Responding to my response to his earlier response to Lindsay Brown’s letter to HRM Councilor Jerry Blumenthal decrying council’s decision to spend $50,000 repeating decades of studies that have confirmed the safety of biosolid use in agriculture, Cliff White writes: Halifax Harbour is certainly cleaner then it was. Well, as long as it hasn't rained in three days, and thank god we get so little precipitation here abouts. And it would be churlish of me to mention that the sewage plants don't meet the new federal regulations for what can be released into the ocean, so I won't. Let me just point...

06 June, 2011

Former health inspector Bill Bailey writes: Kudos to Lindsay. Unfortunately, because politicians’ skin is made from elephant hide, they will probably take it as a compliment. And a Halifax reader notes that this week's Rona flyer features "eco friendly" Milorganite, at $7.79 for a 16.3 kg bag, "for better results NATURALLY." As noted previously, Milorganite is the great-granddaddy of recycled, composted municipal sludge. So it's OK to spread Milwaukee's venerable composted sludge on Halifax vegetable gardens, but heaven forfend we use Halifax's modern stuff on municipal flower beds. And one more. Colin May writes: Reminds me of the arguments against incineration  20 years ago: "Heavy...

30 May, 2011

Contrarian has previously voiced astonishment that environmentalists — more accurately crackpots posing as environmentalists — would oppose a recycling project that transforms harmful municipal waste into a valuable organic fertilizer here and here. We're also chagrinned the Halifax media's gullibility and lack of interest in actual scientific information about the topic. Now, a North End resident has voiced similar incredulity in a letter to District 11 councillor Jerry Blumenthal: Dear Mr. Blumenthal, For a long time, I couldn't understand why Haligonians keep comparing their city to tiny Moncton, but now I'm beginning to get it. And I'm not referring to Moncton's apparently...

22 May, 2011

Lawrence Boothby doesn’t think much of sculptor Jamie McCartney’s plaster vulvas: Pale, monochrome, rigid, dry, repeated - it was interesting to me how the medium of plaster, the context of the exhibit, the isolation of one part of a woman's body from the rest of her body (and emotions), and repetition, alters a viewers' perception. For artistic purposes, the 400 tiles could have been of almost any set of objects that were similar yet unique. Four hundred color photographs of the same size would have better captured the beauty of vulva including their hair, but he wouldn't have been able to...

26 March, 2011

An anonymous reader writes: Marriage is the cruelest form of celibacy, so I thank you for the reminder of what women look like....

20 March, 2011

English sculptor and prop maker Jamie McCartney arranged 400 plaster casts of vulvas into a nine-meter polyptych, to be displayed at the Brighton Festival Fringe in May. The project took five years and a quarter ton of plaster. Subjects ranged in age from 18 to 76, and included mothers, daughters, identical twins, transgendered men and women, one woman before and after giving birth, and another before and after labiaplasty (a practice McCartney hopes his exhibition will discourage). For many women their genital appearance is a source of anxiety and I was in a unique position to do something about that. Vulvas...

19 March, 2011

Michael Kimber delivers a gutsy, lyrical call to action, challenging people with mental illness to speak for themselves and change public perceptions: If your device doesn't see the video, click here. H/T: Stephen Kimber...

11 March, 2011

Faced with the conspicuous failure of the war on drugs, the Harper Government proposes to escalate it, as if doing more of something that failed is likely to succeed. Portugal took a different approach. On July 1(!), 2001, that country decriminalized the use and possession of all illicit drugs, a move many feared would accelerate social decay. The British Journal of Criminology has published a study of what actually happened: This paper examines the case of Portugal, a nation that decriminalized the use and possession of all illicit drugs on 1 July 2001. Drawing upon independent evaluations and interviews conducted with 13 key stakeholders in...

28 January, 2011

Contrarian reader Stan Jones offers further evidence of 21st Century North America's altered perception of weight: Footage of the Benny Goodman Orchestra playing Sing, Sing, Sing in 1937. Those are some skinny musicians. Note especially Harry James, whose solo begins 38 seconds into the tune: (That is, of course, Gene Krupa on drums, and Goodman himself on clarinet.) As a former TV host, Glennie Langille has first hand experience with society's social expectations around weight. She offers a skeptical view of the notion that skinny equals healthful: My first observation is that the original photo of Kennedy makes him appear to have an enormous...

22 January, 2011

Scott Logan, who formerly served as Nova Scotia's Assistant Deputy Minister of Health Promotions, responds to our observation that John F. Kennedy would seem skinny today: This piece and the previous on "Your Lying Pants" speak so graphically to socialized norms. When the majority of people smoked it was "cool." When—for various reasons—the tipping point was reached where the majority were non-smokers, the efforts to reduce tobacco's harmful impact on society gained great momentum.  In tobacco, the strategy was based on "re-normalizing" society's previous normal view of smoking. In other words the "new cool" was re-cast in a non-smoking image. The health...

17 January, 2011
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