This is in fact how big Polaroids by Attila Richard Lukacs is.

And the book contains several gatefolds – in a few cases on facing pages.

Now, the “content”? Nothing to pop a boner about. In fact, the book might contain the first and only boring piece of writing by Michael Turner, who in any event is not the kind of guy I’d expect to be interested in skinheads.

Here’s what confronts you in the purgatory known as the downtown Toronto passport office, where every seat is taken (and then some) and the atmosphere is positively Soviet:

I asked Passport Canada’s media office why the location’s typography and signage were so atrocious and in violation of the Government of Canada style guide, the Federal Identity Program. (I didn’t tell them I asked the “prescreen” agent more or less the same thing. “It is what it is,” he said, amid a lot of shrugging and rationalization.)

We thank you for bringing this to our attention. The signs you sent us in the photo were removed. We are actively working to replace all the signs across Canada to be compliant with Government of Canada and accessibility standards. Sometimes signs are created quickly in order to manage client flow when applicant volumes at an office surge unexpectedly. Though effective in helping point people in the right direction, these signs are not to be permanent solutions.

Well, that helps, but this organization knows full well its downtown office runs at 100% or more capacity every single day.

You know what else they don’t do? Verbally announce whose number comes up. Upon “prescreen,” you’re handed an auto-generated tag comprised of a letter and a number. But tags are not called in alphanumerical sequence, so you have to anxiously watch one of several identical LED boards for what actually seems like a near-random calling order.

Oh, but they do announce last call if you don’t hustle up to the cubicle in time.

A passport costs at least $87, you can’t pay in cash, and you have to pay extra to pick it up.

That’s my interpretation of the mildly notorious new crest for the resuscitated Winnipeg Jets. Toronto Star, 2011.07.26:

The militaristic (one could easily say fascist) design is easy to criticize, and it has been.

• The logo looks like a CF-18 and in fact it was vetted by the Department of National Defence, which did not respond to a question about how much control it had over the design. (Admittedly, I gave them a long deadline and they are a government bureaucracy.) I assume nothing was allowed to happen without DND’s approval, but I can’t confirm that.

• The design is overly literal. (CBC: “ ‘Our desire was to authenticate the name and make it as meaningful as we possibly could,’ Jets co-owner Mark Chipman [said,] ‘to draw a connection to the rich history that our city has enjoyed with the air force.’ ”)

• The whole thing looks like it was drawn with vector tools, which it surely was. Nothing says cheap like Illustrator gradients shading.

Nobody has bothered to point out that this is yet another case of a corporation believing that a new logo improves the company. Only graphic-design ingénues are impressed by corporate logos as such. Where’s the rest of your graphic design? Where are your typography; your layouts; your letterhead; the typeface you print letters on letterhead in; your style bible; your matching Web site; your Twitter avatar; your favicon? A logo is one step in a process and a rather unimportant one at that. A logo isn’t the culmination of anything.

The Jets’ owners “worked with Reebok on the design,” we were told. This didn’t make any sense: Neither a hockey team nor an athleticwear conglomerate designs a logo. So I asked the Jets’ Dorian Morphy who the actual designer was. “There were literally a dozen or two designers at Reebok that designed various initial concepts,” he wrote back. “As the design became more focus[s]ed, I’m sure there were only a few. But, generically, ‘Reebok’ designed it. I could get names, but for what purpose do you need the info?”

To give the designer credit, I said. Even a design team has a leader. “If we wanted one designer to take credit it would have been launched that way. Agree to disagree.”

Actually, what Morphy was “agree[ing]” to do is conceal the identity of the designer, designers, or lead designer. I interpreted that as an indication the designers were ashamed of their work and didn’t want their names associated with it. More charitably, they are mere cogs in a corporate machine and are nameless, as individually irrelevant as the civilians whom CF-18s bomb.

Too harsh? Agree to disagree.

Who really designed the Jets logo?

A Reebok publicist told me “Dominique Fillion is our lead designer for NHL uniforms.” I mailed Fillion to ask if he actually worked on the Jets logo and in what capacity, then suddenly got a message back from the original publicist politely insisting everything go through him.

In interviews. Fillion has talked about his role in vague terms and, elsewhere, refused to say anything at all.

Renaissance man Ben Hammersley delivered a speech to the British security intelligentsia. And I must commend him for his bravery in saying these things to their faces. In another context, this would be called speaking truth to power.

For many, a functioning Internet with freedom of speech, and a good connection to the social networks of our choice is a sign not just of modernity, but of civilisation itself.

This is not because people are “addicted to the video screen,” or have some other patroni[z]ing psychological diagnosis. But because the Internet is where we live. It’s where we do business, where we meet, where we fall in love. It is the central platform for business, culture, and personal relationships. There’s not much else left.

To misunderstand the centrality of these services to today’s society is to make a fundamental error. The Internet isn’t a luxury addition to life; for most people, knowingly or not, it is life. […]

We are used to having our opinions matter, and so now, at the one end, politics is more shrill (more rabble-like) and at the other end, we have rioting.

Indeed, a small part of the trigger for the London riots can be understood as the gap between the respect given to peoples’ opinions by the Internet and the complete disrespect given by the government and the ruling elites. […]

The speeches given after the London riots, about closing social networks down in times of national emergency were… stupid in this respect. They disregarded the centrality of those services in people’s lives, which made people look out of touch with modernity. […] They reinforced the impression you get when you go through an airport – that this is all self-justification.

