The five occupants of this 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan — my son, daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren — survived a head-on collision on the TransCanada Highway Thursday evening. I offer the following details in hopes that other families will find it helpful to understand the factors that decisively improved their chances of survival. Shortly before 5 p.m, August 26, my family was westbound on Route 105 in Lexington, Nova Scotia, just north of the Canso Causeway, when a severe rain squall hit the area. Daughter-in-law Jenn had just slowed down when an eastbound car apparently hydroplaned and spun across the centerline into...

31 August, 2010

What's up with Queens County, Nova Scotia, and orange vehicles? Top to bottom: Ford Ranger 4x4, Charleston; Harley Davidson, White Point; Custom two-door, Liverpool....

30 August, 2010

The New York Times previews a play and a forthcoming children's book about a nearly forgotten travel guide that helped African Americans (and African Canadians) navigate the segregated accommodations that prevailed into the 1960s. A Harlem postal employee and civic leader named Victor H. Green conceived the guide in response to one too many accounts of humiliation or violence where discrimination continued to hold strong. These were facts of life not only in the Jim Crow South, but in all parts of the country, where black travelers never knew where they would be welcome...

23 August, 2010

The Herald's Pat Lee has a lovely piece about Contrarian's friend Jane Kansas, currently walking from Montana to Halifax. The layout is also gorgeous, if you can scare up a physical copy of the paper. (Previous Contrarian mentions here and here; Kansas's own blog here.)...

20 August, 2010

Oh the drama of it all! (Click here if the video doesn't appear.) Hat tip: Doug MacKay...

19 August, 2010

In response to the fuss over Halifax sewage sludge, Contrarian reader S.P. points out that the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, District Sewerage Commission has been selling processed sludge under the brand name Milorganite for more than eight decades. The name, a contraction of Milwaukee organic nitrogen, was the winner of a 1925 naming contest in National Fertilizer Magazine. A corporate history on the commission's website explains that product grew out of a pollution control program. Early in the last century, the city formed the commission to clean up organic matter flowing into Milwaukee's waterways. The commission opened a laboratory to study a British chemist's scheme for...

18 August, 2010

If the admirable Ellen Page* wants to contribute to the environment of her home province, she might consider pressuring the Dexter government to rethink its politically expedient decision to delay regulations to control mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants. Mercury is a dangerous element with well-known impacts on human health, especially the health of young children. The province and Nova Scotia Power have known about their obligation to clean up mercury emissions for years, if not decades. [Disclosure: both NSP and the NS Govt. have been my clients.] The government's decision to back away from that legislated commitment in the...

17 August, 2010

Datamarket.com has animated the earthquakes that prefigured Iceland's unpronounceable volcano. [Embedded below or vis this link.] Earthquakes and Eruptions in Iceland 2010 from hjalli on Vimeo....

17 August, 2010

Where possible, I like to embed videos in Contrarian, to save readers the trouble of clicking through to them,  while including the links for those who prefer to view them at source. Lately, however, most of the embedded videos are disappearing from the emails a few hundred of you use to read Contrarian [see link (1) at right.] At first I assumed this was an artifact of Steve Jobs's hatred of Adobe Flash, causing the embedded videos to disappear chiefly on iPads and iPhones. But, no, of late they have failed to show up in my regular email program. Is this true...

17 August, 2010
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