The Liberal back-room boys have convinced defeated candidate Ian McNeil to seek a recount of last week's vote. McNeil should have stuck with his own better instincts. Fifty votes is a slim margin, but he'll never overcome it in a recount. In the rare occasions when elections are controverted, voters usually punish the candidate who demanded a re-vote....
Chris Jordan photographed the decomposed corpses of albatross chicks a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny island of sand and coral in the middle of the North Pacific. Parent birds feed their nesting chicks what looks to them like food, but is actually plastic flotsam that collects in the nearby Pacific Gyre. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking. To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered...
Philip Lee responds to Contrarian's effort to get the New York Times to correct its obituary of Donald Marshall: While I appreciate your efforts to have the record corrected at the New York Times, I am disappointed by your wink-wink, nudge-nudge attack on journalist and author Michael Harris. First, you've misrepresented his position. Michael Harris recently spoke about the Marshall case in a lecture theatre filled with students and professors at St. Thomas University in Fredericton where he is a visiting chair this fall. Among other things, he outlined at length the significance of the robbery story and how this was used...
On July 22, 1941, an unnamed couple got married in Amsterdam. The bride lived in a second-floor apartment at Merwedeplein 39. The girl next door, in the second-floor apartment at No. 37, leaned out the window to get a good look as the happy couple left the apartment. Someone filmed the scene. It is the only time Anne Frank was ever captured on film. The Anne Frank House museum recently uploaded the film footage to YouTube, "thanks to the cooperation of the couple."...
Going to Mars isn't easy, although the mission success rate has improved since the 1960s. In chronological order (counter-clockwise from top-left), missions to the red planet are color-coded by country, with the longest lines representing the most sophisticated missions. (Even old-fashioned bar graphs can be compelling in the hands of a sharp designer.) Hat tip: FlowingData.com via FastCompany.com via WeLoveDatavis. Original source unknown....
The June 9 general election saw a new party take power in Nova Scotia. It bears comment that, to the best of Contrarian's knowledge, not a single highway worker lost his job as a result, and this non-massacre occurred without notice. On September 20, 1978, the day after John Buchanan defeated Gerald Regan, many highway workers didn't bother to show up for work. It went without saying that Tory sympathizers would take over their jobs. The next time government changed hands, in 1993, Liberal hacks were so infuriated at John Savage's refusal to cleanse highway garages of Tory hires, they eventually hounded...
Despite two disappointing byelections, last week may be remembered as a good one for Liberal leader Stephen McNeil: He turned a potential crisis to his advantage by supporting the government bill blocking access to tainted Grit trust funds. He put Premier Darrell Dexter on his back foot by challenging New Democrats to go further and ban third-party contributions, as recommended by Chief Electoral Officer Christine McCulloch. Caught by surprise, Dexter dithered. It was a show of leadership under pressure. To consolidate, McNeil should: Keep after Dexter on third-party contributions. Ms. McCulloch's imprimatur put this issue beyond partisan reproach. Dexter can choose between following McNeil's...
A stalwart Tory friend who fully expected Ian McNeil to beat Allan MacMaster in the Inverness byelection voiced surprise at MacMaster's decision to go door-to-door with former Premier Rodney MacDonald, who held the seat before quitting last month: I would have expected voters in Inverness to have an earful for Rodney after he quit so soon. There was certainly some of that. MacMaster received 2,247 fewer votes than MacDonald had just four months earlier. But I suspect Rodney was still a plus for MacMaster at the doorstep—probably a crucial factor in his sliver of victory. In the eyes of most Nova Scotia voters,...
[caption id="attachment_2694" align="alignwrap" width="550" caption="L to R: Bassist Fred Lavery, guitarist Dave McKeough, and old time rocker Matt Mainglewood, testing the limits of the iPhone's flashless camera. "][/caption] A decidedly graying crowd of hardcore Matt Minglewood fans packed the Royal Cape Breton Yacht Club over the weekend for the latest in Colleen MacDonald's Load of Wood music nights. Minglewood was joined by some of Cape Breton's best loved session musicians, including Fred Lavery on bass, Dave McKeough on guitar, Ian Aker on sax, Kenny Boone on mouth harp, and James Munroe on trombone. To receive e-mail notification of these occasional (and mercifully early...
The New York Times has corrected its obituary of Donald Marshall, Jr., following remonstrations from Contrarian and from one of the lawyers who represented Marshall before the celebrated inquiry that bears his name. The original Times obit, published in its August 7 edition, two days after Marshall's death, contained the following paragraph: Late on the night of May 28, 1971, Mr. Marshall and a friend, Sandy Seale, went walking in a Sydney park and tried to rob an older man, Roy Ebsary, who drew a knife and killed Mr. Seale. As Contrarian wrote to the obituary's author, William Grimes: The Royal Commission on the...