Right-wing assholes can be tremendously entertaining. Mark Steyn is one of them. I love his TV and radio appearances; give him enough airtime and he’ll inevitably wander off into the grasslands of show tunes and life in the Theatre. I found America Alone snappy and amusing, if – and this is what we sign up for – tendentious. I have never quite understood the Kath & Kim–compliant Australian accent this U.K.-educated “Canadian” living in New Hampshire speaks in, but it sure does add to the fun.

Steyn’s new book After America: Get Ready for Armageddon pretends to be a sequel, I guess. In fact it is merely a crotchety, ill-typeset grab bag of annoyances. Nobody clutches to anecdotes as proof of moral and societal decline like right-wing assholes.

What’s Mark Steyn complaining about now? (Order shown below is almost exactly that seen in the book.)

• “The ‘stimulus’ and ObamaCare” (endlessly)

• “When the Commies take Taiwan” (joking reference)

• Wodehouse

• The Book of Daniel

• “American ruin” (not joking); “Declinism”

• “Globaloney”

• The letters in armageddon: Addiction, Redistribution, Monopoly, Arteriosclerosis (yes), Global retreat, Engineering, Decay, Disintegration, Open season, Nukes away!

• “Dopey Obamatrons of 2008” who “droned… ‘Yes, we can!’ ”

• NASA’s desire to “make Muslims ‘feel good’ about their contributions to science”

• Dams and aqueducts of yore

• Seeking “new, faster ways to live in an eternal present” instead of reproducing

• GM, Chrysler, Detroit

• De facto governmental monopolies (not actual corporate ones; “Government today has a monopoly of monopoly”)

• Statists (a word only right-wing assholes and Objectivists ever use; then again, cisgendered is a word only sworn enemies of those groups ever use, and Steyn also complains about “code language” and “code words”)

• “ ‘Rights’ to stuff”

• Human-rights commissions here, but also OSHA

• Bankers and “imaginary money”

• Eco-totalitarianism

• Infertility

• Big unions

• Public-sector salaries

• Greece, Italy, Germany

• “Celebrat[ing] diversity”

• “We are obsessed with identity, but any identity other than ‘American’ ” (written by Australian-accented U.S./Canadian binational)

• “My old pal Boris Johnson”

• Illiteracy

• “Feelings”

• Sexless, infantilized, semi-employed hipsters (males emasculated)

• “A ‘family’ is any living arrangement you happen to dig at that particular moment”

• “Procedure” (in context of cops and security guards refusing to save people during accidents or crime)

• Demise of “women and children first,” which apparently never was practised, least of all on the Titanic

• Britain (apparently in toto)

• “ ‘Human rights’ ”

• “Dependistan”

• “Almost every claim made for the benefits of mass immigration” (“is false”)

• “The jobs Americans won’t hire Americans to do”

• “Conformicrats”

• Shark and coyote attacks as proof our enemies don’t fear us anymore. (Next graf begins “After the boom in Islamic terrorism”)

• Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (“Is there a Queers Against Sharia?”)

• Genetic diseases brought on by Pakistani Brits marrying their first cousins

• A “ ‘Food Safety’ Act, among whose items was federal regulation of schoolhouse bake sales”

• “Six-figure universal college education”

• “Islamophobia”

Globe and Mail editorial, 2001.08.13 (behind paywall), in response to wolverines attacking kitties in Kitimat:

[I]f we truly love and respect animals, we shouldn’t take sides. Wolverines are relatively rare; B.C. has just 3,500, and is lucky to have them. They should be disturbed as little as possible. Cats can be kept indoors; children can be told to keep their distance. A pet perambulating on its own is not a citizen and, as a general principle, has no right to state protection from wild animals. Coexistence may not always be peaceful, but it is the best policy.

Remember, animals do not have “rights”; they have interests. Kittycats have an interest in not getting eaten, while wolverines have an interest in not getting shot.

There is, however, the issue of children too small to fend for themselves against the existential threat of wolverines. Not all children understand they need to be vigilant, nor are they mature enough for that to be a fair burden. This will rarely come up with prissy 21st-century mothers; helicopter moms wouldn’t dream of letting their priceless bundles of joy play all alone in the backyard, but not all moms are interested in raising emotionally stunted prima donnas.

