The most unusual Steve Jobs obituary this week might be the one that appeared in PDN Pulse, the blog of Photo District News. Jobs, it seems, was a legendarily truculent photo subject. PDN Pulse recounted some of the legends. “It was the joke among photographers. He was like the nightmare subject,” said San Francisco photographer William Mercer McLeod, who photographed Jobs five times. In 1986, Fortune magazine hired Doug Menuez to shoot a portrait of Jobs for the magazine's cover. Menuez wanted to photograph him in the NeXT offices, on a staircase Jobs had commissioned from architect I.M Pei. Jobs arrived, looked...

08 October, 2011

Hint: It's closer than you think. Jon Stewart reveals that Halifax is the real promised land. Best quote: What's wrong with you two? You can't even get along in Nova Scotia. It's the most polite part of Canada. Watch it quick before the Comedy Channel yanks it from YouTube. H/T: Andy Weissman...

06 October, 2011

Salon sex columnist Tracy Clark-Flory clucks disapprovingly at what she deems excessive media coverage of that award-winning New Mexico state trooper busted on security cam having sex on duty and in uniform with a woman splayed across the hood of her Honda. Contrarian takes a different view. You cannot spend as much time in newsrooms as we have without developing a grudging admiration for the comic extremes of tabloid chutzpah. We particularly admire the Hispanic-oriented, Chicago-based website Hispanically Speaking News for shining a spotlight on the small but curious dog that wandered in for a closer look at the steamy curbside quickie,...

04 September, 2011

Here's a bit of contrarian sporting news that escaped my attention when it happened April 18:  The 20 fastest finishers in the men's 2011 Boston Marathon had one thing in common: All raced in wheelchairs. Our friend Warren Reed highlights this remarkable (but largely unremarked upon) fact in an article for the Journal of Medical Ethics decrying the use of outdated terms about disabilities in scholarly writing by medical researchers. It's a point Reed has gently chided Contrarian about in the past. In an informal search of half a dozen medical journals, Reed found 8,680 articles in which the word "wheelchair" was...

11 August, 2011

How does The New Yorker come up with ideas for its Talk of the Town column? Here's the great magazine's helpful instructional video: Yes, with this post, Contrarian has succumbed to shameless viral marketing, but it's New Yorker shameless viral marketing....

15 June, 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

New Waterford filmmaker Ashley McKenzie (erroneously identified by the CBC as a Halifax filmmaker) looking pensive Wednesday night at a taping of CBC-TV's Short Film Faceoff with host Steve Patterson (center). The show's semi-final episode pitted McKenzie's award-winning Rhonda's Party against two other good shorts, Down to the Wood by Newfoundlander Kelly Davis, and In Between by Montrealer-turned-Torontonian Nadine Valcin. The episode taped last night will air June 25, after which Internet voting will determine an over-all winner of $50,000 in cash and equipment rentals toward their next production....

19 May, 2011

.. Re iPolitics.ca's coverage of the Prime Minister's visit to flooded areas of Manitoba, Myra Barss asks: Did Mr. Sunshine walk on water while viewing the floods?...

16 May, 2011

A portrait of the ineffable Harry "The Hat" Flemming (1933-2008), whose likes will never again be seen in Nova Scotia journalism, glares down from a wall of the press room at Province House. Harry's friend and neighbour, the actor, artist, and reformed politician Jeremy Akerman, painted the image and donated it to House Speaker Gordie Gosse, who staged a quiet ceremony to hang it this week: A perfect tribute to a writer who knew no fear, a character who knew no peers. God, I miss his sardonic pen. Be inspired, young journos....

05 May, 2011

CBC Sunday Edition guest host Robert Harris chided Elly Alboim this morning for the national press corps's failure to pick up on the NDP surge until the polls made it obvious. [caption id="attachment_7960" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Alboim"][/caption] Alboim responded, reasonably, that reporters couldn't be expected to pick up on a phenomenon before it existed. (He did credit Chantel Henert for noticing it a week before her colleagues.) Alboim went on to speculate that the NDP's dramatic rise in the polls reflected, not a sudden blooming of love for Layton, but widespread anti-Harper sentiment that coalesced around Layton following his good performance in the debates. If...

01 May, 2011
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