Speaking of the weird and homemade, D. Brown, a carpenter in Canning, makes guitars out of cigar boxes. John Dunsworth, an ardent fan, interviewed him, and Mike Swain filmed it. Seems there's quite a movement behind these rigs. [Update] If a $200 cigar-box guitar is out of your price range, Dave Atkinson recommends the cardboard upright bass....
That's what Atlantic tech blogger Alexis Madrigal calls Google's Books Ngram Viewer. Google has scanned about 10 percent of all the books ever published. Enter any word or phrase into the search box, and the viewer returns a graph of its frequency of appearance in books published over the last two centuries. Note that the searches are case sensitive, and you can compare the relative frequencies of up to four five different words or phrases, separating them by commas in the search box. Say, "Nova Scotia" and "Ontario," for example: Try it yourself, and please send me any interesting pairings you come up with. Madrigal's...
Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio faces Cleveland fastballer Bob Feller, who died Wednesday. “I don’t think anyone is ever going to throw a ball faster than he does,” DiMaggio predicted. Feller was a 17-year-old high school student when he pitched his first game for the Indians and struck out 15 batters. Three weeks later he struck out 17, tying Dizzy Dean's Major League record. "By the end of his brief rookie season," the New York Times reports, "Feller was the best-known young person in America, with the possible exception of Shirley Temple." In 1937, with his picture on the cover of Time, he opened his first...
The Fratelli Pelligrini (that's Pilgrim Brothers in Italian) perform at the Holy See. It's hard to pick out the weirdest element: the boys themselves, their bare chests denuded of hair; the Pope's rapt expression; the nuns' ecstatic approval; or the cheesy martial music: ...
This wonderful story showed up in an AskReddit thread about picking up hitchhikers: Just about every time I see someone I stop. I kind of got out of the habit in the last couple of years, moved to a big city and all that, my girlfriend wasn't too stoked on the practice. Then some shit happened to me that changed me and I am back to offering rides habitually. If you would indulge me, it is long story and has almost nothing to do with hitch hiking other than happening on a road. This past year I have had 3 instances of...
According to this crowd-sourced interactive graphic from priceofweed.com, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and PEI have the best retail reefer rates on the continent: This is a screenshot. Click here to view the interactive chart, then click on any dollar sign to get data on that state or province. Detailed Nova Scotia price reports here. (Click any of the Police reporters might want to bookmark this chart for ready reference next time the boys in blue claim the half dozen, half-grown plants they seized in Upper West Boot have a street value of 47 gazillion dollars. Hattip: Floatingsheep.com....
An alert reader [points out] claims that although musician Denis Ryan is one of Nova Scotia's most successful investors, he is not now and has never been a restaurateur. Perhaps that's why he is such a successful investor. [Update: Several readers report that Ryan once held an interest in the Antigonish bar now called Piper's Pub. I think that makes this a correction within a correction to a correction.] Darn. All those Irish folksingers look alike. I've corrected the original post, which, ironically, was prompted by another news organization's similar flub. In strict blog etiquette, I should leave the original mistake in place, but...
Perhaps this post deserves elaboration. By any measure, dredging Sydney Harbour is a dubious use of public funds. It may yield modest increases in commercial shipping, but dreams of a container terminal here are but a fantasy. Despite the massive boom in world shipping that characterized the 2000s, the two container piers in Halifax continue to limp along at half capacity. Plans for a third pier at Melford are years ahead of those for Sydney, where a putative terminal proponent seems to have vanished. Yet the Cape Breton public has been massively oversold on the concept as the only possible salvation of...
[Updated below] Our friends at AllNovaScotia (subscription required) appear to have been punk'd by [restaurateur] singing investor Denis Ryan and Halifax folksinger-comedian Tony Quinn in a YouTube spoof of a profane Irish expat turning the air blue-green with outrage over the Emerald Isle's financial travails. The NSFW clip identifies Quinn as a reporter for "the Financial News," which morphs to "the Financial Times" in the AllNS piece. As alert Contrarian reader DR points out, however, the clip does not turn up on any site calling itself 'Financial News,' and the reporter definitely doesn’t say, 'Financial Times.' Also, the 'reporter' looks and sounds remarkably like...