The Globe's online letters page outdoes itself

It's badly designed and hard to read at the best of times. Today, it's even more fun:

The only retailer that matters?

This is a weird sentence, from a Marina Jiménez story on Mexico City in today's Globe and Mail:

Parks are closed and plazas empty. Malls, museums, cinemas and shops are shuttered - as well as most restaurants and cafés, including some of the country's 259 Starbucks outlets.

Short Twitter fiction

My story on writers creating short fiction on Twitter is online at The Globe and Mail. 

It features interviews with Arjun Basu, and Clare Bell (author of the Ratha series), and also links to Jason Camlot (aka jcsped) and Darryl Parker (aka Twirled View).

Basu, writes super-short stories. He calls them twisters, and they run exactly 140 characters. He's got more than 500 so far, and has attracted the interest of an agent who, he says, is confident he can get him a book deal.

Bell's a former engineer who used to race an electric Porsche -- now there's something you won't find on most writer CVs. She's posting a novelette in tweets, as of March 14, and also archiving the pieces for readers who are jumping into the story in the middle.

How to build your credibility as a sports reporter

Refer to the Canadiens coach as "Pete Carbonneau" as Jimmy Golen of the Associated Press did, in a story I read in the Globe and Mail this morning. Amazingly, the G&M hasn't corrected the mistake, though an online commenter noted he's "pretty sure" that's not the coach's name.

Downfall parodies

I have a story in today's online edition of The Globe and Mail about the spread of Downfall parodies.

The Internet is awash in film clips showing Adolf Hitler ranting and raving about being banned from World of Warcraft, hating The Phantom Menace, and being upset about the bank foreclosing on his home.

The online videos are parodies based on a scene from the 2004 film Downfall, starring Bruno Ganz as Hitler. The original scene captures Hitler's realization that he is doomed and the war is lost. The parodies take that scene, but add subtitles to completely change what he's saying.

Like this: 

The story offers some context on the history of Hitler parodies, and on whether or not it crosses the line to cast Stephen Harper as the Fuhrer, as this video does:

Short answer: yes and no.

Young and prudish

Yesterday, the Globe and Mail ran a "Facts and Arguments" essay by journalist and j-school prof Linda Kay. It was called "The teacher has no clothes":

I was applying body lotion in the locker room at the local YMCA, having just enjoyed an invigorating swim and a leisurely shower.

Standing stark naked with my hair wrapped in a towel, I heard someone approach and loudly exclaim, "Is that Professor Kay?" 

Oh yes, it certainly was. In all my glory.

Some of the comments on the story are hilarious. People wondering why she was naked in the locker room, for instance. Why not be more discreet? 

There's also an age-related thread running through both the essay ("It never fazed me to stand naked before fellow swimmers in my club, maybe because most of us were middle-aged and sagging in similar places"), and it comes up in one of the comments too.

Tom R from Victoria, Canada writes: My question has a little different slant but nonetheless relevant. Why do the younger men in my local rec centre... way too often hide themselves away so as to seemingly protect themselves from being seen by anyone else ?? What's their problem ?? This doesn't seem to be an issue for us older males.

Reading the piece, I found myself thinking about a misconception that I think dates from the 60s: the idea that younger people are more likely to be relaxed and comfortable about nudity. I never saw it when I was younger, and I certainly don't see it now. As one of the commenters (in a comment now deleted) wrote: where's the evidence that we are at all enlightened in 2008?

Adolescence and young adulthood are so much more fraught with concerns about image, and the way our bodies appear is the most personal manifestation of that concern. I've been in locker rooms and seen exactly what Tom R is talking about. High school and slightly older guys wrapping themselves up in towels, going off to the toilet stalls to change (yuk) and going through contortions to get dressed without showing any skin. Meanwhile, their elders are just going about their business -- shower, shave, sauna, get changed -- with minimal fuss. Some of the time they're naked, some of the time they're not. Big deal. 

Somehow we've absorbed the idea that youth equates with casual attitudes towards sex and nudity (hence the perennial teen sex panics in the media). It's a holdover. A cliche. And like all cliches, it's time for it to go.

What's with the Globe and Mail's letters page?

This must be one of the most annoying pages on the Internet -- and, mysteriously, it has survived several redesigns.

It's the Globe and Mail's letters to the editor page. When I pick up the print edition, it's the first place I turn. I'm not sure why -- habit probably. The letters used to be witty and incisive. Sometimes they still are, though not often enough.

But online? The page is a mess. 

The letters are grouped by subject. Usually. (Yesterday, the letters in response to Margaret Wente's claim that Canada was, in fact, "un pays de sauvages" before Europeans arrived took up most of the page, but were not all grouped together.)

For each letter, we see the name of the writer, and some text. Like this:

Nameless white crosses 
Judith Tanguay

Your front-page photo depicting the nameless white crosses that mark final resting places at Alberta's Wabasca Cemetery (Hunt Begins For Long-Missing Students - Oct. 27) sadly perpetuates a belief that this was unique to native children who attended residential schools. I recently visited a small Protestant cemetery in Hearst, Ont., that was established in the early 1900s. Of the 505 graves, 114 are anonymous and countless others unmarked.

Click the name of the letter-writer, and the rest of the letter appears.

Then there are letters like this one:

Victim of eco-bullying? 
Karen Shein 

Re Don't Carry A Cloth Lunch Bag To Work? Tsk, Tsk (Life, Oct 27): If an employee is going to act like a whiny and egocentric preschooler who does not yet understand that we all need to do our part to take care of the environment we all share, then it necessitates their being treated as such.

Click the name of the letter-writer and you see... the same letter again. The site doesn't distinguish between which letters are shown in their entirety, and which represent only the first paragraph.

In order to ensure that you catch each and every bon mot from the Globe's letter-writers, you have to click each and every one of their names. Which is ridiculous, of course.