Right-wing assholes are fun to read (and, with Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant, listen to). And just in the last week, three of them have served up juicy morsels that only occasionally amount to deplorable ad hominem pejoration.

• Steve Sailer:

  [O]ne mechanism that thins the ranks of women in the executive suites is that, as young women climb the corporate ladder, they come into less and less contact with the dweebier guys down the ladder and more and more contact with the most powerful and ambitious men at the top. Women don’t generally love working in the macho atmospheres found higher up, but a lot of them do fall in love with individual macho executives, whom they often marry. And then they tend to downsize their own careers (since their husbands make so much money) to concentrate on helicopter-mothering their children. […]

  Affirmative-action pressure to hire women at Wall Street banks to avoid disparate-impact lawsuits led to a lot of women getting hired, who then found that they don’t really like trading, with its macho atmosphere, but they do like macho traders. In fact, they like them so much they want to have their babies. So they tended to marry a rich male colleague, then downshift careerwise to being a Tiger Mother for their offspring.

• Taki: “Since Chaz is now a ‘man,’ Chaz is no longer a lesbian, and her longtime oyster-gobbling partner Jennifer Elia has suddenly ceased to be a dyke and is now a heterosexual woman, and anyone who does not accept this charade at face value is automatically a confused bigot.”

• The always troublesome Jack Donovan (“né” Malebranche):

  Based on pictures, many of which obviously revealed sexual orientation via expression or stereotypically consistent “styling,” average participants found gay white males weird. (I’m going to guess that straight white men found them weird and offputting and half of the straight white women instinctively wanted to go shopping with the gay males.) Black males, on average, registered as a threat. Gay black males registered as the most submissive and least threatening black males, so they were preferred over straight black males and allowed the white people in the group to feel less racist but also safer.

  (I asked the authoress of the study in question, Alison Chasteen, for a tearsheet of her paper, which she claimed not to have. Its abstract is now sitting in the pile for my next trip to U of T to use their electronic databases.)

Slate ran a breezy, if overlong, précis of an article in what turns out to be a bit of a cult classic, The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. (There’s a waiting list for it at the library.)

I read Ronald T. Kellogg’s “Professional Writing” chapter and found that it actually does not include anything that could be considered advice. It will not teach you how to “write faster.” It is merely a literature review, the likes of which I have been reading for 20 years now. The chapter certainly does a worse job of elaborating the twin issues of hypergraphia and writer’s block (both mentioned by name) than The Midnight Disease (q.v.) did.

Nonetheless, in a reprise of the classic trope that there are two kinds of people, Kellogg quotes previous research (elided here) as proving exactly that.

Beethovians engage in few prewriting activities and prefer to compose rough first drafts immediately to discover what they have to say. Their drafting necessarily involves many rounds of revision.

By contrast, Mozartians delay drafting for lengthy period of time in order to allow time for extensive reflection and planning. They may also plan mental pre-text [terrible choice of words sic] that is later recalled and written down as a first polished draft. A variety of notational methods are used to externalize plans during prewriting, including tree diagrams, flowcharts, boxes, arrows, doodles, as well as lists and outlines

…and, now, a vast array of personal information managers from Evernote to OmniFocus.

In this taxonomy, I am a Mozartian, but what I have learned the hard way is that anything other than a hed you cook up in advance is a darling that ends up getting killed.

Andrew Haigh continues to maintain the delusion that his intrinsically gay film Weekend, which includes highly realistic depictions of male–male sexuality, will actually be “universal.”

It seemed obvious to me when I was writing the story that first and foremost it was about two people with very universal struggles, but simply being told within a gay context. I also think that I was quite excited at the idea that an audience would watch the film expecting one thing but that it would become something different, resonate in other ways. That was always part of my intention….

The problem is that the minute the film becomes defined as a “gay movie” it puts people off from going to see it.

It puts off hetero males and conservatives of any gender. They buy a lot of movie tickets.

Plus I do want straight people to give it a go precisely because I wish this separation that seems to exist would disappear. I go and see films about straight people all the time and those films resonate with me and I’m gay – so I find it frustrating that it can’t always work the other way around.

Yes.

Yes, gays’ generations-long cinematic accommodation to straight people – up to and including writing in, directing, art-directing, costuming, and of course starring in straight people’s movies – should immediately invert its polarity and manifest itself with heterosexualists. (The reasoning here is the same ancient dodge that insists all people are bisexual. It’s the closet at work.) But straight people are the ones who have never had to budge an inch to see themselves represented in movies.

We’re accustomed to being treated as marginal and expendable and inferior, so of course the first thing a ladder-climbing director of a gay movie will tell the press is that his movie is actually universal. Hasn’t Andrew Haigh had to spend his whole life lying to himself about what straight people in film mean to him? Hasn’t he had to do that just to actually have a life at the cinema? Haven’t we all had to do that?

The answer is yes. But straight people have never had to do it even once and are not in a big rush to start. It’s never even occurred to them. It isn’t even a topic of discussion.

The mythmaking that straight guys are gonna show up for Weekend needs to stop. They’re not gonna. Nor should they.

Has this guy even heard of Vito Russo? How about Armond White? (“The transference of identity that people of colour have always had to make at the movies is just the kind of theoretical, hypothetical leap of faith/pledge of fellow-feeling that Hollywood filmmakers now refuse to return.”)