I listen to ABC Radio National’s linguistics program Lingua Franca. A bit dry and academic at times. But I put the kibosh on that last week when hostess Maria Zijlstra interviewed me about Canadian English and Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours. Three years later, but still.

• Episode page

• Download via iTunes

Speaking of kiboshing, Maria plotzed when I used the word “bupkus.” And Maria was rather interested in Canadian run-on bilingual packaging (“Trademarks and graphic design owned by Procter & Gamble détient les marques et conception graphique”), for which I ginned up a set of Flickr photographs that she probably won’t actually use.

“Bring your purchases to the cash and pay by Interac”

We also had a whole discussion about Canadian-only words and senses like cash and Interac (and debit). (I did not get any points for knowing that the Australian equivalent of Interac is eftpos or EFTPOS.)

Just this morning, in Lynn Coady’s The Antagonist, I found that exact usage of cash to mean variously cashier, cash register, and bank of same.

On the iPad

Press the Home and lock-screen buttons together. (Does not work with AssistiveTouch. I’ve already filed a bug)

On the Kindle Fire

Undertake this 22-step process, including downloading a software-development kit and typing a dozen commands in Terminal. (“To take screenshots of the Kindle in action, you’ll have to dismount the Kindle from your Mac by clicking the Disconnect button”)

(Cf. connecting to the wifi at McDonald’s.)

Here we have the Mondrian-influenced storefront of the Lululemon outlet in Yorkville, Toronto:

Note the “Occupy Yoga Studios” slogan typeset (in Trebuchet) on the vitrine. You will recall that Lululemon is the objectively Objectivist yoga-gear retailer. Whyever might an Objectivist retailer co-opt the Occupy movement?

I called the store and asked. Floor manager Sarah didn’t even let me finish my question. “Joe, I can stop you immediately. I can’t comment.” She also wouldn’t give her surname (“I’m not comfortable disclosing that information. Thank you” [HANGS UP]).

Sarah wouldn’t tell me if it was the store’s idea or headquarters’. She told me to call Vancouver. I E-mailed them instead, asking:

How does Lululemon’s cooptation of the Occupy movement, which protests against the greed and unaccountability of rich elites, square with Lululemon’s avowed Objectivist philosophy, which endorses and encourages greed, unaccountability, and elites?

Jennifer Neziol wrote back with an obviously canned response:

lululemon [sic] has a unique marketing strategy which is grassroots[‑]focus[s]ed and includes a decentralized approach; our stores are each responsible for creating their own merchandising and window displays that are unique and resonate with their respective guests and community. We are passionate about sparking conversations with and among our guests, and value their feedback.

Actually, Sarah valued my feedback enough to hang up on me. I got the impression mine was not the first call she had received, but, like every other question I asked, Sarah refused to answer.

I am pretty sure this disjunction of Objectivism and “Occupy” slogan rivals the recall of 100,000 Atlas Shrugged DVDs’ ideologically incorrect packaging as highlights of Objectivism for ’011.

Denise Balkissoon profiles five sets of lesbian moms, or their children, in the Globe. That’s already feminist enough, don’t you think? But then she goes and spoils it all by saying something stupid (emphasis added):

Considering… the fact that women on average earn lower salaries, one might assume that kids raised by lesbian couples would have tougher lives. And yet it seems it is not so.

Lower than whom? Lesbians earn, on average, more than straight women. Lesbian couples do not earn more than heterosexual couples where the husband works. In fact, nobody earns more than those couples, an effect of the so-called marriage premium.

Balkissoon’s throwaway statement seemed like a reiteration of the tired myth that wymmyn earn only seven cents for every dime that men do. (The insinuation is that men and women are hired for the same jobs yet women are intentionally paid 70% of men’s salaries.) In fact, if you match for age, experience, hours worked, and education, and also match for time spent away raising children (the biggest single factor), the wage penalty disappears or decreases to about 25%. That means there still is an average wage penalty for being female, but the conventional wisdom overestimates it by a factor of at least three. I want Toronto’s national newspaper to refrain from blithely repeating conventional wisdom.

At any rate, I mailed Balkissoon asking her to tell me what exactly she was talking about (again: Lower than whom?) but got no response. I also asked why she focussed on lesbian moms and not gay dads. Obviously, as she notes, there is more data available on lesbians. But I was working from the assumption that lesbian moms are always acceptable while gay dads are viewed as kind of icky, as all male contact with children now is. (If a mother raising a child is a societal triumph, just think what two mothers raising a child might be.) She didn’t answer that question either, so I did not, in turn, get to explain what I meant and receive a comment on that.

