Oddball fagonomics outlier: Zeke, rich widowed homosexualist.

When his spouse [defined as what, exactly?], Gary, died last year, Zeke was left with two mortgaged houses and some big decisions.

He is living in his weekend home on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast but would like to move back to Vancouver. His city home is pulling in high rent, so Zeke wonders whether he can really afford to live there on his modest publishing-industry salary.

Should he sell the coast home, or can he keep both properties, Zeke wonders? He is uncomfortable with his $535,000 debt load and is striving to pay it off as soon as possible, making extra payments to his mortgages.

• Monthly net income (including rent): $7,770.

• Assets:

  • Bank account $75,000

  • GICs $39,000

  • RRSP $101,000

  • Sunshine Coast home [sic] $300,000

  • Vancouver house [sic] $750,000

  Total: $1,265,000.

• Monthly disbursements:

  • Mortgages $3,570

  • Condo fees, including water, sewer $665

  • Property tax $475

  • Home insurance $75

  • Heat, hydro $150

  • Maintenance $165

  • Auto insurance, fuel, maintenance $390

  • Groceries $640

  • Clothing, dry cleaning $135

  • Gifts $20

  • Charity $20

  • Vacations and travel $210

  • Personal $90

  • Dining out $70

  • Pet expenses $145 [that’s one expensive pet]

  • Entertainment, subscriptions $45

  • Sports, hobbies $85

  • Dentists, drugstore, vitamins, health, life insurance $105

  • Telecom, cable, Internet $310

  • RRSP $100

  • Other savings $250

  Total: $7,715.

Usually it is positively insufferable rich hetero retirees who are featured in this column in the Globe. Their faces are always obscured, and just seeing the photo alongside every installment – without exaggeration – almost makes me ill. I loathe it that much.

Zeke, incidentally, spends like a drunken, widowed, homosexualist sailor.

Film critic Armond White’s Wikipedia entry reads more like a Zagat entry.

Film critic and essayist Phillip Lopate wrote that White “has staked out a position as a renegade film critic, the Last Angry Man, unafraid to attack popular favorites or make enemies with colleagues.” His criticism has been described as “unique” and also as “thoughtful” since it “allows readers the opportunity to interpret films as more than just entertainment.” Also, he has been described as “not boring” and “capable of wicked insights,” “often contrarian (and always fun to read),” “extremely knowledgeable,” “immensely readable, fearless, provocative” as well as “passionate, idiosyncratic and a natural polemicist.” […] Critic Kyle Smith has argued that White “simply has a different æsthetic from that of the herd,” while critic David Chen suggested that he “(perhaps too) vehemently believes in the integrity of his art and longs for the golden era when the mainstream still cared what film critics thought.”

Detractors have criticized White for his “hyperbolic rhetoric” and “misanthropic mudslinging.” Critic Glenn Kenny called White “a bully and a hypocrite” and complained that “the sub-theme of every White review is that every other critic is a moral degenerate and an æsthetic cretin.” Essayist Dan Schneider dismissed White as a “critical clown” and “a contrarian with political and personal axes to grind,” Similarly, critic Vadim Rizov described White as “a jerk who combines rhetorical misdirection with bullying behaviour.”

(Cf. “ ‘Gastrique’ milk-poached four-story Hills Farm ‘poularde au lait’ with ‘crème fraîche’ dumpling and ‘bouquetière’ of spring vegetables.”)

Unidentified soldier in Infidel by Tim Hetherington (R.I.P.):

Critic, novelist, essayist, men’s-style correspondent, and self-styled language authority Russell Smith has suffered a recurrence of retinal detachment. He’s having trouble coping. He’d have less trouble if he’d reached out to people who knew something about it and could help him.

• There is not much entertainment for the sightless.

  Does this strike you as the epitome of self-involvement and refusal to do one’s research?

  Even music you have to type and click to download. CBC Radio One is still the most dependable and stimulating companion, regardless of all the clever other podcasts that people tell you to listen to. Those too, remember, require good eyes to seek out and download on a computer screen.

  You can use any accessible device (like an iPhone, any Macintosh, or a Wintel computer with extra screen reader) to download or just listen to streaming radio and podcasts.

