Arts activist and New Democrat Andrew Terris questions the province's decision to rename the Hantsport Connector after William Hall, VC, the first African Canadian, and the first Canadian sailor, to receive the Victoria Cross. The son of slaves who escaped the American south during the War of 1812, Hall earned the honor for his exceptional bravery during the Siege of Lucknow in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. On Monday, Terris wrote Premier Darrell Dexter: The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was also known as India's First War of Independence, so in essence Nova Scotia’s social democrats are memorializing a black man who helped white...

25 November, 2010

A US study by the Pew Research Center finds that pre-election polls favor Republican candidates when the pollster only calls landlines, and not cell phones. The gap appears to be growing as more people abandon land lines for cell service. [S]upport for Republican candidates was significantly higher in samples based only on landlines than in dual frame samples that combined landline and cell phone interviews. The difference in the margin among likely voters this year is about twice as large as in 2008. And then there's Skype. This calls to mind the 1948 US presidential election, in which polls (and pundits) predicted a...

23 November, 2010

The youth wing of the Catalan Socialist Party has a vivid take on the pleasures of voting: Via Salon's Tracy Clark-Flory, who reports that other Spanish political parties were not amused, calling the get-out-the-vote spot "crude," "misleading," "filth," and "as attack on the dignity of women."...

21 November, 2010

The Chicago Manual of Style, grand dame of copydesk styleguides, has published its 16th edition, but Ed Park, writing at Bookforum.com, recalls the 14th fondly: Though I never read the book cover to cover, the Chicago Manual of Style took up a lot of brain space during my copyediting years. Section headings suggested good titles for poems or chapters: "Mistaken Junction" (5.63), the vertiginous "Words Used as Words" (6.76). Ostensibly a reference work, it was really a form of secret potent literature, offering some of the challenges and unconventional pleasures of the sort of doorstop-shaped fiction I was consuming back then...

20 November, 2010

Contrarian reader Andrew Bourke is reconsidering a trip to Disney World after seeing this video of Transportation Safety Agency screeners in Chattanooga Tennessee manhandling an upset three-year-old. (If you can't see the video, try this link.) The San Francisco Chronicle explains: A TSA employee gave Mandy the pat down and she started screaming and kicking her legs...

17 November, 2010

. . . . . . . That schools in the Cape Breton-Victoria School District will close is obvious. Enrolment here has dropped 22 percent over eight years, with no end to the decline in sight, while costs have risen 25 percent over the same period. That Holy Angels High tops the list of candidates for closure is equally obvious. The geriatric Catholic order that owns the school wants to unload it, and has offered it to the board for $750,000. The board estimates it would need another $8 to $10 million in repairs, while newer schools nearby have lots of space. The prospect of closure has provoked the...

17 November, 2010

Get ready for Opt Out Day: For those using Flash-impaired Apple products, try here. From the clever Taiwanese animators, Next Media. Hat tip: This week in Google....

17 November, 2010

A visitor finds its way to the mayor's house in Ross Ferry: ...

17 November, 2010

China hand James Fallows expends a lot of time and words reassuring Americans that China is not the unstoppable, omnipotent superpower they fear it to be. Reality is more complicated, he argues, especially when viewed up close, from within China, where he has spent years. However, a Fallows cover story in the current Atlantic warns of one technology in which China is leaving the west in its dust: the quest for ways to burn coal without emitting carbon. In exhorting the west to greater effort in pursuit of clean coal, Fallows takes aim at one of the environmental movement's most sacred bovines: the...

13 November, 2010
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