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.