Nate Silver is one of a kind – an out gay journo who understands numbers. Silver delivered the commencement address to the 2011 Columbia Journalism School, a prestigious institution that could not figure out how to publish his address in HTML. Are you surprised at this kind of middle-aged incompetence at, and contempt for, the medium that put Nate Silver behind Columbia’s podium?

Instead of poking through Columbia’s error-strewn Microsoft Word document, I suggest reading the corrected HTML version of Silver’s address:

Journalism Day Henry Pringle Lecture

by Nate Silver

I put that together in 25 minutes.

Markdown is a faux-HTML syntax that is actually more complicated to learn than real HTML, which can be used directly and need not rely on the intermediary of a Markdown interpreter. As such, people like Kevin Lipe are quite wrong to recommend it, even to beginners.

Such recommendations stem from the myth that one must actually type out HTML elements, which is not difficult in the first place. The same text editor (e.g., BBEdit) into which you type Markdown can add valid, semantic HTML to your text automatically. I effortlessly write perfect code with such a system and it takes me no time at all. I don’t need a crutch and you don’t either. I certainly don’t need a picture of a crutch, an image to which I would compare Markdown. Indeed, Markdown is a joke that comedy nerds insist meets a legal definition of “funny” that nobody in the audience laughs at.

Yet another article in the mythmaking Toronto press (here by Murray Whyte in the Star) about a defunct art trio we were told for decades was terribly, terribly important. I checked: The Star all by itself has written eight articles in the time I’ve lived here telling us how famous General Idea was all along. This trio was never actually reviewed or covered for its legitimate artwork in that time. Artfags knew about them, but that isn’t what I’m talking about. My issue here is coverage of the actual art in the same papers that insist the artists were always famous.

The only thing I’ve ever read about General Idea was one hack piece after another that declared they were always famous (that was their goal) and endlessly recapped the same career highlights that went unnoticed in the mainstream press when they actually happened.

Now, why else does General Idea get all this press? The same reason Toronto FC is popular: The prosody of the name. GENERALEYE dea; TORONTOEFF see. Another linguistic contribution: Two members of the art trio had unpronounceable names you couldn’t possibly recite from memory. Journos love that sort of thing. They can keep those names straight; why can’t you?

Toronto media love nothing more than to cover already-famous people whom Toronto media already have covered. (It’s been days since we’ve heard what Don McKellar, Paul Gross, and Peggy Atwood are up to.)

Instead of rewriting the same story I’ve read over and over again for the last 20 years, Murray Whyte could have done actual research. He could have documented how A.A. Bronson, always referred to as the “surviving member” of the group, had and has not a hope in hell of getting his name removed from his contribution to the Hide/Seek exhibit at the Smithsonian. (Actually taking the work off the walls was never in the cards.) I read and listened to endless interviews in which this aging artist type stated that “copyright” permits him to disassociate his name from a gallery environment he wishes to protest.

It does in Canada, because we have moral rights here, a term Bronson later began to use in interviews and a publicity-stunt letter. But in the United States, where, nobody seemed to notice, the Smithsonian is located, moral rights do not exist save for highly proscribed concessions for photographers. There was nothing whatsoever Bronson could do if the gallery wished to attach his name to his own work. Bronson failed in his quest, the only result he was ever going to get.

What could have been a commendable statement of principle was nullified by Bronson’s and journos’ ignorance of the law. But copyright is just too technical for art-world dearies. Why don’t we just run a profile? These guys have always been great.

Literal and figurative trannyfucker Zoë Whittall, an estimable authoress and journalistrix, nonsensically complains about an award for which she is nominated. God help us all: What if she wins it?

The prize is meaningful because the publishing industry is still hesitant to publish books with queer and trans characters written by queer and trans people. They will embrace books like Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides or Annabel by Kathleen Winter, but… those books would not have made it into the popular limelight if they weren’t written by cisgendered heterosexuals…. [T]he only books by Emma Donoghue to make it to the best-seller lists are the ones without gay characters.

Whittall has an excellent point here, one made much more pithily by Michael Cunningham: “I can’t help noticing that as soon as I write a novel without a blowjob, they give me the Pulitzer Prize.” But blowjobs are phallocratic, and anyway, whatever a gay male has to say is automatically suspect. Surely a gay man is neither queer nor trans, hence is actually the oppressor of both.

Cisgendered masquerades as a useful backformation but is used as a form of hate speech by tranny apologists – actually, the same people who insist that tranny constitutes hate speech. The difference here is they are trannies but we aren’t “cisgendered.”

So when I’m asked why the Lambdas need to exist,

(Apparently that happens a lot?)

it’s because there is a pink ceiling…. [I]t’s also an opportunity for those writers who do think it’s important to write about lives that reflect our lived realities to gather and celebrate our achievements and to be proud of the quality work that has been produced that year. I’m proud to be on the list, and at the same time, hope the awards will eventually not be necessary.

This doesn’t make sense, of course. If “queer and trans” lit awards aren’t necessary, it will be due to the elimination of “queer and trans” literature or that of the awarding body. It is not true that there will be no need for an award once every queer and trans person gets every queer and trans book published by mainstream houses and, as Whittall implies, once “cisgendered heterosexuals” get nothing at all published if its subjects are queer or trans. (Or, as she elsewhere complains, if they are “closeted” and writing about straight people.)

An ideologue who champions “queer and trans” writers manifestly will not lead us as we “celebrate” the “achievements” of gay-male writers – because those are not “our” achievements, Whittall suggests. My “lived reality” involves being lectured repeatedly that I am actually transgendered and that transgenderists are actually part of the legitimately constituted lesbian and gay community. Both claims are false. Whittall is the kind of activist who would start a Facebook protest against me if I actually published that “lived experience” in any sort of book. (She’s probably mulling one over right now.) The actual oppressor of “queer and trans” people, this ideology holds, is the gay male. I assume Whittall subscribes to that precept along with the others that come pre-approved as a matched set.

I told the editor of Quill & Quire that Whittall was an inspired hire as publishing reporter. I still think that. But, within a circle that should be even more marginal than she admits, Whittall is an ideologue who lobbies for success and recognition for only the literature of which she herself approves. She doesn’t want honest gay literature; she wants literature with an approved “queer and trans” agenda.

Gay writers writing gay stories for gay men are, I gather, to be opposed – unless they are willing to accept outsiders’ labels that they are “queer and trans” (even if they are neither), and only so long as they are not, in Whittall’s estimation, closeted.

Whittall’s are actually mainstream views in what passes for “the gay community” in this town.