  I see now that one lapse in Smith’s stellar record of good taste – his choice of crapola Windows laptops – has come back to haunt him. If he wanted to start using a screen reader because his vision left him no other choice, in any case he’d have to learn how to do so. That would take a while; there would be a learning curve. But what he’s faced with now is going out to a specialized dealer (like Frontier Computing) and paying over a grand for a horrendously complex program like Jaws that will work about as well as Windows itself does.

  If he had a Mac, all he’d have to do is press Command-F5 and start using VoiceOver immediately. At no extra cost.

  The course of action would be quite different if all Smith needed were screen magnification. The free magnifier built into Macs is still better than the one on Windows (especially under Lion), but it’s a much closer call.

• Television, it turns out, can be followed from the soundtrack alone without any loss of subtlety. And it is not at all bad for me to be forced to understand more about the complexities of television drama, its finely-honed narrative conventions.

  The other day I watched/listened to the final act of one of our most famous and successful Canadian-made cop dramas, a show I had always heard massively praised. […] The patient officer, using uncanny psychological ability, guessed the code and disarmed the bomb with seconds to spare. This narrative device is I believe known as the “ticking time bomb.” Those are about all the lessons from television I can withstand for now.

  Surely he means Flashpoint. Anyway, Smith can easily listen to not-very-good audio description of this and essentially all other Canadian dramas. All he needs to do is turn on SAP, usually by just hitting the audio button on the remote control until described audio starts playing. (Doesn’t require cable or satellite. HDTV settings are much trickier and always require vision.)

I apologize for being harsh, but if Smith had actually known the facts (computers work just fine for blind people; you can sightlessly follow TV shows without guesswork), he wouldn’t have had a column this week. Those columns too often read like reactive, last-minute affairs dashed off in response to something he read on a blog.

A case like this is perfect for the Twitters: “X just happened to me. I want to do Y. Tips?” At the very least, Smith could have posted again to the Toronto Freelance Editors and Writers mailing list.

The use of one’s bully pulpit to complain about the impossibility of tasks that are actually possible and the narrative failings of programs that are actually narrated seems a tad embarrassing.

Nonetheless, there is one person in town with fingers in Smith’s pies (journalism, linguistics, accessibility) who would be happy to help out – with only mild scolding along the way.

I wrote:

I should not have been surprised by the block of council flats whose crushingly Soviet, flat concrete exterior and dangerous walkways were so often depicted. England is a living dystopia; drugs are what its gay men need just to survive.

And now the de facto journal of American gay opinion, Out, curiously claims the exact opposite (unreadable original; Readability version; emphasis added):

There are equal moments of passion, pain, and high comedy in Weekend, all played out against a dreary backdrop of the English Midlands. “Nottingham is a nowhere town,” Haigh says. “So many films are about hipsters in cool parts of town. A lot of people don’t exist in those worlds. They might live in ugly tower blocks but find beauty in what they do.” Haigh discovers the splendo[u]r as well – his camera lovingly frames smoke delicately wafting from a council tower’s chimney and the contrast of illuminated high-rises against a polluted sky.

I read various news items of the unexpected death of Chris Nutile (bio), a civilian who was, among other things, a good uncle to his nephew. (Because he’s underage, out of caution I’m not going to publish the name of the nephew, even though it was widely reported.) Nutile was such a good uncle that, in his memory, Nutile’s nephew lobbied the Boston Red Sox to add their own tiny grain of sand to the molehill known as the It Gets Better Project.

I am green with envy a kid in the 21st century can grow up with an out gay uncle who, by being himself, imprints another path through which boy can become man. I am never sure role models are real, but a masculine gay uncle seems like the closest thing to a role model a young boy could have. Through his example, a young man could learn that manliness is an option.

Here I am committing the venial sin of surmising and assuming. I spent a long time asking friends and family members of the late Chris Nutile if they’d be able to answer a couple of questions for me, but none ever responded. Hence I don’t actually know that Nutile was a masculine gay uncle. (Wouldn’t a lot depend on his voice?) Nonetheless, the photograph (credited to the nephew’s family) that accompanied the aforelinked ESPN article is at least suggestive.

