Gone-fishin' CBC Radio host Costas Halavrezos muses about his ego-lite broadcasting style on the veteran's last Maritime Noon broadcast: [A]s listeners, you've noticed I play my personal cards close to my chest. I don't tell cute family anecdotes or talk about my favourite sports teams or what I had for breakfast, because I believe every second of broadcast time is precious, and well, the majority of you don't get to communicate with other Maritimers every day like I do, so it's best if I stay out of the way and free up the space. This is but a variant of E.B. White's...

19 September, 2010

Salon's Glenn Greenwald digs out a prescient morning-after column by Hunter S. Thompson of all people, published on 9/12/2001: The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare...

13 September, 2010

That was the manifesto of my favorite Yippe, Abby Hoffman. Now you can steal it online....

12 September, 2010

Felix Solomon, a blogger for Reuters, proposes a Unified Theory of New York Biking that Halifax cyclists would do well to heed: Bikes can and should behave much more like cars than pedestrians. They should ride on the road, not the sidewalk. They should stop at lights, and pedestrians should be able to trust them to do so. They should use lights at night. And — of course, duh — they should ride in the right direction on one-way streets. None of this is a question of being polite; it’s the law. But in stark contrast to motorists, nearly all of whom...

12 September, 2010

A New York Times article explains something that has long puzzled me: why are institutions where security really matters so lax about passwords, while the corner store requires long, ever-changing, combinations of  upper and lower case, alphanumeric and non-alphanumeric characters? Why are my credit union and my bank satisfied with a four-digit numeric PIN, which they never make me change? The answer, according to a number of security experts interviewed by the Times, is that passwords don't need to be strong or constantly changed. Worse, "[O]nerous requirements for passwords have given us a false sense of protection against potential attacks. In fact,...

12 September, 2010

Last year, James Fallows illustrated the growing girth of North American's by digging up photos from the 1950s of Jackie Gleason, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ramond Burr. Gleason was a notorious fatso. Hitchcock and Burr were celebrated symbols of portliness. None would draw a second look today. Now comes evidence that the shift in our perception of what constitutes fat has been getting a quiet nudge from pants manufacturers in the form of "vanity sizing." Abram Sauer, of Esquire's Style Blog, snuck a measuring tape into the change rooms of a series of men's retail chains and came back with this heartbreaking news...

10 September, 2010

My favorite film series opens its fall season tonight with this year's surprise winner of the Best Foreign Film Oscar: The Secret In Their Eyes, a movie that crosses genres: part thriller, love story, comedy, and political drama. Showtime: 7 p.m., at the Empire Theatre, 325 Prince Street, Sydney. Previews from WhatsGoinOn and The Post. Check out the links: Oh yeah, that other film festival starts today, too....

09 September, 2010

Phil Shackleton reports on a little known border problem: Canadian border farmers say it’s not uncommon to see dozens of sociology professors, animal-rights activists and Unitarians crossing their fields at night. “I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a Hollywood producer huddled in the barn,” said Manitoba farmer Red Greenfield, whose acreage borders North Dakota. "The producer was cold, exhausted and hungry. He asked me if I could spare a latte and some free-range chicken. When I said I didn’t have any, he left before I even got a chance to show him my screenplay, eh?” In...

09 September, 2010

Do not miss Jeffrey Goldberg's continuing posts about his surprise command audience with Fidel Castro last week. First instalment here; second here. Goldberg is a perplexing figure, a former member of the IDF, quick to call anti-semitism against anyone who balks at his lockstep advocacy of troubling Israeli policies. He caused a stir recently with an Atlantic cover story speculating about an impending Israeli nuclear strike against Iran. Many regarded the article as thinly disguised tub-thumping for such an attack (see here and here), while others demurred. In the end, the Atlantic held an extensive, online print debate about the issue — which...

08 September, 2010
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