Here’s how slipshod and self-contradictory a “respected” American publication can be.

• Ben Yagoda’s article ostensibly advocating the use of periods and commas outside quotation marks (not a hard-and-fast rule even in British) uses neutral quotation marks:

  

  Then again, this is one of those ultra-fake Web sites (the Awl is also in this group) that uses the known failure of nospace-emdash-nospace and also neutral quotation marks and apostrophes.

• And the piece resorts to fake superscripts in an unnecessary usage of same, 16th edition. (That’s a Microsoft Word abomination.)

• And it uses what nerds call a backtick (`) as an opening single quotation mark.

• And we don’t end heds with periods, though of course there is a meta-reason for doing so in this case.

• Yagoda quotes a misspelling of “darnedest” without later correction:

  Conan O’Brien, for example, recently posted:

  Conan’s staffers’ kids say the darndest things. Unfortunately, in this case "darndest" means "incriminating".

• Yagoda ignores the fact that, in any presentation where markup is possible, the correct way to write the titles of TV shows is in italics, hence:

  [I]ronically, given the anecdote about Tales of the City, PBS is the only widely available channel that has any serious LGBT content, e.g., documentaries such as Ask Not and Out in the Silence.

  (I corrected the CAPS-AS-emphasis error endemic to half-assed prose like Yagoda’s, and the errant semicolon. One could debate the need for a hyphen at one point; can you see where?)

• The sentence from Pitchfork is correctly and unambiguously written thus:

  Covers on the LP include the Beatles’ “Michelle,” Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’,” and tracks from Serge Gainsbourg and Henri Salvador.

  Note my avoidance of the collision of apostrophe and closing single quotation mark – unremediated in the original, with its half-assed wordspace inside two fake apostrophes.

  At any rate, Yagoda is too dumb to notice that he irretrievably altered the source by quoting the original sentence, which forces the use of single quotation marks in American and Canadian style.

Let me go back to a previous point. Could Ben Yagoda explain – off the top of his head, without recourse to any reference material – when British usage does place periods and commas inside quotation marks?

We’re only five months into the year, yet this is – straight-up – ’011’s worst article about copy-editing. Quote me on that. And do nothing Ben Yagoda suggests.

Update

(2011.05.31) The illustrious Gruber linked to this posting. We had E-mailed back and forth before that happened. I have no objection to being called “cranky” in this context. The issues here, in case they weren’t clear already, are:

• Yagoda understands half the problem and offers half a solution for it. This simply is not an issue of putting periods and commas inside quotation marks. Quotation-mark rules are actually much more complex than that especially in U.K. usage, which, Yagoda is unaware, actually comprises several variant usages.

• Yagoda and his publication cannot correctly render the examples that claim to prove his point.

  I can’t put my hands on an article I read this year that stated that Slate’s content-management system has remained essentially unchanged since 2003. Let’s accept I have recalled that fact correctly. Even given the stated and actual character encoding on Yagoda’s piece (UTF-8), I assume the Slate CMS can handle US-ASCII characters and nothing else. (A typical error of American computer programmers.)

  Given that constraint, in an article about punctuation somebody along the production line should have known enough to use character entities (e.g., “ or ”) to encode that punctuation. You never have to leave the US-ASCII repertoire, yet the result in the browser is correct. (Don’t do this as a matter of course; your copy becomes uneditable. But we aren’t talking about day-to-day uses here.)

  So yes, Slate’s “typesetting” is “appalling.” For this specific article, it need not have been, I estimate. But because it was, that fact became fair game – for me and for Gruber.

How’s this for a conclusion? The way I do it is the right way. I run the tightest copy in the business – as a point of pride.

Six months have passed, so American white liberals in the whitest, most liberal, most American profession, computer technology, are railing against themselves for not inviting enough wymmynz to speak at conferences.

We’ve been through this before. Your priorities aren’t my priorities – namely, increasing the participation of people with disabilities. Your priorities aren’t more important than mine; women are not more important. You’re making noise on this topic just to sound correct and liberal.

On the broader topic of wymmynz in IT, I read the same arguments over and over. To select a noteworthy one, if unreasonably long work hours are a barrier to participation, why aren’t you going after the exceedingly male 37Signals, which takes Fridays off during the summer and never ever works anyone to the bone?