I expect that a flaming or effeminate (or just a more typical) gay uncle would impart a different lesson to a young nephew, one that could in some cases be almost as salutary.

Melissa Kaita (no relation):

So BookCamp was pretty awesome, except for a couple [of] sessions ruined by a certain angry someone.

Actually, I “ruined” only one of them.

Last year, Scott and I gave the best presentation at BookCamp. We certainly prepared enough. But without looking it up, I couldn’t tell you what we talked about. Probably some variation of the issue that never goes away – document semantics and structure and how those apply to nonlinear and/or illustrated books of the McLuhan variety.

This year I sat through a completely unplanned and unfocussed session deceptively entitled “E-Book Reviews/Usability.” Three sinecurists of the still-new E-book industry, who of course all know each other, sat up front and made all sorts of imperious statements – e.g., the implication (denied when I challenged it) that some genres just shouldn’t ever be printed.

But was that the problem? Not really. These were.

1. Endless defence of shit semantics and crap copy. From the audience and from the panel (especially from Kobo apologist Ashleigh Gardner) I heard a steady stream of excuses for lousy copy in E-books.

   1. Readers will put up with “one or two” letters awry if they can still understand the word.

   2. Kobo relies on people reporting typos, which may or may not be corrected (with the affected book probably reissued). Maybe 300 out of a thousand titles issued each month are thus corrected.

      In other words, we now have confirmation of Kobo’s true business model: Acting as a sluicegate for publishers transmitting shitty copy to paying customers, at least 70% of which copy is never corrected. (Kobo’s business model is charging you for shitty copy and expecting you not only to do post-facto proofreading for nothing but to save up your notes and somehow transmit them to Kobo.)

   3. Publishers used to run a book through half a dozen edits; now we’re lucky to get two. But, I said, why in the world would a five-year-old book be sent to India for OCR, especially when we know for an absolute fact that method always produces shit copy? People don’t have the files for 20-year-old books, somebody shot back. “I said five years,” I replied; surely somebody has the original Quark for Windows file or equivalent.

      Or, my respected audiencemembers chimed in, maybe a publisher bought out another one and the owner took his computer home. Or the designer is dead.

   I’ve got no time for this bullshit and you shouldn’t either. Dude: We’ve upped our standards. Up yours.

   I’m not going to sit there and listen to a roomful of publishing-industry mediocrities defend and explain lousy copy. So don’t act all surprised and discomfited that I bellowed the following at top volume: “Quit defending lousy code and copy! There’s no excuse for it – not in a print book, not in an E-book, not in a newspaper, not in a Chyron on TV, not in television captioning, for God’s sake.”

   Canadians defend mediocrity to the utmost, because by and large we aren’t capable of anything better. The few of us who do know better are seen as a problem.

2. As predicted, character encoding is a complete mystery to these people. The so-called Typography panel seemed inauspicious even before it happened. We got shunted off to some kind of snack bar and spent half our time talking about cover art, something that only incidentally involves “typography.”

   When not being challenged and interrupted, I had to explain – patiently and in an even tone – how character encoding works. First anybody there had heard of it, I surmised – or of CSS, for that matter. Nobody in the room knew how fonts in E-books are chosen and specified, why the reader has final say, and why the system is working as intended when that happens.

   The professional book designer from Random House admitted he knows not a lot about “files” and still typesets fractions by hitting a letter and changing the font to an “expert set,” a practice that hasn’t been current since 2001 at the latest. (That’s why their E-cookbooks will “pop up a GIF” when you want to read a recipe. That’s wrong at least 2½ ways. But hey, nobody can reliably typeset a fraction like ½; what choice do they have?)

   I was hoping I’d be able to make an announcement about an upcoming pair of articles on character encoding in that magazine for people who make “websites,” but I don’t think we’re there yet. At any rate, if you’re working in publishing and don’t have a basic understanding of Unicode, you need to either learn or get out of this business.

   Hint to Peggy: It is no more difficult to include Greek (Ελληνικά) and Cyrillic (кириллица) in an E-book than it is to include the letter A. (I just did.) It does require one extra bit of markup in typical cases.

