The so-called National Captioning Institute has been a reliable source of half-assed captioning since circa 1980. I can attest to the accuracy of that statement because I have been watching their mediocrity for the entire time.

Under the auspices of Joel Snyder, NCI pretends to offer audio description. It’s outsourced to freelancers, of course, and they explicitly offer to use non-union voice talent. What else would one expect from a company whose first president, the late John Ball, was reportedly the 14th candidate offered the position, and is in fact the same company that locked out its employees and shipped piracy-sensitive work overseas?

And their description is atrocious. For some reason no doubt related to undercutting WGBH on price, NCI describes a few movies for Paramount. One of them was Iron Man 2, whose description track somehow survived the transfer to DVD. Listen to a sample for 3½ minutes (MP3) and tell me you could put up with this bullshit for two straight hours. (Voice talent uncredited, but it’s obviously just some guy and not a real actor, and is probably the writer of the description, and is quite audibly gay.)

How could this be done better? By hiring WGBH. They even do a good job describing FUCK YOU.

Perpetuating his mythos as an aw-shucks down-home Newfoundland comedian even though he actually is a rich gay TV star in Toronto, Rick Mercer snows a gullible reporter from the Star.

Emily Mathieu uncritically accepts Mercer’s contention that the really interesting house in his past is the one he bought back home for nineteen and a half grand, $4,000 of which came from his parents. In fact the Mercer house of interest is the one he and his producer/husband bought, with cash, in Playter Estates, as Frank reported years ago.

This insufferable fixture of CBC’s endless cavalcade of news “parodies” is at pains to keep the press from discussing three important facts that, taken together, explain who he is and where he is today: He’s rich, he’s gay, and the producer of his shows is also his husband.

Was there a moment in your career where you felt you had achieved financial security?

Yes and no I don’t care to elaborate.

Let’s leave it at that, why don’t we?

Mathieu refused to respond to my inquiry about Mercer’s manse. And, not incidentally, the interview has the copy quality I would associate with high-school students rewriting Wikipedia articles in Word for Windows.

(UPDATED) Of course gay blogs don’t make money. Their owners don’t know their own industries, have ungodly awful taste, and fall prey to the same malady that, like Dutch elm or the ash borer, threatens to clearcut the forest: Doggedly, dumbly, suicidally insisting on doing what is known not to work instead of what does work.

We’ve been through this before. The difference now is that journalists who should know better are marvelling at the fact that failed methods are failing.

• Nikki Usher wrote a piece for Nieman in which she gawked, as if guilelessly, at the unprofitable niche that gay blogs scrabble around in.

• Chuck Colbert at industry newsletter PressPassQ wrote what amounted to a follow-up report that ended up sounding just as baffled by facts that should have been obvious all along.

• David Badash banged out what was almost a parody of a blog post – 400 words too long, undisciplined, and rife with hand-wringing.

I note that all of these writers pretended that the grizzled positoid’s site is not actually the leading gay blog in the United States. Fittingly for a country where it actually never does get better for gays, his site actually is the leading gay blog there.

All these writers are so ill-informed about the economics of online publishing that of course they don’t understand banner ads don’t work and text ads work even worse. Yet those two options, along with paywalls, are the only means of making money these writers seem ever to have heard of.

Now, why else might gay blogs be unprofitable? Could it be because they’re atrocious? You cannot separate revenue from questions of taste and user experience; the observable fact is that gay blogs have no taste and their owners don’t know the first thing about providing a pleasant experience. (Or they don’t give a shit.)

Hence when writers come along who also have bad taste and do not even know what user experience is, let alone hold it as a priority, it just stands to reason that the resulting coverage displays bafflement and ignorance, tainted with a dollop of overplayed dismay, that terribly important community resources like Queerty and Towleroad can’t make a go of it.

(None of these media critics is interested in dialogue about their criticism. Usher laid on a thick, sputum-like, top-posted layer of sarcasm and dudgeon when I repeatedly asked for comment, which she refused to provide. Colbert sounded baffled by my question and left it at that even after I linked him to more information. Badash ignored a request for comment.)

At any rate, these sites do not practise journalism in any recognizable sense. Of course Weblogs, since time immemorial, have linked out to other sites, but these sites do precious little else. They all do the same thing, all link to the same coverage of the same events, and all share the same political stance. (The only discernible difference is the proportion of coverage of “hot” boys.) Gay and lesbian readers in these sites’ presumed U.S. audience simply do not need that many links to today’s evidence the Republican party hates them.

All these sites should be replaced by a single Pinboard feed or legitimate curated linkblog. That in itself would immediately eliminate nearly all the content on these sites, since such content is almost invariably a link with maybe a quoted paragraph.

This model works perfectly well for Maria Popova, whom none of the principals involved in this tale will have the good taste to read. Maybe they’ve distantly heard of Jason Kottke. (Skill-testing question: Can they find either of those writers without a link?) Linkblogging works when the blogger develops and exhibits curatorial taste. U.S. gay blogs just link to everything and duplicate each other while doing it.

You quite simply do not need to load a blog homepage, one that might actually crash your browser, to find links to today’s minor variation of the U.S. gay news that has not changed its tenor in a generation. Writers and readers need to update their methods. Then again, these are people who find the decade-old technology known as RSS too technical.

As these distasteful, interchangeable linkblogs manqués scrape by, legitimate gay and lesbian journalism continues its steady decline. Indeed, is there any legitimate gay journalism practised in the United States?

In an honest reckoning of the gay-blog landscape, some combination of the following would occur:

• Links would be offloaded to exactly one legitimate linking service run by one curator with taste. (No candidates spring to mind.) Do this right and you get your own panel on Flipboard, a medium none of these people will have heard of, let alone use daily.

