In response to my post on the Dexter government's obsessive management of routine government communications, Bruce Wark writes: When I arrived in Nova Scotia in October, 1986 as CBC Radio's National Reporter for the Maritimes, I found that the Nova Scotia government's public relations system was generally third rate. I had just come from six years covering the Ontario legislature and was used to dealing every day with a professional civil service and public relations officers who provided accurate information quickly and efficiently. In fact, I realized  during my years at Queen's Park that the Conservatives' decision to create a professional (and...

27 February, 2011

Eamonn Fingleton, an ex-pat Irish financial journalist who lives in Tokyo, takes a decidedly contrarian view of the Japanese economy. Far from stagnating for 20 years, as received media wisdom would have it, Japan's economy has been ticking along just fine, he contends. Guest-blogging for James Fallows at TheAtlantic.com website (where Contrarian will take a guest-blogging turn the week of March 14), Fingleton cites a couple of inconvenient facts in support of his analysis: Japan's current account surplus in 1990, regarded as the onset of its 20-year economic malaise, stood at $36 billion. By last year, it had risen to $194 billion. Over the...

26 February, 2011

Costas Halavrezos adds a Rube Goldberg twist to our antique engine percussion series (previous instalments here, here, and here.) with this unique James Taylor concert rendition of Slap Leather: As Costas points out, the song is 20 years old, but its bittersweet lyrics could have been written yesterday....

26 February, 2011

http://contrarian.ca/2011/02/13/spirit-place-how-about-atheist-heights-instead/ Contrarian readers are sharply divided about plans to build a seven-storey old people’s apartment where St. James United Church now stands. (My own misgivings here.) First the Cons: Liz Cunningham, owner of a Charles Street creperie just down the street from the proposed apartment complex, writes: Finally somebody who sees through the smokescreen, holier than though, social justice, inclusive "nonsense." St John's United Church is a developer first and foremost. They are seeking variances on lot coverage, height, density, etc, etc, etc. That is all we should be talking about. My hat’s off though to Louisa Horne and the rest of that group. They...

26 February, 2011

AllNovaScotia.com has a good piece this morning by Paul McLeod (subscribe!) detailing the obsessive control Premier Darrell Dexter's office exercises over all departmental communications, to the point that answers to even the most routine and trivial inquiries often wait hours for a nod of approval from the Central Committee. In a companion piece by McLeod,  ex-Premier Rodney MacDonald's Communications Director Wade Keller, now toiling for Labatt's, endorses the Dexter government's approach as necessary for managing the government's message. Trouble is, communications during Rodney MacDonald's brief term were atrocious—precisely because of excessive message management. As one of Keller's predecessors aptly put it, the...

22 February, 2011

The NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio has released a very cool animation showing the Earth's water cycle over 25 days, based on real data. (Click on the image below to view the animation). NASA explains: Water regulates climate, predominately storing heat during the day and releasing it at night. Water in the ocean and atmosphere carries heat from the tropics to the poles. The process by which water moves around the earth, from the ocean to the atmosphere to the land and back to the ocean, is called the water cycle....

21 February, 2011

Contrarian friend Cliff White muses on tractor percussion (previously here and here): Not only is this just a wonderful piece, it's a nostalgic reminder of just how much rhythm and music there was in early machinery. Aside from the occasional pile driver, I can't think of anything today that carries on that tradition. Even the once ubiquitous make-and-break engine seems to have unfortunately gone completely from our shores....

21 February, 2011

It's been tried, according to Rick Falkvinge, who begins a seven-part history of copyright today. Moneyquote: The copyright industry has tried the same tricks and rhetoric for well over 500 years, and they are also keen on trying to rewrite history. But the tale of the history books differs sharply from what the copyright industry is trying to paint. When the printing press arrived in 1453, scribe-craft was a profession in high demand. The Black Death had taken a large toll from the monasteries, who were not yet repopulated, so copying books was expensive. Obsoleting scribes was not a popular development with...

20 February, 2011

And God love Contrarian readers. When Steve Hart sent me this video of a pretty good guitar trio using a slow-idling tractor for percussion on Sweet Georgia Brown and Bye Bye Blues, I wondered it it was a known Internet chestnut that had somehow escaped me. But the earliest copy of "the Saskatchewan Philharmonic" was posted last April and had only 8,000 hits. Turns out the video is neither philharmonic nor Saskatchewanian. It's Sweden's Olle Hemmingson Trio, featuring the eponymous Olle playing a Gibson Les Paul Signature guitar, with an antique Volvo tractor for percussion. Thanks to Brian Bonnar for setting...

20 February, 2011

It's got a backbeat, you can't lose it: Between the musicians and the marine make-n-breaks in this province, surely we could produce a Maritime rejoinder. Update: It ain't from Saskatchewan. Amplification and correction here. H/T: Steve Hart....

19 February, 2011
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