I have no problem loudly violating your liberal-feminist-consensus model

I have no interest in folding, spindling, and mutilating myself to comply with the liberal-feminist-consensus model I have encountered at every publishing event. First of all, almost nobody actually has technical skills there, but even if one does, the message is to shut the fuck up because everybody here has to feel absolutely equal. It’s a “collaborative” environment, as I was lectured several times in the Typography session.

Here is everything a roomful of women in the publishing industry will allow:

1. A woman may mention a problem she’s encountered.

2. Everyone will nod sympathetically and agree it’s a problem. (Why not? It’s a collaborative model. Everyone agrees on everything!) But nobody will actually explain what the genesis of the problem is or how to solve it.

If the problem is shit semantics in your E-books or nonexistent character encoding or just bad copy and I can explain the problem or tell you how to fix it, that’s what I’m going to do. I have no interest in making sure everybody in the room feels equally sisterly bad about how terribly intractable a problem is. I want the problem solved; here’s how to do it.

I object to the implied consensus that everyone must remain as baffled and technically backward as the least-technically-capable member of the group. It reflects poorly on this female-dominated industry (which female domination was the subject of another panel), since E-books do not know you are female and nothing, certainly not men, is stopping you from learning.

Let’s return to the semantics issue, which I refused to back down on in the ostensible Usability session. I explained the true facts of the matter, which I guess nobody had ever told these people: E-books are Web pages and you absolutely must use valid XHTML. You have to use the correct semantic element for your content, and the source of that knowledge is the Web-standards movement – weak in Canada and next to nonexistent in Toronto. Standardistas are not going to teach you semantics because they’re too busy making Web sites.

So when is your training session? a helpful voice asked. I accept the friendly amendment from the floor, I said sort of nonsensically. But here, lemme start making sense for you. I’m calling your bluff.

Training for publishers on Web semantics

You may think I’m a total fucking asshole. In reality, I’m an asshole only some of the time, and perfectly charming and amusing a lot of the time. And I am an ace teacher. Believe it.

I was going to say that only the subset of attendees of the Usability session who actually make E-books need this knowledge, but I never believed that. Everybody who works in E-books has to have enough knowledge of HTML semantics to mark up a manuscript. Anything less, to paraphrase Don DeLillo, is like being the founder of the field of Hitler studies without being able to speak German.

Here, then, is the offer.

We will start small and I will train up to six publishing-industry professionals in an informal setting – like a meeting room at the Bloor-Gladstone Library, or maybe the bank vault at the nicest Starbucks in town (at Dupont and Christie). Training will cover necessary HTML semantics and character encoding. I swear to God I’ll have you basically competent for typical fiction and nonfiction titles in one hour flat. Some parts of these topics are complicated but the basics really are not.

Don’t want to take this course because you don’t like my attitude? I just finished telling you I have different levels of “attitude.” Besides, nobody else is giving this course. Nobody else here can; I know everybody in town with this knowledge and neither of the other guys will give you the time of day. It’s me or it’s nothing. Please make your selection now.

And yes, this early session, of which there will be at most one, will be free. That isn’t because I don’t think I should be paid (I do) but because you don’t think I should. Complain about your low publishing-sector pay all you want, but fundamentally you believe you deserve to be paid for your work but I don’t. What I’m offering is a free sample. Take it and learn something or leave it and nod understandingly to your book-industry sisters about how terribly difficult E-books are.

The HTML training session happens whenever you can get your act together to ask for it. I’ll have a soyaccino, thanks.

Nic Boshart, this is all your fault

I had a nice coffee with unshaven Alsatian metrosexualist Nic Boshart a year or two ago. Whatever professional amity we might have nurtured was vitiated when, much later, he invited Josh Tallent to a planning session at his office but, by his later admission, deliberately kept me away. Josh and I have a nice bit of schtick going where I tell him to raise his rates and he pretends to be offended by the idea, but let me just state here I am actually offended by Boshart’s policy of exclusion and drive-by defamation.

But, ladies, isn’t he adorable? And so nonthreatening for an heterosexualist male. Just the way you like ’em.