• Competitors like Towleroad, Queerty, and After Elton, which clearly are not, never were, and never will be commercially viable even were they monopolies, would simply merge into a single site that focusses on legitimate journalism, something these sites’ owners are admittedly incapable of producing. And you’d pay a few bucks a month to read it. Paywall becomes gaywall.

• The remaining merged site, the grizzled positoid, and a few hand-picked sites of similar ilk would do the only thing that works and start their own ad network. Each member site would show precisely one ad at a time. That would solve every problem at once, not least including the issue of inappropriate ads featuring shirtless guys popping up alongside AIDS obituaries, gaybashing reports, and this week’s teen suicide.

Precisely none of these sites would allow comments, which are always a bad idea in a news context, are reused by religious fundamentalists, and trigger FBI investigations.

Of course the owners of these sites will have too little taste, and will be too suicidally stupid, to take the only steps available to them that will turn failed hobbies into businesses. And journalism critics will continue to be just as ignorant as their subjects, expressing bafflement that a model that obviously could never work hasn’t.

Stated a different way, neither side will take the advice that will make them relevant and secure a viable business, not least because I am the one offering it.

About 373 times since 1996. That is my estimate using a proxy search for "Mr. Speaker" in the online Hansard.

(No hits for "Madame Speaker"; I checked. A more instructive search would begin from 1976.11.15 when the Parti Québécois was elected, but there are no computerized records dating back that far.)

I’d never heard of GetGlue. The venture-capital-backed company AdaptiveBlue Inc. produces some kind of iPhone app by that name. I learned of the app’s existence when I read a blog post about a 45-minute podcast two blind people put together teaching you how to use VoiceOver to overcome GetGlue’s inaccessibility.

In short, the makers of an application for the platform that is the easiest to make accessible to blind people in the history of computing refused to do so, forcing blind people to spend hours futzing with workarounds and recording instructions for other blind people to carry out their own futzing.

And now GetGlue is hiring a purported iPhone/JavaScript developer, itself something of an oil-and-water mix.

To apply, create a http://getglue.com account [sic] and explore the system. LIKE [sic] your top 10 movies, shows, albums, and books – both tech and non-tech. After that, E-mail your GetGlue username, your LinkedIn profile or a r[é]sum[é], and a sample of your recent code[,] to jobs at getglue dot com.

Note: Your candidacy will not be considered if you don’t follow the steps above.

In other words, drink the Kool-Aid before applying. How irresistible.

Partner Fraser Kelton and PR flak Claire Gendel both refused to comment. I’d say this is one company that should be actively boycotted, if not sued. And I don’t make those statements lightly.

Yes, but only in Whitehorse (and in Yellowknife and in Fort Nelson, B.C.), because those are NorthwesTel’s sole 3G networks.

But let’s back up: Why wouldn’t you have been able to use an iPhone in the Far North?

• When you get right down to it, there is only one telephone company (and barely a couple of ISPs) in the territories. NorthwesTel, a Bell subsidiary, handles almost everything related to telephone, Internet, and cable and satellite TV in the three territories and in northern Alberta and British Columbia. But in some locations, the same service actually goes by the name Bell and there is a division of labour between parent company and subsidiary.

• Cell networks use protocols incompatible with the iPhone, save for those three cities and towns.

• Bandwidth and airtime are so expensive that the cost represents a direct threat to economic development in the North.

At any rate, yes, you can buy the iPhone 4S and use it in those three hotspots. (The iPhone 4 was previously available and presumably still is.) I found out this fact by reading a single Twit from NorthwesTel. But there was no mention of the iPhone at all on the official Web site, which assuredly is not the full name of the company plus .com (it’s NWTel.CA). Nor was there a press release. There was no indication at all that the 4S was available save for that single Twit.

So I called them up. Emily Younker later told me that Apple “has strict stipulations with their vendors about marketing. You would need to check with them for specifics.” I did that, asking Simon Atkins, Apple Canada’s media rep (and someone I knew in his former life as a freelance propagandist), what gave. I didn’t get an answer, but I hadn’t gotten my hopes up for one, either.

I called all three of the “retail stores” where one could actually get one’s hands on an iPhone, but only the Fort Nelson store answered its phone. And they do have posters and an info pillar up, along with flyers and the like, though “we’re not allowed to actually advertise [it] on our in-store TV,” the staffmember said. And yes, the 4S and the 4 are both “very, very popular.”

Why do I care? I find the North interesting, but mostly it’s because I love the idea of using an iPhone while walking down the street in Yellowknife space-age and charming. (It’s never warmer than “20” [nobody bothers saying “minus”] and the whole town’s out of milk until the next boat can make it across the lake, but, by God, I’ve got the same apps those assholes in Silicon Valley do!)

Essentially, then, I like the idea of Northern iPhone.

The producers of Don’t Quit Your Gay Job (q.v.) are trolling for spec work. OutTV’s Blue Satittammanoon wrote on the Facebook:

OutTV is looking for job ideas for the new season of our hit series Don’t Quit Your Gay Job. If you have a job you want Rob and Sean to do, leave your ideas in the comment box below. […]

Disclaimer: By submitting your suggestion(s) to Convergent Productions Ltd. and/or OutTV Network Inc. (collectively, “Producer”) for new episodes of Don’t Quit Your Gay Job, you hereby acknowledge and agree that:

1. you understand that Producer may receive many suggestions for the same or similar types of episodes;

2. Producer shall have no obligation to produce an episode based on your suggestion(s); and

3. you shall have no right to compensation or acknowledgement of any kind if Producer, in its sole discretion, does produce an episode based on your suggestion(s) or similar suggestions from other people.