Straw Dogs (2011) director Rod Lurie makes the masculine hierarchy rather obvious in this composition.

You don’t even need to be a lesbian “willing to make an exception” to get the message about Alexander Skarsgård. It’s laid on a little thick, actually; he’s becoming overexposed, particularly at the gym. So different an impression than the one delivered by brother Gustav as the soft-edged gay husband in Patrik, Age 1½.

In Hopscotch (1980), Walter Matthau goes on the lam using a sequence of vehicles any of which would by itself represent a dream come true for the susceptible child of the 1970s.

1. Concorde:

   

2. Hovercraft:

   

3. Seaplane (cf. Caribe):

   

Service Ontario is the provincial-government “retail” service where you can renew your driver’s licence and health card and so forth. Of interest here are their storefront locations, and of especial interest is the Service Ontario ministore located inside the Canadian Tire at the godforsaken intersection of Leslie and Lake Shore.

Here is the sign that greets you while you’re waiting in line (close-ups).

I’d be playing into these incompetents’ hands by listing everything that’s wrong with this sign, which is, at root, everything. It shouldn’t exist, and if there really is a need to impart any of this information, that needs to be done with legitimately designed signage in a comprehensible information hierarchy. Note also that this malarkey was clearly banged out on the same horrific Windows machines that “typeset” the Canadian Tire store signage.

Atrocious? Yes. But it’s actually worse, since the Canadian Tire location is one of the few in the province where one can apply for the Ontario Photo Card, which was specifically designed for blind people who can never hope to secure a driver’s licence. Anyone can apply for it, but the task of getting down to Leslie and Lake Shore is formidable even for someone who can walk to it from Leslieville. I prefer not to. In fact, I’ll wait for the Jones bus to carry me what on paper seems to be a distance of three blocks that in fact takes over 20 minutes to traverse on foot.

Service Ontario has a beautifully designed full-service store inside College Park, right on top of a subway station. Blind people get around on the subway just fine. It is inconceivable that a blind person could navigate to Donlands station, take the Jones bus, get off at the strangely-located southbound Lake Shore stop, and somehow find their way inside a strip mall and upstairs inside a store, all in the name of applying for the only photo ID card they can reasonably use.

The entire process and the entire retail environment, then, are hostile and ill-considered. This sort of incompetence and user contempt could happen only in Canada.

I tried to complain about the signage on site. Nobody would listen, but they did hand me a printed comment form I could fill out and mail in. What did Service Ontario have to say about this when I contacted them? Nothing, because Alan Cairns (“Spokesperson, ServiceOntario”) wouldn’t confirm which media rep handles questions (it’s obviously him) and implied I was wasting his time unless I were “with the media.”

Try this on for size, Alan Cairns

Next week I’ll be writing about the “design” of the Ontario Photo Card itself. Cairns can mend fences by telling me exactly who “designed” it and how these “design” decisions were reached. Extra credit for defending the typography, which is unreadable for a person with normal vision and hopeless for anyone else. One more bonus point for explaining the incorrect French hyphenation, itself obviously banged out by an anglo.

Over the decades, the New York Times’ coverage of the gay and lesbian community has changed. Looking at the big picture, first the paper ignored us, then refused to actually call us gay, then begrudgingly did, then unbegrudgingly did. In the 21st century, the Gray Lady wants you to know that its version of fair and balanced reporting involves an unrelentingly complimentary tone. The Times wants you to know just how gay-positive it is.

But old habits die hard. We’re still erased from the record or portrayed as victims of “whisper” campaigns. Even when they’re being nice to us, the Times can’t keep from lying. The paper is like a Republican struggling to deal with a crowd of black people: It’s smiles all the way till the Freudian slips bubble up.

In a textbook example of lying about gays by saying good things about us, Times reporter Tanzina Vega cheerfully “documented” just how eager “marketers” are to cash in on “a community with money,” to quote one of the headlines attached to the piece. (Heds are fungible and are commonly written by editors.) Her article also functioned as a TechCrunch-style endorsement or ratification of a dicey new startup site, Dot 429.

Another attraction for advertisers, as stigmas about the groups fade and the economy tightens, is the opportunity to sell products. Howard Buford, the president and chief executive for Prime Access, a multicultural advertising agency, said one factor favoring the group for advertisers is two-income households where both partners are men, who still make more on average than women.

“When you have a male couple, that effect gets amplified,” Mr. Buford said.

And while more LGBT couples are having children of their own or adopting children, Mr. Buford said many couples did not have children, leaving them with more disposable income and “disposable time” for travel and entertainment.

What kind of mistakes has Vega made here?

1. Facts about money. Not a single factual assertion is actually backed up by evidence, though one of the statements has a thin veneer of truth.

   • The consensus of the economics literature holds that gay men earn less than straight men on average (lesbians slightly more than straight women, also on average). In fact, many surveys show that gay-male and lesbian couples earn about the same; that figure puts gay men below straight men and lesbians above straight women, in average cases. But essentially all the research shows that married hetero couples make the most money, due mostly to the so-called marriage premium. (A man married to a woman makes more than any other man or woman on average.)