This serious issue also does not justify the typical right-wing response to all living things they don’t like, from wrongly-convicted murderers to mature trees to anything but a fetus: exterminate.

How the Globe’s nonexpert, Courtney Shea, assesses two business-book covers that are so unoriginal and rote they could in fact have been designed by algorithm.

With the aqua lettering [“lettering”!] and Dickinson’s ethereal wardrobe choice, the book, at first glance, looks like The Secret for 2011 audiences. Too bad Oprah wasn’t around to trumpet it. [Oh, snap]	With his imposing stance and thick, gold-embossed lettering, the look is very Art of the Deal. (Thankfully, O’Leary didn’t feel the need to imitate Donald Trump’s hairstyle.)

An actually-quite-good article in the Grauniad asked A-list graphic designers to nominate designers they liked.

Quentin Newark (whose name is not New York or Newyark) nominated John Sorrell (link added):

John Sorrell used to run a big design agency with his wife Frances Newell, and they always did very expressive, gleeful work that didn’t seem to be constrained by rules. They rebranded British Airways with different art for each tailfin – the model of which Margaret Thatcher famously covered with her handkerchief.

This seemed like an apocryphal tale. Too delicious to be true, really. So I double-checked.

An E-mail to Sorrell’s new foundation went unanswered, but the Margaret Thatcher Foundation almost instantly top-posted a reply stating that yes, it really happened and there’s actual TV footage.

So there you have it: A prime minister who understood the importance of design and actually expressed an opinion on what she didn’t like. That right there made Margaret Thatcher half again a better client than most actual clients.

(UPDATED) Don’t Quit Your Gay Job is a series airing on precarious homosexualist diginet OutTV that has no business being as good as it is. (Also on the iTunes.) It isn’t spectacular, but the show doesn’t let a low budget and rather poor production values (including no goddamn captioning) queer a good idea.

The exercise is taken with just the right seriousness, with no ironic distancing from the task of actually learning the job. You’d think from the title that cohosts Rob Easton and Sean Horlor try out stereotypically gay jobs for shits and giggles, but in fact the jobs seem to run the gamut from curler to bus driver.

(The show with the highest chance of fiasco seemed to be the one on horseback riding. Avoided, though.)

I was surprised to learn there’d be a second season. And pleased. Then we kept running across an oddball commercial for one of OutTV’s few advertisers, Richmond Honda. The commercial leaves the impression that Easton actually sells cars there and Horlor actually works on its Web site. They’re listed elsewhere as having various freelance jobs in radio production and “communications,” but: That’s what these guys are reduced to? Working for one of the few advertisers on the network that carries their show? (It’s a bit like 1950s television, is it not?)

I asked Horlor via the Facebook about this, and mailed Easton at obvious addresses; no response. Richmond Honda also didn’t respond.

Here is my point.

My point is that Canada has a lot of astonishingly crappy TV shows with derivative or half-assed ideas. This one isn’t. It’s hobbled by lack of budget. Even what other producers consider an anemic budget on their own shows would be a windfall of cash for Don’t Quit Your Gay Job. Shouldn’t this program be on CBC?

Actual response from Sean Horlor

(UPDATE, 2011.09.19) Sean Horlor eventually noticed my Facebook message hidden in some obscure folder or other and writes:

That Honda commercial was something we shot between seasons. The recession wasn’t kind to Canadian productions based in Vancouver. I viewed it as an opportunity for Rob and I to get something new on the network while we were waiting to film more episodes and let people know that we hadn’t vanished entirely.

All right, but is it true or false that Rob works on the Richmond Honda floor and you do some kind of work on the Web site?

False. That was the creative treatment for the commercial. Neither Rob nor I have ever worked at that dealership.

Financials

I removed a couple of sentences from the earlier version of this posting that did a half-assed job describing OutTV’s precarious financial position. Here, from the CRTC’s reports on specialty-service financials, are selected income and expense numbers from the last three years.

Financially, OutTV is losing proposition even with half a million subscribers.

Another update

(2011.11.25) The show’s producers are out of ideas and are trolling for spec work.