Certainly no one is willing to admit that staring at a computer all day is about as attractive to most women as, say, installing roof shingles all day. Advocates for women in IT never also advocate for women in roofing. As Susan Pinker put it (I say this every time because it remains true), activists decided men had the best jobs and now demand that women get half of them. Somehow that now includes running through a Keynote deck in front of a roomful of nerds. Having done that on many occasions, I don’t see why you think it’s such a plum gig.

At any rate, if this is your pet issue and you aren’t actually a woman (even if you are the redoubtable Mr. MONTEIRO, who is just the right kind of rat bastard), you’re vamping. You mean well. Some of my best friends mean well. But neither the facts nor the outcome will change.

My complaint here is not with liberal men but with Aspergerian men, i.e., most men in the computer industry. I am not in the least bit concerned with women in that industry in this context. Guys are the problem. If you disagree, run your own experiment: Take vehement issue with the politics of the closet in technology “journalism” and see what happens. (Not [co]incidentally, Tim Cook, Apple’s gay COO, now holds the Nº 1 position in the Out Power List for 2011.)

Last month I began putting wheels in motion to do something about my complaint. I envisaged a tiny gay-only technology miniconference, something between a BarCamp and an unconference, held for a budget of effectively zero at, say, the 519. You’d have to fly yourself in and pay every expense yourself. We’d be lucky to get a projector, let alone catered luncheon. But the point is for once in our lives we wouldn’t be surrounded and overrun by goddamned straight people. We wouldn’t have to move straight people to sit down.

If it works for BlogHer it will work for us.

I combed the various affinity networks. Tom Coates, Chris Heathcote, Dan Melton, John Poisson (so unconvinced I was shocked), James Bridle, Scott Gatz. Adorable Pete LePage, who for some reason moved from one tasteless monopolist to another and once told me he has quite given up expecting Americans to pronounce his surname properly. Ted Drake. Chuck LeDuc Díaz. Perhaps Ian Jopson, who – obviously – works for Fox News.

I suppose I could have asked around more with the dykes. All I could think of was Kath Moonan, despite the fact this is the perfect industry for them. (Quit your volunteer facilitatrix position at the rape-crisis centre, ladies, and start up a Web shop!)

Not all these people I actually know and/or have met. Not all of them I even contacted, because halfway through I realized that, for this to work, it would have to happen somewhere other than here. If we tried it in, say, Montreal, at least I wouldn’t have to struggle to put together a simple boys’ night out.

Interested parties, and only those, may contact me.

Violet Blue (for it is she):

Now, if you’re thinking that someone who posts porn or offensive content shouldn’t be doing that anyway, I promise you eventually will find out how idiotic that response is – the hard way.

And you’re not a Delicious user.

(I rewrote the complete mishmash of the first paragraph so it makes sense. Violet Blue needs an editor.)

Even after alleged “update,” Delicious’s new terms still state that the owner “reserves the right, at any time and without prior notice, to remove or disable access to any [c]ontent… that [it], it its sole discretion, considers to be objectionable for any reason.”

Here are the results of a quick search of Delicious tags that will almost invariably lead to pages that somebody you don’t like, or vice versa, could label as porn:

• /Fleshbot: 242

• /Dudesnude: 24

• /Guys with iPhones: 55, most of them mine

• /BigMuscle: 389; /BigMuscleBears: 9

• /Gaydar.co.uk: 7 (/gaydar results are too mixed to assess); /GayRomeo: 56

• /Randy Blue: 131; /Sean Cody: 49; /Corbin Fisher: 13 (one could continue through the entire Wikipedia list of studios)

For comparison purposes, here are some ringer candidates, namely the /~tube sites: X 2,104, Porno 286. Those are the sort of sites straight people think of when you say “porn.” These are the same people who consider gay men’s online profiles, which are so bog-standard we don’t bat an eyelash at them, as falling into the same category. They don’t.

If you exclude /~tube sites’ and possibly Fleshbot’s, the only tags remotely classifiable as pornographic are those used by gay males. If Delicious’s new owners follow their own terms of service, they’ll ban users who linked to /~tube sites, an action that will affect every category of user. But the owners must also specifically target tags used only by gays. By any standard that would constitute unequal treatment, or, stated another way, illegal discrimination.

It is very easy to imagine that certain heterosexualists would consider gay a “reason” why “content” is “objectionable.” Delicious’s new terms require you to back up your links, so if a malicious religious fundamentalist somehow gets write access to the core database for a couple of days, gay-related links could be deleted forever with no in-house backup from which to restore them.