     Hence while Buford’s first statement is accurate but misleading, his next statement (male income “gets amplified”) has no basis and just doesn’t make sense.

   • The economics literature does not back up any notion that gay men or lesbians have more “disposable income,” which the literature cannot really define. (None of the attempted definitions of the term are well accepted or even basically sensible.) Even if you use a kind of casual or civilian definition that disposable income is what you spend on things you truly don’t need, how many of those things are bought with income and not credit, especially for the kind of gay men Buford is targetting?

2. Facts about children. Lesbians have children roughly half as often as straight people, gay men about half as often again. These facts, which Vega did not bother to cite, do not demonstrate that either kind of homosexual couple has more disposable anything, including money or time. But that is exactly what Buford implies.

3. Sources with vested interests. Howard Buford stands to make money if clients accept his proposition that gay men have “amplified” earnings to tap. As in dozens of other cases of media misrepresentation of gay money, the people trying to sell something are the ones claiming gay buyers are unusually able to afford what they’re selling. These blandishments and outright lies are so old they were first demolished by Badgett’s Money, Myths, and Change 11 years ago. That is a long time for reporters to trust biased sources and stenographically report their claims as if true. Vega is the latest to perpetuate a disgraceful tradition that violates basic tenets of journalism.

Incorrect facts are still incorrect even when and if they make a minority group look good. A journalist does have to let the facts get in the way of writing pro-gay articles. Publishing stories that flatter your own self-image that some of your best friends are gay and you’re the farthest thing from homophobic – that is my interpretation here – is an exercise that should be stopped cold by the need to get your facts right.

Over the span of a month, Vega didn’t respond to my request for comments, nor did Buford, nor did the public editor of the Times, Arthur Brisbane.

Meanwhile, in early 2012 we witnessed a bread-and-circuses spectacle in which a cutesy Times correction became a cause célèbre among easily-distracted twits. And in the explanation of the underlying error, the Timeswoman who made the mistake insisted “[t]he Times’s rule is, we correct anything that is wrong, no matter how small or seemingly silly. And I don’t know any of my colleagues who would want to do differently.” This too is a lie.

Journalist Keph Senett explored the allegedly low participation of women in soccer at the Vancouver Outgames. In so doing, she managed to pop into the microwave some stale myths about gay money and women’s wages, hit the ADD 30 SEC. button, and walk away.

Why don’t I just show you a mildly-edited version of the E-mail I sent her, to which she didn’t bother to respond? (I’ll skip my explanation of how she linked to the wrong parliamentary study on women’s incomes.)

The economic realities of LGBT adults tend to mirror the broader population – and sometimes exaggerate it.

That isn’t true. Usually the claim is that “the gay community” (really gay males) are a “desirable” or “DINK” demographic. Neither your statement nor that blandishment is true. The consensus of the economic literature holds that gay men earn less than straight men on average, while lesbians earn slightly more than hetero women on average.

There is no way to gloss these findings as “[t]he economic realities of [gay and lesbian] adults tend to mirror the broader population[’s],” because the opposite is true. Also, bisexuals have barely ever been surveyed and transgenders never, to my knowledge. This is another case when the intrinsically inaccurate acronym “LGBT” shows its intrinsic inaccuracy.

author Julie Cool used 2008 metrics including total earnings data to measure the gender wage gap.

This research isn’t relevant to gay and lesbian adults. I assume you are trying to claim that, no matter what anyone, especially any man, says, women earn 64% of what men do and that’s an absolute emergency that must be addressed everywhere, even in gay soccer. Or have I got you all wrong?

Her findings: In 2008, women earned 64% of what men earned. Theoretically, a family with two female earners would net 78% of the income of a straight couple. The number drops to 64% when compared to families with two male earners.

Again, false.

according to 2006 Statistics Canada numbers, four times as many lesbians as gay men had children under the age of 24 living in the home

Now, that study I’d like to see. Generally lesbians are estimated to have children twice as often as gay men (but half as often as heteros). Reference, please.

In general, the more left-wing the commentator, the more impatient they are to insist that women earn three-quarters or two-thirds what men do across the board, and that such income disparity is fully attributable to systemic sexism. Senett takes this ball and scores an own goal.

Xtra, the homosexualist fortnightly published by a not-for-profit yet funded by de facto porn, is hiring for a new site, DailyXtra.com.

Editorial director Matt Mills won’t give me a straight answer about the new site. Conceptually, it sounds like another failed gay blog, with:

• atrocious code that might take down your browser

• /News/NationalNews/2011/jan7_mile-long-slugs-replicating-most-but-not-all-the-text-in-the-headline-that-incidentally-isnt-even-marked-up-as-an-h1.aspx/ (“asspix”)

• tables for layout

• Flash video

• ads, including not-safe-for-work ads

• gassy rehashing of other people’s work (plagiarism masquerading as “aggregation”)

• defamation

• pageview-inflating segmentation of articles; preponderance of “slideshows” with similar effect

• comments, which may be reported to law enforcement

Xtra operates a severely broken technical infrastructure. Perhaps you’ve tried to load an Xtra news story on iOS?

