Archive for: March 2010
Cape Breton’s Magazine now online & searchable
From November, 1972, to June, 1999, Ron Caplan published Cape Breton’s Magazine from his farmhouse in Wreck Cove, Victoria County. Typeset on an IBM Selectric, printed in a one-of-a-kind, out-sized format, each issue was packed with oral history of a beloved island whose way of live was rapidly changing.
Caplan has now digitized the whole ungainly collection and made it available, in searchable form, online. The interface feels a bit dated and awkward to use, but it’s all there – an extraordinary resource. Want to know what an eyestone was? Check Issue 4. Women steelmakers in World War II? Issue 37. Spruce beer? Issue 8.
This is journalism in which the interviewer rarely intrudes, preferring to let Cape Bretoners of a bygone era tell their own stories. Caplan liked to say that the apostrophe was the most important part of the title.
Hat tip: Stacey Pineau.
MLAs’ pay and public begrudgery – time for a retraction?
In the wake of Glace Bay MLA Dave Wilson’s surprise resignation while under forensic audit of his expense claims, a young Contrarian friend asks if I’m ready to retract my post all but dismissing the expense brouhaha.
Answer: I’m getting there.
We don’t yet know the story behind Wilson’s abrupt departure, and I don’t wish to imply otherwise. But even before that news broke Friday, the premier’s ham-fisted attempts to resolve criticism surrounding his expensing of Barristers’ Society dues had me rethinking the issue.
Contrarian’s alter-ego is currently submerged in a writing assignment, so I will merely flag the topic for later elaboration.
The Ten Commandments redux
Displaying customary humility, atheist showboat Christopher Hitchens takes a stab at re-writing the Ten Commandments in the current Vanity Fair and on YouTube. Andrew Sullivan responds by recalling a parallel attempt by Walt Whitman, in the prose preface to Leaves of Grass:
Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers or families, re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.
As between Moses, Hitch, Walt, and Sully, Walt gets Contrarian’s vote.
What’s up with this, Pete? – updated
A diesel-powered Pete’s Frootique truck idles unattended on Doyle Street in Halifax Saturday morning, needlessly spilling volatile organic compounds into the crisp spring air.
Update: Contrarian reader Colin May points out: Parked on the wrong side of the street, in a no parking zone, too close to a stop sign. Three strikes and you’re…
Big Mac v. salad – feedback (updated)
Contrarian reader Ken Clare thinks Contrarian’s standards slipped with our post of a chart comparing US food subsidies:
Edward Tufte, the “Galileo of Graphics” you introduced us to back in June, refers to images like these as “chartjunk.”
I haven’t taken the time to measure the images you copied (from a committee of physicians who may have had a passing relationship with math sometime in their pasts), but the subsidies pyramid eyeballs closer to a 100-to-1 ratio than the 75-to-25 ratio it is labeled.
Update: A Diligent Reader award goes to Contrarian’s insomniac friend Alistair Watt, who spent time with a ruler and a spreadsheet before concluding that the front faces of the pyramid graphs were a nearly perfect match for the data they purported to represent, but their transformation into three-dimensional pyramids distorted the data severely.
In other words, had this been presented as a column chart or a pie chart, it would have been reasonable. However, when I laboriously calculated the volumes implied by each subsection, the results were dramatically different.
Literary fire hazard
The Halifax Fire Marshall temporarily halted a reading by Alistair MacLeod (standing, back to camera, left side of photo) tonight so the overflow crowd of more than 600 could be rearranged to clear clogged aisles. Officials turned away another 100 people as the 73-year-old MacLeod, who splits his time between Windsor, Ontario, and Dunvegan, Cape Breton, read his 1976 story, The Closing Down of Summer. The Saint Mary’s University event marked the first time MacLeod had publicly read the story in its entirety.
Moneyquote:
When I write a story, when I’m halfway through, I write the last sentence. I think of it as a lighthouse.
Why a [U.S.] Big Mac costs less than a salad
This comparison, from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, is, of course, based on U.S. farm subsidies and U.S. dietary guidelines. Any data geeks out there want to take a stab at Canadian pyramids?
The nation that pees together
Here’s a curious Olympic postscript: a printout of Halifax water consumption on the afternoon of the Olympic gold medal hockey game:
The spikes correspond with the three intermissions, and with the immediate aftermath of Crosby’s sudden-death goal and the medal ceremony. Epcor, the company that runs Edmonton’s water system, produced a similar graph for that city on the same afternoon, with the previous day’s spikeless consumption superimposed in green:
Hat tip: R.S.
OK Go
I don’t normally post videos with 6.8 million views, but the Chicago band OK Go‘s latest home-made, Rube Goldberg, paint-ball spectacular is irresistible. Plus it comes with a great yarn about the counter-intuitive value of giveaway Internet content, and the pea-sized brains of record company dinosaurs.
Ira Glass, host of the great National Public Radio show This American Life, calls OK Go “living catnip.” They direct their own videos, shoot them on shoe-string budgets, and, in the words of singer Damian Kulash, Jr., “we see them as creative works and not as our record company’s marketing tool.”
In a recent New York Time op-ed piece, Kulash explained how OK Go posted its homemade 2006 video, “Here it goes again,” on YouTube without record company EMI’s knowledge or permission, a technical violation of its recording contract. The video won a Grammy, tens of millions of fans saw it, thousands poured into OK Go’s concerts, and EMI made lots of money.
How did the record company react? By pressuring YouTube to curb the viral spread of its videos. Technically, they did this by blocking embedding. Kulash explains after the jump:
Revolving into light
Around this time of year, I like to dig out You May Know Them as Sea Urchins, Ma’am, Ray Guy’s 1975 collection of newspaper columns, and re-read the last essay in the book: “This Dear and Fine Country (Spina Sanctus).”
Well, we made it once again, boys! Winter is over.
Oh, but there is still snow on the ground.
So what? It hasn’t got a chance. It is living in jeopardy from day to day. We should pity it because it will soon be ready for the funeral parlour. It is only a matter of another few paltry weeks and we shall see it disappear into brown and foaming brooks; we shall see the meadows burning green and spangled with little piss-a-beds like tiny yellow suns. Winter is over.
Oh, but there is still ice on the water.
So what? The globe is turning and nothing can stop it. We are revolving into light.
The fisherman tars his boat on the beach and is heated by two suns, one in the sky and another reflected from the water, and the ice on the cliff behind him drips away to a poor skeleton.It is only a matter of a few more paltry weeks and we shall see the steam rising from the ponds andfrom the damp ground behind the plow; we shall see the grandmother sitting out by the doorstep for a few minutes watching the cat; we shall see the small boats a’bustle, piled high with lobster pots in the bow, and the days melting further and further into the night.
Winter is over now.
Praise God and all honour to our forefathers through generations who did
never forsake this dear and fine country.
Ray Guy is a Newfoundland writer. The joke underlying the book title is that sea urchins are sometimes called whore’s eggs on The Rock. The Latin phrase Spina Sanctus (sanctified by the thorn) was a motto used by George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, an early settler on Newfoundland’s Southern Shore.
The photograph shows the sun setting over Baddeck at 5:54 p.m. today, itself a sign that winter’s goose is cooked.
