As Wendy Southgate of Elmswell, Suffolk, UK, took her dog, Trixie, for a stroll around the neighborhood one morning last spring, she noticed an odd looking car cruising slowly along the street. She wondered vaguely what it was up to. Then last week, Wendy's husband Terry, a firefighter, decided to look for their Cross St. house on the British version of Google Street View, and there were Wendy and Trixie. He looked a little further down the street, and there they were again. He checked a nearby street, and found them again. And again. Finally, Terry followed Wendy's customary dog-walking route—and...

22 April, 2010

How does a government that takes human rights obligations seriously handle warnings of detainee abuse? It would be too easy to ignore these warning signs, only to find that detainees previously held by UK have been mistreated while in Afg hands. The fallout of that, as we have seen from Canada’s experience, would, at best, be unwelcome. Read on: Source. Hat tip: Cheryl Cook via @DougSaunders...

21 April, 2010

Danish design student Julian Hansen offers an infographic to guide us through an increasingly common task: choosing just the right typeface. Click the image to bring up an enlargeable version....

21 April, 2010

Three national reporters for CBC Radio News carried out the devastating survey posted here last night, a source tells Contrarian. Veteran reporters Vic Adhopia of St. John's, Dave Seglins of Toronto, and Greg Rasmussen of Vancouver conducted the survey in March after months of grousing by colleagues about the operation of The Hub, the Toronto unit that co-ordinates all assignments for radio and TV news reporters. They submitted the survey to CBC brass, who responded in a conference call with all national reporters two weeks ago. News head Jonathan Whitten led the management team on the call, which one...

21 April, 2010

A survey of 24 CBC Radio national news reporters shows dismal morale and widespread dismay over organizational changes that funnel all radio and TV news assignments through a single "hub" in Toronto. A couple of nuggets: If anything, the individual reporters' comments are even more devastating: Read the full report below: ...

21 April, 2010

Contrarian reader Dave Atkinson writes: Both you and Bill Turpin used the word "fulsomely" to describe an apology. I assume you both know what you're doing. How droll. Bill and I probably knew once, but we, or at least I, forgot. William Safire rises from the dead to remind us. (As a bonus, he throws in "noisome" and "enormity.") [Update] Bill T. didn't forget after all: Sheesh! I've been lectured by Harry Flemming on the use of fulsome, so I chose it with care to describe The Coast's apology, and did so because of its ambiguity. It's nice that Dave Atkinson picked up on it, but...

20 April, 2010

I'm about as un-Catholic as they come. I grew up in Massachusetts, where the Roman clergy formed a reactionary vanguard scorned by my family and friends. The magical beliefs at the core of Christian dogma strike me as risible, and I've been known to bedevil Catholic friends by making sport of them. Not much fun in that these days, so palpable is the pain and frustration among Catholic laity over Pope Benedict XVI's Nixonian defense of the sex abuse cover-up scandal enveloping his papacy and the church. No one can take pleasure in their present grief.  Like other non-Catholics I suspect,...

20 April, 2010

The folks at Informationisbeautiful.net got their numbers wrong by a factor of, er, 10. The amount of CO2 emitted by the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano was not 15,000 tons of CO2 per day, but 150,000. To their credit, they owned up to the mistake, apologized fulsomely, and published a revised graphic: Although the planes vs. volcano equation is more of a saw-off than it first appeared, the eruption still looks like a net gain for the atmosphere (or it was until flights resumed today). This is a useful reminder of the adage,  garbage in, garbage out — especially important when it comes to vivid...

20 April, 2010

Two readers see The Coast's failure to lift a finger in defense of its reader-posters not as an unwelcome blow to free expression but as an overdue comeuppance for the well-known excesses of anonymous Internet posting. Bill Turpin writes: The Coast's greatest failure to its readers was in allowing anonymous posts in the first place. It's The Coast, not Samizdat, and this is Canada, not the former Soviet Union. You're free to write what you want in this country, subject to defamation laws which, while imperfect, are not odious. There is no need to hide behind an alias. But when you do,...

19 April, 2010

Chris Milk, who has directed videos for Kanye West, U2, Courtney Love, and Barack Obama, is assembling a few thousand volunteers to complete an animated music video for Ain't No Grave, title track of the last album Johnny Cash recorded. The Johnny Cash Project invites participants to use custom drawing tools to create the 1,368 frames in the 2 minute, 51 second, video. Since more than one artist will end up submitting artwork for each frame, the video will look different each time it's played. Writes Milk: Strung together and relayed in sequence, your art, paired with Johnny’s haunting song, will become...

19 April, 2010
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