), the “Canadian military is still not a friendly space for gays and lesbians.” This is said to be true despite the fact that Schwartz could find only one documented case of homophobic mistreatment, which she admits was in fact addressed by the Department of National Defence. That incident is mysteriously entwined with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the United States, despite the fact we live in a different country.

Then we have a quote from a soldier who began his service 18 years ago and hasn’t been in the army for a decade, yet admits things must have improved anyway. Schwartz follows it up with expert assessment that admitting open gays wouldn’t harm the army, including an equivalent assessment from Gary Kinsman, who, as if out of a playbook, decries the military for being “masculinist.” I assume Kinsman also decries synchronized swimming for being wet.

Then we have another gay servicemember openly stating that the military has its own complaint procedures in place, to which complainants don’t even necessarily have to resort (“the issue can sometimes be resolved between colleagues”).

Schwartz sums up the abuse gays face in the military, despite an almost complete lack of evidence proving the premise of the article, by quoting Kinsman saying what he’s probably said every time he’s been asked a similar question over the last two decades: “It’s the tip of the iceberg!” Schwartz’s own facts show otherwise.

What we have, then, is a cover story with so little factual basis as to be indistinguishable from no factual basis at all. The story was wrapped up in a hyperbolic headline like a pretty pink bow. Bad enough. But I fact-checked Schwartz’s ass. I confirmed with DND – twice! – that Andi Schwartz never once asked Defence for a statement on the topic. Schwartz failed to give one side a chance to comment, in one fell swoop branding her article as the year’s most unethical piece of gay journalism.

Eventually, gay activists are going to have to accept that some gay men want to join the army and that they can and do thrive there. Yet to accept that fact would, at the very least, also involve accepting that masculine gay men really exist and very much like the idea of a tough male environment where – again – they can thrive. The message of the gay press is that masculinity is valuable only inasmuch as FTMs claim to have it and hurts everyone else.

Tom Scocca gets so much right in his jeremiad against Microsoft Word that what he got wrong really stung – because what he got wrong is basically what every other writer or journalist gets wrong.

Scocca correctly derides:

• automatic ordinals

• automated indention of lists

• failed ”smart quotes‘

• tag soup in HTML export

But Scocca is the kind of hack who doesn’t know the phrase “tag soup.” Forgivable because he still correctly diagnoses the problem. But, judging by his replacement workflow, he doesn’t know how to solve the problem. What he did was switch to TextEdit and use MS Word solely for wordcount. Scocca also insists that quotation marks, apostrophes, and dashes need to look like something typed on a Selectric.

Long-time readers will see where I’m going here. This is a writer who, like practically all others, doesn’t know the first thing about Unicode and cannot code a simple HTML document. (For almost any kind of article in the journalistic sense, you need to know H1 through H3, P, A, UL and OL and LI, and IMG. It’s harder to write an article about Microsoft Word than to learn nine HTML elements.)

How do you solve this problem in one fell swoop? You read Borked Unicode and then you start using a real text editor, like BBEdit, which can and will mark up text for you nearly automatically and will always use UTF-8 encoding. And it does wordcounts, among other things.

(In fact, Scocca’s complaints about dumb quotes don’t make sense because Word positively does save as UTF-8 by default. He’s doing something else wrong.)

Scocca didn’t respond to my E-mail. And I expect he will do what hacks tend to do – decide he’s already spoken on the issue and refuse to upgrade his skills. He will have trenchantly described half the problem while refusing to solve the other half.

Special bonus failure

Scocca didn’t pick it and Slate’s CMS is notorious, but this is the actual slug for his article (linebreaks added):

/articles/technology/technology/2012/04/
microsoft_word_is_cumbersome_inefficient_and_
obsolete_it_s_time_for_it_to_die_.html

Twentieth-anniversary edition.

Zeitgeist Films promised me a real captioning job, only to give us shit-for-brains same-language subtitles, which are of no use to anyone. Even the dried husk of Captions, Inc. knows better.

The Globe gingerly reported that the TIFF Bell Lightbox isn’t making money. (That’s my interpretation. I don’t see how the complex’s five cinemas cover their own and associated costs. TIFF’s 2011 annual report has not been published yet, but at any rate those numbers are easy to fudge.)

I don’t know what other outcome was even possible here. The Toronto International Film Festival is a literal and figurative elitist organization – gamely writing programme as though what it were running were the British Film Institute; shafting young journalists; and nickel-and-diming its elders. Delusions of grandeur led to the construction of the Lightbox. There aren’t enough cinephiles in town to keep that place in the black, and the echt-cinephiles who run TIFF simply don’t know how to program (“programme”) popular movies.

But at root, nothing is going to change until Piers Handling permanently leaves the building. The Festival’s director-for-life is a sourpuss who rivals Ken Finkleman as most contemptuous man in Canada. Just as cinephiles have never seen a “movie” in their lives, Piers Handling has never shown any evidence of having experienced the joy of cinema. Or joy of anything, based on my observing him for the better part of 20 years.

The entire organization is so superior and condescending it did not surprise me in the least when neither Handling nor his handlers could be bothered to respond to my suggestion of an event that would pack in a subset of the cinephile audience that feels alienated from TIFF’s received wisdom. I wrote:

Since the media office won’t answer queries from anyone other than A-list critics it lunches with, and since the Web site is intentionally designed to obscure such facts, I am not clear about the right programmer to whom to address this request. So I am sending it along to you. I picture you receiving it with your signature unsmiling overseriousness. But this is something you should take seriously.

I suggest that TIFF program a weekend-long festival curated by the only interesting film critic at work today: Armond White. Yes, the same Armond White whom the voiceless voice of the establishment, Roger Ebert, dismisses as a troll. It seems axiomatic that everyone in your building, save perhaps for Cowan, thinks Ebert is being too charitable. While White’s reviews dearly need line-editing, the fact is he relentlessly espouses a well-defined film æsthetic, one that emphasizes visual splendour and kineticism and rewards themes like honour and duty.

Armond White loathes films that flatter the self-perceptions of the audience. He hates audiences who think they’re better than the subject being portrayed. Just think of the fun we’d have putting Armond White face to face with an audience. Make sure there’s an open bar so that tightassed Toronto film snobs will be liquored up enough to say what they really want to say to him.

I’d pay good money for an Armond White Film Festival and so would a lot of people. Make it happen, please.

Then there’s that human-rights complaint in the waiting about TIFF’s installation of “state-of-the-art” cinemas without captioning or audio description.