To illustrate Adam Gopnik's piece on National Geographic* in last week's New Yorker, photo editor James Pomerantz riffled through hundreds of images from NatGeo's online archive of more than 11 million photos. This week, the New Yorker website reproduced "a handful of particularly intriguing images" from "the photo booty" Pomerantz uncovered. National Geographic being the source, one of the images naturally featured Cape Breton. Can you guess what's being pictured here? The caption: "Men wear the waistcoat of Cape Breton’s famous giant named Mcaskill (sic)."**  Gilbert H. Grosvenor took the photograph. * A subscription is required to read the entire piece. ** I assume the...

23 April, 2013

I saw 42 tonight. It's the new movie about Jackie Robinson's breakthrough with the 1946 Montreal Royals, and then with the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers as the first black player in modern Major League Baseball. The movie's a bit cheesy, redeemed mainly by the glorious story it recounts, and by a wonderful performance from Harrison Ford as Dodger General Manager Branch Rickey—the man who spearheaded baseball's integration. There are some nice touches, as when Rickey picks Robinson's bio out of a stack of Negro League player reports he's considering. "He's a Methodist," notes Rickey. "I'm a Methodist. God is a Methodist. It should work out well." Growing...

16 April, 2013

In the summer of 1976, Tom Enders, Canada's Ambassador to the United States, and officials of the US State Department were negotiating the details of a meeting between Foreign Affairs Minister Allan J MacEachen and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Since Kissinger had called upon MacEachen in Ottawa the previous October, the assumption was that the next meeting would take place in Washington. As recorded in a confidential August 7, 1976, State Department memo to Kissinger, one of more than 1.7 million U.S. State Department cables dating from 1973-1976 released last week by Wikileaks, MacEachen suggested an alternative plan: AMBASSADOR ENDERS HAS ALSO INFORMED...

10 April, 2013

I generally refrain from commenting on developments in the Sydney Tar Ponds project, because I know better than most the PR minefield faced by those charged with getting the job done. Nevertheless, the Government of Canada has just released a short video that sanitizes the history of the cleanup in a manner so patronizing and false, it demands comment. Here's an excerpt from the video's smarmy narration: In the years and decades that followed, Sydney would see good times, and it would see hard times. But the resilience of its people would never falter. Faced with the environmental legacy of a century of...

10 April, 2013

Less than an hour ago, from his perch aboard the International Space Station, Cmdr. Chris Hadfield posted this photo of Contrarian's Kempt Head, Boularderie Island, home. (Just incidentally, the photo also shows the ice of Baddeck Bay, from which Alexander Graham Bell's research team flew Canada's first powered aircraft, the Silver Dart, in 1909, a factoid Hadfield happened to mention.) For the geographically challenged, Boularderie Island is the slender finger of land extending in from the right edge of the photo. Kempt Head forms the island's southwestern tip, and is the name applied to the community that occupies the portion of the island...

04 April, 2013

Yesterday I posted a photo from National Geographic's new Tumblr feed showing Alexander Graham Bell leaning in to kiss a woman who was holding herself inside one of his iconic tetrahedral kite frames. Both the National Geographic and I identified the women as Bell's wife, Mabel Gardiner Hubbard. Not so, writes Contrarian reader Donna Johnson, who works at the Bell Museum* in Baddeck: This is one of my favourite photos. Also a favourite of the visitors, who are sometimes a bit disappointed when we point out that, contrary to popular opinion, this is actually Bell kissing his daughter Daisy, not Mabel. If you...

30 March, 2013

At Barak Obama's second inauguration yesterday, American Idol star Kelly Clarkson added a poignant chapter to the storied annals of America's least offensive patriotic anthem, My Country 'Tis of Thee. Seventy-four years ago, the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let Marian Anderson perform at the association's Constitution Hall in Washington because the celebrated contralto was African-American. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her DAR membership in protest, and weeks of controversy ensued. On April 9, 1939, 75,000 people turned out to hear Anderson sing at an outdoor Easter Sunday recital on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Interior Secretary...

21 January, 2013

"Nine of the 10 warmest years since 1880 have occurred since the year 2000," reports NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The first years of the new millennium experienced "sustained higher temperatures than in any decade during the 20th century." Goddard, which monitors global surface temperatures, compiled the findings into an animation showing global temperature trends since 1885.     The animated map charts differences from the average temperature recorded during a baseline period of 1951-1980. Dark Red zones are two degrees Celsius warmer than the baseline; dark blue are two degrees colder. You can download a copy of the animation here. The average incremental...

31 December, 2012

Cartoonist Kate Beaton has momentarily lapsed into prose, with a story about the Canso Causeway in a new Alberta-based literary magazine called, fittingly, Eighteen Bridges. I once watched a travel show where Billy Connolly, the Scottish entertainer, journeyed across Canada. In Halifax, he expressed a distaste for the whooshing tartans, skirling pipes, and other superficial expressions of Scottishness, which he deemed tawdry and inauthentic. It was disheartening, because if he really wanted authenticity, he could have just called me up. I would have recited one of those tragic old Gaelic songs that have been a Cape Breton staple ever since Authentic Scottish...

11 December, 2012

Any idea what this is: Or this? How about this? It's an interactive map (sadly not embeddable), produced by the Bombsight Project, showing every documented bomb strike in the London blitz between October 7, 1940, and June 6, 1941. The project is a joint effort by the University of Portsmouth, the UK National Archhives, and a charity called JISC. On the actual map (but not the screenshots above), viewers can zoom in on a particular dot, then right click for the details: Now let's see the map for Dresden....

10 December, 2012
Show more
Loading...