A tall, overly excitable Ukrainian bottom was chipping away at the Sisyphean task of fixing that infrastructure until they canned him. Among other things, he taught the men nearing retirement age who run the place what Flickr is.

A question I asked Mills, for which I await an answer: “Do you want semicompetent people with bad taste poorly implementing half-remembered bad advice, or do you want this thing to succeed? In other words, will you hire the least unqualified applicants or will you actually do digital journalism right? You’ve got one chance at this.”

A properly conceived gay-news site requires:

1. positively no comments whatsoever on any news stories; ruthlessly premoderated comments on selected op-ed pieces

2. bulletproof code

3. professional graphic design (which costs in the low five digits for one of the few real Web designers at work today, most of whom I know personally); Webfonts inadvisable unless and until tested on Windows

4. well-tested adaptive layouts for common and many uncommon platforms (double-checked by PPK)

5. legitimate fact-checking, including looking up every factual assertion (down to the name of the sitting prime minister) and calling sources to verify quotes

6. a viable print stylesheet

7. ongoing training for staff in markup, semantics, and character encoding

8. original journalism only; relegation of daily links to Pinboard

9. its own Flipboard pane and Flipboard-specific CSS

10. rational slugs (can be conceptually overlapped with shortlinks)

11. at most exactly one ad at a time

12. Instapaper and Readability integration, among others

13. a reader-contribution model

14. a ban on staff picking or perpetuating fights, especially on Twitter

15. training pages and videos to raise the skills of its readers to 21st-century levels

16. complete avoidance of internal E-mail for any editorial or production function whatsoever, with every single thing done via Basecamp, the chosen CMS (probably WordPress), meetings, instant messaging, and phone

In other words, anything at all that seems remotely familiar from existing gay-news sites must be avoided at all costs. Everything they’re doing they’re doing wrong.

It’s nice they’re hiring a copy editor; heaven knows they need one, even online. But this is a publication that still won’t use italics (because Ken Popert banned them 20 years ago) or write periods in abbreviations like Mr. and St., so they have nowhere to go but up when it comes to copy quality.

But this thing needs a real editor who actually knows his stuff and isn’t labouring under the misapprehension he’s a volunteer facilitatrix at a rape-crisis centre. This isn’t the first time Mills and Xtra have played games with me, but if at some point Mills deigns to actually answer my questions I might file an application. If I were you, I wouldn’t laugh.

(CORRECTED) On 2012.01.05, the Canada 2 four-man bobsled driven by Chris Spring crashed on the track at Altenberg, Germany. Three of the four bobsledders were injured – Spring, Bill Thomas, and Graeme Rinholm – and were hospitalized in Germany. Tim Randall had only superficial injuries and was not hospitalized. The Canadian bobsleigh team pulled out of the race the next day, with coach Tom de la Hunty insisting the track remained unsafe.

• Bobsleigh Canada statement (which took a full day to appear [timeline])

• CP coverage

• Sydney Morning Herald coverage

On 2012.01.06, Bobsleigh Canada held a conference call for journalists. I phoned in and took notes. Participants (alphabetically):

• Nathan Cicoria, high-performance director

• Chris Dornan, media rep (normally out of Houston, in Val di Fiemme, Italy, during the call)

• Tom de la Hunty, head coach

• Pierre Lueders, driving coach

• Lyndon Rush, pilot, Canada 1

• Don Wilson, Bobsleigh Canada CEO

When not specified, usually it was de la Hunty answering questions. [continue with: Chris Spring bobsleigh accident: Liveblog of conference call with reporters →]

Almost every mistake that could be made has been made in the conception and production of the “high-class” Berner Men Calendar 2011.

• They picked bobsledders (gold star right there), then shaved them baby-smooth. Obviously that isn’t smooth enough, so out came the baby oil.

• They forced one of the few ginger bobsledders, Manuel Machata, to take off his glasses. We’ve been through this already: You don’t need the façade of perfect vision, let alone actual perfect vision, to pilot a sled.

• They made the second-biggest guy in all of bobsleigh, Alexander Mann, look as reedy as a platform diver.

• Failing to heed the lesson of Dieux du stade, they cap the whole thing off with some scaredy-cat shower scenes that do nothing for anybody. I doubt the guy even felt cleaner by the end of it.

It goes on and on and on. And in another sign these Germans should have quit while they were ahead, Berner keeps pumping out self-incriminating making-of videos (Day 1, Day 2 – look up the rest yourself).

Something has to be amiss when any of these athletes looks better seated in a makeup chair wearing a T-shirt.

How exactly did Germans manage to make shirtless German bobsledders seem tacky? How much of an achievement is it that I feel sorry for these guys?