I view these distinctions as important because Balkissoon’s entire piece was predicated on research showing how well lesbian moms and their children fare. I expected the same adherence to attested fact everywhere else in her article and didn’t get it.

Months in the making, today I’m releasing Borked Unicode, a pop-up blog that aims to teach hacks (i.e., journalists) the minimum they need to know about Unicode. The goal is to make it possible for hacks to write clean copy.

The centrepiece is a 4,600-word tutorial that should have run in A List Apart today. Read that first. (I’ll break it up into smaller sections
maybe next week.) There’s also a Twitter. [continue with: Borked Unicode: Tips for journalists on writing clean copy →]

After Steve Jobs died, a number of observers, led by Christopher Bonanos, noted that, far from merely sitting along the continuum of American inventors where Edison and Ford are also found, Jobs’s beliefs and practices were almost a recapitulation of those of Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid. Commenters ran with the comparison (Carl Johnson, John Byrne, 37 Signals).

I remembered that, in 1996, I wrote an article for the Globe and Mail about the design history of the Polaroid SX‑70. I relied heavily on Peter C. Wensberg’s 1987 book Land’s Polaroid.

My copy is in a box somewhere, so I ordered the library’s sole copy. I looked through this memoir of Wensberg’s time with the company for parallels between Land and Jobs. After a while I simply had to put the book down, because the parallels were nearly exact and showed no signs of stopping. Here are some notable examples, with approximate page numbers and the eras covered. [continue with: Steve Jobs at Apple vs. Edwin Land at Polaroid →]

Casey House, the Toronto AIDS hospice where PWAs do not always go to die, plans to expand its building. And obviously the way to do that is to graft on an appendage of cuboids curtain-walled in glass.

Self-evidently, every heritage building has to be updated to the very latest in Modernism circa 1920. In Toronto, an old building can’t be considered modernized until it has been sodomized and parasitized by glass and metal.

Modernism represents arrested development on the part of architects, which is bad enough, as it constitutes professional misconduct when misapplied this way. For clients, especially arriviste homeowners and ‑renovators, Modernism is nothing more than a way to prove to your neighbours you’re not just rich, you’re rich and smart. The problem here is if you actually understood anything about Modern architecture, you’d know that if you can see your neighbours through your plate-glass windows, you’re too close to civilization to build a Modern structure.

But those rectilinear lines – so clean. Such a welcome geometric relief from the blood and guts of the Great War, for example.

Imagine you’re a patient with AIDS residing in Casey House. By definition, you are sick, perhaps terminally. What Hariri Pontarini Architects has in store for you is a complex with no walls, only windows, so your every lesion, hump, sunken cheek, IV, catheter, and bedpan will be on full display for everyone in the neighbourhood.

When I asked why this suicidally inappropriate design language was “chosen” for an AIDS hospice, I eventually received four paragraphs from Kathleen Sandusky that is such a load of bullshit that, to save her embarrassment, I will not quote it at length. She did insist that “[w]e have yet to design the building,” despite having released high-resolution renderings to Xtra for publication, which renderings she later claimed they were “not able to release.”

(Sandusky Cc:ed her top-posted E-mail to two other people. Maybe this topic makes people nervous. And I won’t even bother linking you to the site that shills for $10 million in community donations, given its inability to run a simple video or simply tell me about the project.)

In Toronto, AIDS patients, even those on death’s door, can get any colour of wall they want as long as it’s transparent. This odious misapplication of architectural style, so redolent of Toronto’s status-climbing and mediocrity, is a complete non-starter and needs to be stopped in its tracks.

Meet designer Ryan Korban, an unrepentant perpetrator of cruelty to animals. (“People don’t come to me for green design. I love fur, animal skins and taxidermy.”) Korban gets himself glamourized in Out (“I get a lot of mean E-mails”) and the Journal:

Korban’s SoHo apartment… can be described as a minimalist animal-rights activist’s nightmare. The couch is covered with sheared mink. The bathroom rug is spring buckskin. His night stand is made of stingray; the face of his dresser set is covered with ostrich skin. “What can I say? I love my exotics[.]”

He isn’t an outlier case. You expect gays to be at the vanguard of social thought, to stand on principle, to defend the weak, but that isn’t how it works. Gays’ selfishness and decadence are actually more offensive than, say, Republicans’: Not only are gays supposed to know better, they actually do, then spin on their ethical heels and swish down the road in the opposite direction.

Out is actually a good venue to examine this trend, having given us a double-page spread of fur coats and gay cruises. “Whether you’re a dandy or a daddy, you’ll want to burrow into these stylish, comfy coats,” like a beaver/corduroy jobby for $8,800 and a mink-trimmed Burberry at $3,795.