Question: What's the name of the school at Dalhousie that trains lawyers? You may be surprised to learn, as I was, that it's no longer Dalhousie Law School. Following a $20-million gift from Ontario businessman Seymour Schulich, it officially became The Schulich School of Law on October 15. Haligonian Warren Reed runs the numbers: In 2004-5, the total Dal budget seems to have been around $200 million—all but $13 million coming from government grants and tuition payments. One could doubtless find more recent data on the Internet.  Schulich's gift, if added to the endowment and invested conservatively, will add about $1...

15 November, 2009

At the Brewery Market in Halifax. ...

14 November, 2009

The Harper Government's ambivalent attitude toward immigration deserves more thoughtful consideration than I have time for this morning, but in light of yesterday's release of a new guide for prospective Canadian Immigrants, a manual high in testosterone and shy on environmental values, I flag it here for future discussion. An immigrant himself, Contrarian left yesterday's Film Series benefit for L'Arche Cape Breton* thinking about the Senegalese immigrant cab driver at the centre of the featured movie — an ebullient character named Solo, brilliantly played by Souleymane Sy Savane, himself an immigrant to the US from the Ivory Coast.  Solo is one...

13 November, 2009

Our post on Vin Scully, 81, who just wrapped up his 60th season calling play-by-play for the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers (and plans to stay on through next season), elicited some wonderful reader comments. First, Frank MacDonald (yes, that Frank MacDonald, the other Inverness County writer who deserves a Giller): Enjoyed your reminder of the Koufax perfect game. In my own writing during the baseball season, the game plays the role for me that music plays for many others. Even when it is televised, as it mostly is in this house, it is two rooms away, and the sound of the...

13 November, 2009

Frank MacDonald also sent us a song he wrote "many years ago." "There has never been a musician I could interest in it," he writes. "Not being a singer myself, I converted into a talking blues that I entertain myself with from time to time in the car, As a old Brooklyn Dodger fan, you may enjoy it. As a Cleveland fan my chances to enjoy things have been few and far between since 1954." SANDLOT KID He lived on a park bench, reading baseball box scores And paid his way doing odd and end chores. But he loved to remember when baseball was magic, And...

13 November, 2009

At Sydney's Waterfront Pavillion Thursday night, it's The Party Of The Year — and that's saying something in Cape Breton! The Cape Breton Island Film Series' 4th annual benefit for L'Arche Cape Breton gets under way at 7 pm at the Empire Theatre with the acclaimed indie film GOODBYE SOLO, the story of two men from completely different backgrounds who form an unlikely friendship. At 9, the action shifts to the Joan Harriss Cruise Pavillion, next to the Big Fiddle, for live music and dancing to the Blues Merchants and Cape Breton's best Lebanese buffet. The whole L'Arche Community will be there,...

11 November, 2009

The Globe's Michael Valpy has a thoughtful piece on the burgeoning interest in Remembrance Day commemorations, especially among young people. The graphic below accompanies the article. While researching his namesake, Rev. Miles Tompkins, a First World War army chaplain, Contrarian reader Miles Tompkins came upon some sobering numbers: The waste of human life hit Cape Breton and the Diocese of Antigonish very hard. The diocese runs from Our Lady of Lourdes in Stellarton to the tip of Cape Breton, and even included the Italian Mission and a Syrian Parish in Cape Breton. Well over 500 boys from this diocese were killed in...

11 November, 2009
Vin Scully said last night that he would continue to serve as the Los Angeles Dodgers play-by-play announcer through the 2010 season. Scully, who turns 82 this month, began broadcasting Dodgers games in 1950. Vin Scully BaseballContrarian began listening to him not long after as a devoted Brooklyn Dodger fan living in Chappaqua, NY. Hiding under bed covers, ear pressed to the radio speaker, we heard games come alive through Scully's gift for vivid similes. He said Bob Gibson "pitches as though he's double-parked." He said, "Losing feels worse than winning feels good." He said, "Sometimes it seems like [Bobby Bonilla's] playing underwater." He said, "Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamp post: for support, not illumination." He said, "When [Maury Wills] runs, it's all downhill." While calling 1987 All-Star Game, Scully saw the Toronto Blue Jay's uber-smooth shortstop Tony Fernandez for the first time. "He's like a bolt of silk," Scully said. Because of Scully's gift for words, we still prefer listening to baseball on the radio over watching it on TV. On the radio, games unfolds in your mind, unconstrained by camera angles and closeups. As the Terry Cashman tune puts it. "I saw it on the radio." After the jump, the word-for-word transcript of Scully calling the 9th inning of Sandy Koufax's Perfect Game, September 9, 1965:
11 November, 2009

A scathing editorial in today's New York Times denounces a US appeal court for having "brushed off" a lawsuit by Canadian Maher Arar. As the paper put it,  Arar "was seized in an American airport by federal agents acting on bad information from Canadian officials," and "held incommunicado and harshly interrogated before being sent to Syria, where he was tortured. He spent almost a year in a grave-size underground cell before the Syrians let him go." Two courts, one in Italy and one in the United States, ruled recently on the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition, which is the kidnapping...

11 November, 2009
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