But that couldn’t possibly happen, could it? Everyone who works in Silicon Valley is liberal and believes in freedom of speech. What few of these committeed freedom fighters believe in are cock pics in fags’ public profiles. Those are a problem to be solved. Install the right operatives and the problem could be. It’s your fault you bookmarked something straight people find “objectionable.”

I’m sure Delicious’s new owners were not intentionally attracting a lawsuit they would be unlikely to win.

“Go fuck yourself.” 

Graphic design gold-medal winner Tom Briggs: “You too.”

Some doubt it was ever cool or influential. Joe Clark, a journalist with an outspoken disdain for Spacing, posted on his blog that “[t]he existence of Rob Ford as a credible candidate for mayor further demonstrates that Spacers™ [a term Clark coined]… have not budged the meter one notch.”

“Who reads Spacing magazine? Not opponents of bike lanes and car-free days,” says Clark.

The foregoing is my first and surely last quote in Ryerson Review of Journalism, in this case within Samantha Edwards’s piece on Spacing (Summer 2011).

An outright loathing for journalism education is as easy to muster as the same for a chartered bank or a municipal transit system. (Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen make a good living off it.) I kept my mouth shut when the new captain of the Titanic, Ivor Shapiro, got up at the launch party last night and, in one of the least euphonic English-language accents on earth, thanked us for coming. Sinecurists like him can afford, literally and figuratively, to grin unconvincingly as waves lap around their knees. Anyway, speak for yourself, I thought: I’m there to support the kids and their magazine.

I did try to mingle. Guess how fucking well that went. In a room that’s 80% female I don’t have a lot of places to go, which I suppose explains the zinger I got from one fellow who is now back in town. I thought I could have a reasonable chat with the magazine’s art director. At first, yes, but then, straight out of grade school, he turned around and ratted me out to the teacher (Tim Falconer, the kind of instructor RyeHigh hires after a quick chat). Here’s to you, Levi Nicholson, unregistered graphic designer. You’ve got a great future ahead of you in a peevish, niggardly, dishevelled town like this. You fit right in.

Waiting for the streetcar on a shabby stretch of Queen St. is, I found out again, just the right setting to reflect on every other disastrous journalism gathering (actually, not just journalism), and to imagine how one’s tormentors will have a good laugh from their Piano cubicle or the Twitters.

My philosophy of loathing the war but supporting the troops isn’t working out, I see now that all of you have gleefully pounded it into me.

Any of these new journalism graduates gonna get jobs? Most of those I talked to don’t think so. Tell me, then, what the real problem is.

I enjoy the ugly blog of Michael Kaplan, an internationalization engineer who – in an apparently unique instance of good taste – drives an iBot.

Apart from getting his facts totally fucking wrong about Canadian English (the sort of error he would never make with the love of his professional life, Tamil), the formerly estimable expert on language encoding took time out of his busy day to bash Apple in an entirely unrelated post about Unicode 6.0.

Of course Windows has extensive Unicode support. (I have previously described it as “phenomenal.”) But, due to the hostility of the platform, not one user in a million can type an opening single quotation mark (native English-speakers) or an apostrophe (non-native speakers). Kaplan himself can’t even type an en dash in the hed of his post, or an apostrophe anywhere.

Given a Manichean development environment in which one robs Peter’s character set to display Paul’s, actually enabling the use of characters above US-ASCII by real people rather takes precedent over Ogham “support,” does it not?

Also: Does Windows Phone 7 support Cherokee?

If you’re my kind of person from my generation, you have Barbara Kruger as an unshakable cultural leitmotif – so much so that you always call her Babs.

Her critiques of the advertising industry (she insists this is her actual theme, and complains when dumbass European curators claim it’s already been done) are expressed through typography. (Why Futura Extra Bold? “Futura cuts through the grease,” she said at a presentation at OCA 15 years ago.) What few seem willing or able to discuss is how phenomenally awful some of her typography actually is.

Nothing, nothing, is worse than these godforsaken buses and trucks she insists on wrapping in vinyl every decade and a half.

For the love of Christ, why can’t she see how atrocious these are? Dr. fucking Bonner wouldn’t let this sort of thing leave the factory.

(Cf. Jenny Holzer.)