No sensible person would go see Sex in the City -2 after reading (or even hearing about) the appalling reviews. But one good thing has come out of it: this delicious review, by Lindy West in Seattle alternative paper, The Stranger. The lead: We've been thinking it for two long years. All of us. Gnawing our cheeks at night, clutching at sweaty sheets, our faces hollow and gray, our once-bright eyes dimmed by the pain of too many questions. Sometimes we cry out, en masse, to a faceless god and a cold, indifferent universe that holds its secrets close. What...

01 June, 2010

The velvet-voiced Max MacDonald leads the cast of the Cape Breton Summertime Revue in a chorus of "Everybody's Going to the Bungalow" Tuesday night at Glace Bay's Savoy Theatre. The revival of the anthemic show, which ran from 1986 to 1998 and launched the careers of many of Cape Breton's best known performers, is playing five nights to packed — and rapturous — houses. Like its namesake, the revival combines poignant lyrics and melodies, like those of Leon Dubinsky's heart-wrenching, "Remember the Miner," Remember the miner; have a thought for the one Who's working the back shift while this song's being sung. His blood...

01 June, 2010

Some Nova Scotia submissions to the website OneMillionGiraffes.com, where Stavanger, Norway, resident Ola Helland is using crowdsourcing to try and win a bet that he can assemble one million images of giraffes in a year. He is currently at 800,000. Left to right, top to bottom, first two images by Taylor, age 15, Halifax; then Peter Merideth, 24, Antigonish; Taylor again; Alina, 17, Halifax; next two by Dalbtron3000, 29, Antigonish; Joshua, 31, Sydney; and the last two images...

01 June, 2010

Anand Girisharadas of the New York Times addresses a weighty issue that threatens to become a regular topic on Contrarian: use of conjunction "so" to begin a sentence. He notes a National Public Radio interview in which fully one quarter of the sentences began with "so." While Girisharadas dredges up a 14th century poem in which Chaucer begins a sentence with "so," he cites scholars who trace the recent boom in introductory so's to Silicon Valley, or perhaps to Microsoft employees. In the software world, it was a tic that made sense. In immigrant-filled technology firms, it democratized talk by replacing a world of...

01 June, 2010