Contrarian is pleased to report, after a recent sojourn in Bayfield, Antigonish County, that Jim Nunn seems to be thriving in his newfound role as gentleman farmer. It's the best thing I ever did in my life. They send me a cheque every month, and I Don't Do A Single Thing for them. I should have done it years ago. We voiced admiration at the ripeness of the tomatoes on his windowsill. You should see my burpless cucumbers. They're huge. But it was dark and cold, and we gave the garden tour a pass. As for politics, Nunn thinks Harper is poised to beat...

22 September, 2009

Contrarian reader John Hugh Edwards has noticed a linguistic quirk of recent origin: For some time I've been meaning to mention how people being interviewed begin answers with, "So...

22 September, 2009

The excellent CBC Radio show, blog, and podcast known as Spark has just posted host Nora Young's  long interview with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Mayer-Schönberger believes cheap digital storage has encouraged us, often unwittingly, to store more information than is good for us. In the interview, he offers two examples: Some people with photographic memory have trouble making decisions, because memories of bad outcomes from previous decisions paralyze them. A Canadian psychotherapist, Andrew Feldmar, was permanently barred from entering the United States because a US border guard, using Google, discovered a 10-year-old article he...

22 September, 2009

Today's New York Times uses Flash animation to show how the financial crisis took the market capitalization of America's banking titans from this (On October 7, 2007): To this (on March 1, 2009): And then back to this (last Friday): Note that the animated version, which you really should visit, uses color to show the relative shrinkage and growth of each bank. Gray is the baseline; green is growth; reddish-brown (who chose these colors?) is shrinkage. Rollover text provides detail on each of the included banks. ...

22 September, 2009

OK, it's not really trompe-l'œil. It's an actual, three-dimensional lamp standard at 6th Avenue and Cambie Street, Vancouver. The Cossette ad agency wrapped the pole in brown vinyl, affixing an out-sized carafe at the top and a giant cup at the bottom. The result: an eye-catching ad for McDonald's coffee giveaway promotion. Don't try this in Halifax, where it's illegal to advertise on poles, except for the anatomically correct poles city fathers (and mothers!) set aside for that purpose. Hattip: Bessy N. ...

22 September, 2009

When German aid workers proposed a basic income support program in Otjivero, an impoverished, disease-ridden, hard-drinking village in Namibia, critics scoffed.  "They'll just drink more," one predicted. But a year into the program, which distributes $100 Namibian (roughly $14.15 Canadian) per month to each of Otjivero's 961 residents, school attendance has soared, public health improved, and crime dropped. Spiegel Online International reports: The basic income scheme doesn't work like charity, but like a constitutional right. Under the plan, every citizen, rich or poor, would be entitled to it starting at birth. There would be no poverty test, no conditions and, therefore,...

20 September, 2009

As the US right hurls ever more fantastic slippery slope arguments at health care reform, the Atlantic's James Fallows has challenged readers to come up with a single non-specious example of a metaphorical slippery slope. Aside from, "birth leads inevitably to death," they've been pretty much stumped. But one reader offered this 19th century advice from Thomas de Quincey, author of Confessions of an Opium Eater. If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun...

20 September, 2009

Green Party leader Elizabeth May likes to deride clean coal technology as "George Bush's favorite techno-fix" for climate change. But a new documentary from the Australian Broadcasting Company says the Bush administration actually undermined clean coal, even as it pretended to support the technology. Coal is our most abundant conventional energy resource, also our dirtiest. It contributes about half of greenhouse gas production in Nova Scotia, about 30 percent worldwide. So a technology that let us use this resource without producing greenhouse gas emissions would be a huge breakthrough in efforts to slow climate change. In 2007, MIT produced a study called,...

20 September, 2009

The Times of London reports that the World Bank is pumping billions into the construction of coal-fired power plants in India, Botswana, and South Africa, despite a recent bank report citing the disproportionate impact of climate change on third world countries. The bank’s World Development Report says: “Developing countries are disproportionately affected by climate change — a crisis that is not of their making and for which they are the least prepared. Increasing access to energy and other services using high-carbon technologies will produce more greenhouse gases, hence more climate change.” The report says that between 75 and 80 per cent of...

19 September, 2009

Thirty-nine years ago last night, Jimi Hendrix died in a London, England, apartment. He was 27 years old. Halifax bluesman Roger Howse honored the anniversary with an all-Hendrix third set at Bearly’s House of Blues & Ribs on Barrington Street. Contrarian friend Richard Stephenson writes: A fixture at Bearly’s over the last decade, the Roger Howse Band draws praise for the power of its music and the precision of Roger's guitar work. About 12:30 this morning, following a longer than usual break, the band returned to the stage and, without fanfare, charged headlong into a ninety-minute set featuring nine Hendrix songs....

19 September, 2009
Show more
Loading...